Category Archives: Spring Reveries

To provide a prompt for the development of poetry that recycles neurons, that jolts, that cleaves our heads, that mediates our passions, that evokes the sensation of reading in the brain, a weekly reverie based on that week’s reading assignment from Neuro is required. You may choose your own favorite passage from the assigned chapter of Neuro and then create a reverie in response to it modeled on the form of reverie Bachelard demonstrates in The Poetics of Reverie. (Students new to the program spring quarter will want to purchase this book, which is available in the TESC Bookstore and browse peers’ winter quarter versions of Bachelardian reveries.) Post your weekly 100 word reverie on the assigned chapters of Neuro here no later than midnight Wednesday during weeks 6-9 of spring quarter. Your poetic reverie (or riff) should begin with what you experienced as a particularly evocative passage from that week’s reading, including page number. Your quote does NOT count in terms of your 100 words of writing. Rather, quote this passage of 1-3 lines from Neuro and then create your own reverie.. The work here is to feel, trace or map the network of meanings associated in your brain/mind with a given word or phrase. While these weekly reveries are brief, they might develop into poems for inclusion in your field study term paper.

Week 7 Psychoanalysis of Fire

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“Fire .is for the man who is comemplating it an
example of a sudden change or development and an example
of a circumstantial development. Less monotonous and less abStract
than flowing wa.ter, even more quick to grow and to
change than the young bird we watch every day in irs nest in
the bushes, fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the
passage of rime, to bring aU of life to its conclusion, to its hereafter.”
Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire; 16)

This life leads my head to become a bubbling cauldron of molten stress and self-criticism
To survive I must react in rebellion, weep these precious melded sand bits
leak strands of orange dripping from my ears
and burst  glass shards past my lips.
Rest my eyes of fire and flame
Pupils drink in the blue heat
Skin take in warmth
careful not to burn soft flesh
Open my ears to clinks, clanks and smashes
Recall my life within the streaks of sparks and roaring furnace.
Contemplate my woes and failings  and mold them into fragile pieces of colorful art.  

A – Neuro Reverie Week 9

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“Despite their many differences, it is possible to identify a general picture of “the self” and “the person” emerging from contemporary developments in the brain sciences. In this picture, consciousness, with its image of the person a sunified, purposive, intentional, and self-aware, is by no means the master in its own house. Consciousness is an effect, a metarepresentation, which creates an illusory, but probably evolutionarily advantageous, sense of coherence and self-direction.” (Rose, Abi-Rached pp. 219)

“A Mutation in Ethics and Self-Technologies?” What are the moral implications of a self no longer seen as fully autonomous, but instead arising out of a multitude of neural processes that are largely unconscious? When is the self at fault, or accountable for its actions? Where do we draw the line? I think that we can use the modern neurodynamic model of the self in tandem with atavistic philosophical and spiritual traditions that have been addressing these questions for thousands of years. I believe there can be a synergy between the scientific models of the times and the wisdom of ancient spiritual traditions. We may now know what we have always intuitively known about the human experience.  I seek to bring awareness within my egocentric self and the the sociocentric self of relationships. I believe that in order to bring about a greater balance and synergy between humans and their environment we must learn to use the tools and technology of our times to re-invenent and re-qualify the human image. With greater awareness and greater intention we can overcome unsustainable modes of living. The mission statement for the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies reads in part “This multifaceted crisis requires a fundamental reorientation of our civilization, one in which a compassionate humanity becomes a mutually enhancing presence within Earth’s complex systems of life.” I think that the current neuro-imaging technologies can provide a way of mapping our own complex evolutions both as individuals and societies. It may be romantic, but I believe we can use these tools to evolve our species in a way that is more efficient, much like a “self-aware” computer program that can make changes to its own coding.

A – Neuro Reverie Week 8

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“The contemporary Western conception of the Self – individualized, bounded, with interior depth and temporal continuity, self-possessed, autonomous, free to choose – was not natural, given, or universal, it was historical and cultural achievement.” (Rose, Abi-Rached pp. 203)

Their are two basic models of the self: the interdependent, sociocentric self that arises out of relationships between the group, community, or tribe and then there is the egocentric model that has arisen in the West. The self is holoarchic (a holon is both a part and a whole). The self perceived as separate and individualized from the social unit, with it’s own autonomy and free will; and the self perceived as indistinguishable from the social unit form a dualistic gap that in my opinion gives rise to many forms of psyhcopathology in the “individual”. How do we bridge the gap between these dual aspects of the self? Deconstructing social dualisms can be part of this reconciliation, but in order to understand how the dynamics of the self, it many be helpful to understand the plastic nature of the brain and the neurological basis for the formation of personhood.

