Humpty Dumpty

[pynchonoid]

--- s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
> >>> The world we see are only pictures in our
> brain percepted through our senses.<<<
> 
> If you were to dissect a brain I can assure you
> there would be no pictures
> found in it.
> 
> Where are those pictures, and who/what is 'seeing'
> them?
> 

Here's one answer:

From: William Benzon <bbenzon at mindspring.com>
Subject: EEG & Poetry
To: PSYARTS <PSYART at LISTS.UFL.EDU>

CPoeticos,

Here are some notes I've made toward getting a handle
on how poetry flows in
the brain.  I'd appreciate any comments you might
have.

Thanks,

BB

==================

Time, Consciousness, and Poetry

Let us start with Walter Freeman’s observation that
consciousness occurs in
discrete moments lasting on the order of 100-130 msec.
Each moment consists
in electrical activity that spans an entire
hemisphere. The moments in the
two hemipsheres are independent of one another. In
order to estimate the
number of moments of consciousness that transpire
during “Kubla Khan” I read
the poem aloud several times and timed my reading
using a stop watch. The
table below show six timings. The first column is the
duration of the
reading in seconds; the  second column is the number
of moments at the rate
of 7/second.

seconds    moments

137        959
128        896
129        903
142        994
139        973
134        938

Thus we have between 900 and 1000 moments of
consciousness needed to perform
“Kubla Khan.” Actually, it’s double that, since each
hemisphere has its own
stream of moments. So what?  What I think is that it’s
reasonable to think
about what those moments are needed for.

Let’s start with Wallace Chafe’s Discourse,
Consciousness, and Time. He
talks about the substantive intonation unit as a basic
unit of discourse.
His notion is that the (fragment of an) idea to be
rendered into speech is
present in consciousness at the beginning of the
intonation unit. It is then
rendered into speech in one all-but-irrevocable action
that is about five
words long in his sample. You can abort the rendering
for whatever reason,
resulting in a fragmentary unit. Otherwise, the idea
is rendered into speech
and we’re ready for another one – or to relinquish
conversational turn. As
the substantive intonation unit is roughly equivalent
to a line of poetry, I
will simply refer to a line.

“Kubla Khan” consists of 54 lines; assuming Chafe is
correct, that accounts
for 5% of our conscious moments. Further, KK has a
rich rhyme scheme,
requiring attention to line ends. Let’s say that’s
another 5% accounted for.
Further, while line beginnings and endings are distant
from one another on
the page, they are, of course, cheek-by-jowl in
performance. So, we’ve got a
lot of obligatory action at relatively fixed points in
the poem (though KK
uses a variety of line lengths).

Let us get a reasonably skilled reader to recite the
poem while hooked up to
Freeman’s EEG machine. We’ll record the reading and
the EEG. Will those line
breaks exhibit a distinctive signature in the EEG?  I
do not know, but it’s
something to look for. But there’s surely more.

For example, consider these lines, from the middle of
the first movement:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragements vaulted like rebounding hail,
Of chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

As Reuven Tsur and I have independently observed,
syntax and rhyme are out
of synch here. Synctactically we have two triplets
followed by a couplet;
but the rhyme is four rhymed couplets. This is the
only place in the first
movement where syntax and rhyme get out of synch. The
second movement
exhibits the same form, a middle section of
desynchronization flanked by two
synchronized sections.  Would this pattern show up in
the EEG?

Recall that Freeman has observed that the two
hemispheres have independent
moments of consciousness. One might speculate that the
left hemisphere is
handling language syntax while the right is dealing
with rhyme (and other
sound patterning). What happens to the relationship
between the hemispheres
as Coleridge plays with syntax/sound synchrony?

Now let’s do the same with “This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison.” LTB is a bit
longer than KK, and consists entirely of unrhymed
pentameter. Would its EEG
signature thus be distinctly different from KKs? 
Again, I do not know.

Surely these different phenomena involve different
neural dynamics. That’s
not the issue. The issue is whether or not we can
detect some of these
differences in EEG recordings. It’s rather like trying
to deduce the
mechanical features of an engine by listening to the
noise it makes in
different operating conditions. The noise is simply a
side-effect of its
operation, but it is systematically correlated with
engine events. If you
can’t look directly at those engine events, then
listen to the noise.

The point of using poetry in EEG investigation of
brain function is that it
is highly structured and thus more likely to provoke
distinct electrical
signatures. The point of comparing KK traces with LTB
traces is that they
are so distinctly different that we have some
reasonable hope of being able
to related differences in EEG signature to differences
in the poems.


==================

Benzon, W. L. (1985). "Articulate Vision:  A
Structuralist Reading of "Kubla
Khan."" Language and Style 18: 3-29.

Chafe, W. (1995). Discourse, Consciousness, and Time:
The Flow and
Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and
Writing. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.

Freeman, W. J. (1999). Consciousness, Intentionality
and Causality.
Reclaiming Cognition. R. Núñez and W. J. Freeman.
Thoverton, Imprint
Academic: 143-172.

Freeman, W. J. (1999). How Brains Make Up Their Minds.
London, Weidenfeld
and Nicholson.

Tsur, R. (1987). The Road to "Kubla Khan": A Cognitive
Approach. Jerusalem,
Israel Science Publishers.

Freeman, W. J. (1999a). Consciousness, Intentionality
and Causality.
Reclaiming Cognition. R. Núñez and W. J. Freeman.
Thoverton, Imprint
Academic: 143-172.

Freeman, W. J. (1999b). How Brains Make Up Their
Minds. London, Weidenfeld
and Nicholson.



Mind-Culture Coevolution: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/


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