The Dream of Reality: Heinz Von Foerster's Constructivism - Lynn Segal Current Biology - Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies To view the full text, please login as a subscribed user or purchase a subscription. Click here to view the full text on ScienceDirect. Figure 1 Schematic Diagram of the Motion-Energy Encoding Model (A) Stimuli pass first through a fixed set of nonlinear spatiotemporal motion-energy filters (shown in detail in B) and then through a set of hemodynamic response filters fit separately to each voxel. (B) The nonlinear motion-energy filter bank consists of several filtering stages. Figure 2 The Directional Motion-Energy Model Captures Motion Information (A) Top: the static encoding model includes only Gabor filters that are not sensitive to motion. (B) The nondirectional motion-energy encoding model includes Gabor filters tuned to a range of temporal frequencies, but motion in opponent directions is pooled. (C) The directional motion-energy encoding model includes Gabor filters tuned to a range of temporal frequencies and directions. (G) Receptive field for a second voxel. Figure 3 Figure 4
The Future of Literature in the Age of Information « Three Pound Brain Information technology made Plato anxious. Writing, he feared, would lead people to abandon their memory, to trust in “external characters which are no part of themselves.” Now we find ourselves living through a new revolution in information technology, one with consequences every bit as dramatic and likely even more profound. How could we not be anxious? Our old ways of communicating are either becoming obsolete or finding themselves dramatically ‘repurposed’ before our very eyes. Including the grandest one of all: literature. Literature is one of those categories that have vexed the human intellect for centuries. The morphology of what we like to call literature has remained fairly stable since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. The problem, I would like to argue, is one of habitat. No generation has witnessed such a sudden change in cultural environment, period. So why does it all feel so, well, dusty? Or should be. One genre among many. This is no easy task. But will it?
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson | Art Beat On Monday’s NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown spoke with author Margaret Atwood about her latest novel, “The Year of the Flood”: Atwood, one of Canada’s leading writers, has published more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She won the 2000 Booker Prize for her novel, “The Blind Assassin,” but is perhaps still best known for her first foray into futuristic fiction, the 1985 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Her newest novel is “The Year of the Flood” — a companion to her recent book, “Oryx and Crake.” Below is Jeffrey Brown’s extended interview with Atwood at her home in Toronto: Atwood put together a dramatic reading of the novel as part of its launch. Graeme Gibson is the author of five novels and a collection of stories called “The Bedside Book of Birds.” In the clip below, Gibson reads a passage from “The Bedside Book of Beasts,” recounting an animal encounter from his youth:
Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize America wants a Nobel Prize in literature. America demands it! America doesn’t understand why those superannuated Swedes haven’t given one to an American since Toni Morrison in 1993. America wonders what they’re waiting for with Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. OK, enough. Boy, were we upset. It’s true that the Academy, like any body of judges, has made some ill-informed decisions. That only fed the vitriol directed at Stockholm, obscuring a valid point about American letters: We’ve become an Oldsmobile in a world yearning for a Prius. Stockholm has been trying to tell us this for a long while, and we would do well to listen. And yet here are the Americans who could win it this year, according to online oddsmakers Ladbrokes (in order of decreasing likelihood): Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates and Don DeLillo. But if we don’t win yet again, we are at fault. Our great writers choose this self-enforced isolation. That makes for a small literature, indeed.
Reality Check: Why Some Brains Can’t Tell Real From Imagined How do you know what’s real? A new study suggests that people’s ability to distinguish between what really happened and what was imagined may be determined by the presence of a fold at the front of the brain that develops late in pregnancy, and is missing entirely in 27% of people. Although the study sounds like it sprouted from the musings of stoned undergraduates or the abstruse pursuits of basic-neuroscience geeks, its findings may prove important for the understanding of schizophrenia, a disorder which often includes confusion between real and imagined voices. The key brain structure identified by the study is called the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a fold in part of the prefrontal cortex, the region that is involved with planning, thought and judgment. The size of the PCS varies greatly in normal people, and some people a PCS only on one side of their brain, while others have one on both. MORE: Why Pot Smokers Are Paranoid
Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” at 50 Our cult of decade anniversaries—the tenth of 9/11, the twentieth of “Nevermind”—are for the most part mere accidents of our fingers: because we’ve got five on each hand, we count things out in tens and hundreds. And yet the fifty-year birthday of a good children’s book marks a real passage, since it means that the book hasn’t been passed just from parent to child but from parent to child and on to child again. A book that has crossed that three-generation barrier has a good chance at permanence. So to note the fiftieth birthday of the closest thing that American literature has to an “Alice in Wonderland” of its own, Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”—with illustrations, by Jules Feiffer, that are as perfectly matched to Juster’s text as Tenniel’s were to Carroll’s—is to mark an anniversary that matters. This reader, from the first generation, received a copy not long after the book appeared, and can still recall its curious force. “Five thousand bucks you got!”