Week 9 Neuro Reverie

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Week 9 Neuro Reverie

 

“We will undoubtedly find support fir the core contention of the human sciences, that human societies are not formed by aggregations of such isolates, each bounded by the surface of its individual body. We will find much evidence that disproves the idea that the nature of humans is to seek to maximize self-interest, and hence to challenge the view that to govern in accord with human nature is to require each individual to bear the responsibilities and culpabilities of his or her selfish choices. Such unpredictable conversations between the social sciences and the neurosciences may, in short, enable us to begin to construct a very different idea of the human person, human societies, and human freedom. We have tried to show, in this book, how neuroscience has become what it is today; let us conclude with a simple hope for the future: that neuroscience should become a genuinely human science.”

 

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 234). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

 

 

This had to be the most spine-tingling paragraph of the entire book for me. Although it makes perfect sense that neuroscience will undoubtedly alter human social structures, it is hard for me to imagine how the future of humanity and the world will manifest itself. I love how sure the authors are about what we will come to experience with the continual advancements in neuroscience: the lessening of self-interest and responsibility, a new way of viewing ourselves and our actions, and new forms of freedom. It seems that neuroscience has the capacity to build a more collective and cohesive global consciousness; hopefully one that unites us all as equals stemming from the same all-encompassing body, a single heart that pumps the same fiery blood through our veins. Unfortunately the course of human history has not proven this to be likely. With new forms of freedom come new forms of oppression. Perhaps we are drifting away from human compassion and closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Week 9 Neuro Reverie

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Renée Ingersoll

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

5/28/13

Neuro Reverie

 

Neuro Reverie

“This is the argument  that neuroscience, in isolating brains and their components as the focus of investigation and explanation, ignores or denies the fact that, in humans and other animals, brains only have the capacities to do what they do because they are embodied, organs in a body of organs with all its bloody, fluid, and fleshy characteristics. ”
(Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro; 230)

When you break everything down,
it’s  an innumerable amount  of
a   t   o   m  s
the words on this page
this page
the hands that typed it
the keys that were pressed
the computer screen to see them
the eyes to see.
To think we are separate from our bodies,
is to think we are separate from the universe
which cannot be
and it’s what being is.
Even the idea of the soul offends the body
we are not celestial orbs occupying fleshy cages
for sport or amusement
this

is

It
I want my conscious to rot like the rest of me

lp- Bachelard Reverie .4

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“For, as so many ethnographic studies of laboratory life have shown, the laboratory is not a “non-space”: it is itself a real configuration of persons, devices, and techniques, which imposes its own characteristics on the data generated, as well as the interpretations made of them, and all the more so when the subjects are individual living creatures, be they human or other animals” (Neuro 228)

 

And have you ever been so far away?

And have you ever seen the light through the tunnel at the end of the gray?

And have you ever been locked in a cage?

 

And have you ever been unwillingly changed?

And have you ever been estranged?

And have you ever been told you’ll live to see another day?

 

And have you ever been told you caused something or someone to be that way?

And have you ever noticed things change for a better grade?

And did I ever tell you that everybody is this way?

Forever changing with the day.

Neuro Reverie Week 8

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Liberty.

 

“Organ in a body of organs” (Neuro, 230)

-this thing, this neuro-science

science of picking a part

apart the pieces.

leaving

the whole, formed only through pieces

pieces holding pieces.

we can know the pieces

but we cannot be the pieces without being the whole.

neuroscience takes the pieces

and I am left

searching for the whole

the piece of the whole that fits inside of all of me

I am not pieces of a piece

or a piece of pieces

I am whole

brained, bodied, bound and released.

sure

look at my pieces

mold my piece

hold my pieces

but dont forget to

admire my whole

flock at my whole

imagine my whole.

because despite all my pieces

I am whole.

