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.

V – Spring Reverie week 6

Liberty Peru

Neuro Chapter 5 – The Social Brain

Inspired by ideas from these two qoutes (and ideas discussed in “Neuro” and “The Vegetative Soul”)

“…brain regions shaped by evolution, notably the amygdala, orbital frontal cortex and temporal cortex – regions that have the function of facilitating an understanding of what one might call the ‘mental life’ of others.” (Rose/Abi-Rached 143)

“For mirroring is not restricted to the observation of another carrying out a movement, but is extended to the observation of another experiencing an emotion such as joy or pain…” (Rose/Abi-Rached 146)

Temporal:

the assumption that everything shifts.

My lobe extending towards your face, full of emotion

-the building blocks of your hands show me the fleeting decisions you are bound to make.

inside my own

temporal

psychic abilities,

linking together a shard of hope

a shard of glass

a shard of understanding how you think,

“Lasting only for a time; not eternal; passing” (Thefreedictionary.com)

 the outstreached neurons of you drinking water

to the lips

against the tongue

down the throat

in the belly

through the urinary tract

quenching the thirst

only to be thirsty moments later.

temporal.

all of it.

E – Week 5 Bachelardian Reverie

Ironies in Rose

Autism doesn’t feel like

A disorder. It feels  different

An excess of input of empathy,

A lack of theory of mind, not mirror

Neurons. Here psychology shows itself

Why ask an autistic person instead of

Developing conclusions based on theories

Lab rats, brain scans, differences. That input

Should not be separate from the stories of

The brains being scanned, from the ideas.

Different doesn’t mean unable to express ourselves,

Non-verbal doesn’t mean unable to communicate,

Doesn’t mean infantile. Sometimes different just

Means different. So here I am a subject, a disorder.

I lack mirror neurons, have deficiencies in certain chemicals.

But what does that tell you about what I need?

S – Week 6: Bachelardian Reverie

Neuro, Chapter 5 

“Perhaps arguments from neuroscience are merely being invoked to give such proposals a sheen of objectivity—for they are often criticized as arising from hopes rather than facts.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 162)

 

Every time science attempts to locate a neurological basis of some social phenomena, there’s a concretization of importance: social values are substantiated as biological inevitabilities. This process of naturalization frequently serves the dominant order, as it reifies and concretizes traditional value systems.

Example: competition is a necessity within capitalism. Systems of competition are justified within Darwinian evolutionary science, leading proponents of capitalism to say, “Look, we can’t help but compete. It’s in our genes.” Repeat justifications of the social order through science ad infinitum.

 

Within science, the greatest disagreements arise over findings that disrupt the social order.

 

The scientific community has been squabbling about the existence of mirror neurons, and I wonder if they’re proving to be so controversial because they naturalize social values like empathy, reciprocity, and connectedness. Science is giving us a neurological impetus to be nice to each other—an incentive that throws a few wrenches in the cogs of modern living.