on both yr houses | the m john harrison blog Judging by their responses I think some readers might have missed the sarcasm in my post on John Mullan’s Guardian piece. For me one of the sharper delights of the piece is its implication that along with “literary fiction”, literature itself began in the 1980s. As some below-the-liners at the Guardian comment, it seems shortsighted–especially on the part of someone whose academic specialism is the early history of the novel–to associate “literary fiction” not with actual literature but with a rebranding exercise from the Thatcher era. Mullan’s snobbery is canonically based. I’m not claiming that, just because literary fiction as described by John Mullan can be shown to have the features of a genre, some other genre therefore deserves to be the princess of everything; only that literary fiction as described by John Mullan (“What is literary fiction? Don’t feel you need to answer that. Like this: Like Loading...
boston2 Interview with DFWThe Boston Phoenix March 21 - 28, 1 9 9 6 David Foster Wallace winces at the suggestion that his book is sloppy in any sense "It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess," he says. "A lot of work went into making it look like that. That might sound like a pathetic lie, but it's not. Wallace's dander, however, isn't perceptibly on the rise. Whatever the cost of celebrity, Wallace, at 34, is about as famous as serious writers get in this country before they've been dead for quite a while. Asked why he chose to be a writer, Wallace dodges, saying, "There isn't much else I want to do," and talks instead about writers in general: "Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. "When I was younger," he goes on, "I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. Why the conversation took the form and direction it did in Infinite Jest isn't something Wallace is anxious to explain. "If you're torn in these two different directions," he says, "it's very odd.
jest5 "Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, and Miscellany" Entertainment Weekly March 15, 1996 Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum It sits there like a dare, like a reproach, like a doorstop. Carrying the 3-pound, 2.7-ounce book to read while commuting is out of the question; I might as well heft dumbbells in my backpack. Reviewers far more disciplined than I can tell you what Infinite Jest is about. These reviewers also claim to have read A Brief History of Time, Foucault's Pendulum, A Suitable Boy, and It Takes a Village. --Lisa Schwarzbaum
Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany "Infinite Jest" By David Foster Wallace Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany Published early in 1996, David Foster Wallace's remarkable novel Infinite Jest quickly acquired a tremendous level of notoriety for its then 33-year-old author. [Disclaimer: this site contains copyrighted material for which I do not have legal permission to reproduce. Sven Birkerts's review from the February 1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly was one of the earliest appraisals of Infinite Jest and it created quite a bit of excitement for the novel. The DFW Archive
jest11 "Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, and Miscellany" The SALON Interview Issue #9, March 9-22, 1996 By LAURA MILLER David Foster Wallace's low-key, bookish appearance flatly contradicts the unshaven, bandanna-capped image advanced by his publicity photos. The 34-year-old Wallace, who teaches at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal and exhibits the careful modesty of a recovering smart aleck, discussed American life on the verge of the millennium, the pervasive influence of pop culture, the role of fiction writers in an entertainment-saturated society, teaching literature to freshmen, and his own maddening, inspired creation during a recent reading tour for "Infinite Jest." Salon: What were you intending to do when you started this book? DFW: I wanted to do something sad. Salon: And what is that like? Salon: Not much of the press about "Infinite Jest" addresses the role that Alcoholics Anonymous plays in the story. Some of my friends got into AA. There's a kind of Ah-ha! DFW: OK.