Hh – Week 9 Reverie

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“We have already contrasted two ways of thinking about sociality in social neuroscience: On the one hand, we find the impoverished conception of sociality that can be found in most research that utilizes brain imaging in laboratory settings- where ‘social’ seems to refer to sequential transactions between isolated individuals or simulations of such transactions in scanners. On the other, we encounter the more subtle arguments of those who seek to understand sociality in terms of the multiple networks of collective association that characterize human existence, in families, groups, villages, towns, nations, and beyond, and the neurobiological consequences of isolation for humans evolved to live in such ecological settings.” (Neuro, 231)

When it all boils down, how will they study me?

Will they cite past knowledge and patterns

Or consider all of me engulfed in everything?

Everything I had done and who I was

Alongside who I was raised by where I come from

Sometimes it seems a conundrum

To study based on isolation

When really there’s always an influence

That seems to find its way into equations

And can a brain scan equate

To what my brain can’t communicate

But my spirit and my mouth can

Consciousness is an outland

Somewhere far off we can’t find

Where we are alive, reside, and decide

Not constricted to the real time

In the deepest recesses of our mind

So study me as you like

With scanners and alike

Or the patterns of those I am like

You will find everything except

My mind within the light.

 

T Neuro Reverie 9

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Siproena Johnson

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

May.27.13

Neuro Reverie Week 9

Word Count 175

 

“Emotions course through the veins, engage the heart and the lungs, the bowels and the genitals, the muscles, the skin and face.  As for cognition, do we not think, literally here, with hands and eyes?” (P. 230 Rose, Abi-Rached)

 

Energy flows through human body in the most intriguing ways.

Suppression of feeling leads ultimately to massive outbursts,

Adrenalin rushes through this body, redirecting the senses.

Epinephrine also known as adrenaline or adrenalin

Why to such length is this masking of feelings taught from early childhood to old age?

An outlet must be available without fear of reprimand.

Desire to direct the energy finds the tools are often near.

Here, as music plays, this outlet lies in my hands.

Paper; plain or decorated, can be found manipulated to some degree.

Paper; solid colored or with lines, the imagination can be set free.

To, and with these, writing instruments, hands and mind can combine.

Creative usually, and even compulsive, these manners are put to the test.

These tools readily in hand give the mind some ease and focus with an outcome its own conciliation.

Design and form are at the fingertips as the eyes scan diagrams on a page.

Eventually the mind on autopilot can take hold and the outcome can even leave its creator amazed.

Pilg – Neuro Week 9

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“The proliferation of the neuro – prefix is, no doubt, often merely a matter of fashion. Yet when ‘neuro-drinks’ promise to improve our brain power, when ‘neuro-trainers’ claim that their courses will enable us to take full control of our lives, we can recognize the growing power of the belief, however banal, that by acting on our brains, we can improve our mental life and enhance our everyday capacities to meet the ceaseless demands for self-development and self-management that characterize our contemporary form of life.” (Abi-Rached, Rose 226)

Reaching for the stars, there is only hope to fall upon. Hope is what guides the absent hands searching for meaning in those bright lights in the sky. It is what keeps mind in tune with brain and the followers of the pharmaceutical in tune with the future. Long have we, the followers of the pharmaceutical, sought to outlive the constant struggle between life and reality. Here is that thread of hope, dangling just within reach. Through the Neuro others have come to know our pain on a much larger scale, deeper than most in a most intimate way. No longer shall we stand doe eyed at the whims of some pen swipe, testing us with another pill, another pain, another trial. It has come time to replace the trials of old with that of the new, a new time calls for a new mind. Our saviors come in white lab coats, messy hair, and hard to read books all reaching, as we all do, for the stars for hope. One person’s research is another’s life and it is in your hands I place mine. Pull me from this trench of endless regurgitation of the DSM and into the light of Neuro. Test me, poke me, feed me your truths for I am ready for change, WE are ready for change. Through you, through your guiding hands we can break the struggle between water, pill, food, sanity repeated infinitum. It is in hope I place my heart, the hope that you the selected few pioneers of the outlandish can thwart the evil corruption placed into our lives and set things new. It is in this fantasy of Neuro- drinks and trainers that one may shape his or her own reality even if they are still the whims of the ethereal.

Hope stands above all else. For I hold true to hope that one day the task of cleansing one’s mind will be done through one’s own cognition. I am ready for tomorrow and the new light of the day when we can put down our endless fall into madness and pick up where we once left, that normal we all seek.