Ghost in the Machine

Quite a lot recently, i've had this sense of unfamiliarity within my own body, its like a continuous 'what the fuck are you doing?' sense of being which makes me wish i didn't have to associate myself with my Self.

Most of this stems from an extreme detachment, or rather discrepancy, between what i intend doing and what i physically end up doing. It's true a lot of people have good intentions; i used to have intentions too, real ones, like an intention to get into University, get a job, improve my backhand slice, or read 3 books a week.

I've since deteriorated.

I now have intentions like making sure i don't break anything made of glass today. Or, sometimes i have an intention to not get out of my car again because i 'think' i've left the straighteners on in my bedroom. And then i go upstairs, not paying attention, forget why i came back in, i do something completely irrelevant, get back in my car, then wonder if i've locked the front door....and whether i've left the straighteners on in my bedroom. It's a sad state of affairs, and they're not 'intentions' they're just Standards of Sanity, i guess. Thus, my approach to life these days is one of Positive Apathy; why bother thinking about anything when it has no real meaningful effect on what you do, it reaches no further than the thought process itself.

I can only currently describe my feelings as a mix of 'locked in syndrome', phantom limb, being drunk and the relationship the rat and Linguine had in Pixar's Ratatouille. My brain is active but my body is incapable of creating anything beautiful or interesting, i don't recognise my hands when they make a sloppy job out of everything, i find it difficult to pay attention to anything that requires me to sit down quietly and mostly i feel like i'm dealing with a total idiot of sorts.

It's frustrating. What have i become? What was i before? Can i get up from this horrible nightmare.

Meanwhile, this video for Fang Island's "Daisy" strangely depicts a nightmarish version of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you don't get it, watch it again- you'll see. The sense of exclusivity from the world, and how, you quite simply can never physically let people know that hot pants don't suit them.

Fang Island from carlos charlie perez on Vimeo.

Moving Life of the Butterfly Collectors

“Oh fuck it. Just burn all my stuff, just burn everything if it means I don’t need to pack anymore of this shit”.

It’s always been a favourite late night game of mine for a while now- to prepare myself for a fire evacuation by scaling my personal possessions down to just 3 items to take out of the burning establishment whilst everything else gets burned to black ash, never to be seen again- almost like they never existed in the first place.

There is a disturbing sense of catharsis in playing these kinds of games…. Not merely because I give a lot of my possessions a bit too much sentimental value, therefore anything that bears as much of a whiff of re-organisation and re-consideration is mentally harrowing, but also because late nights (always) call for an existential crisis- and this is how I solve them:

By somewhat manically looking through my cupboards, under my bed, through my desk, occasionally venturing out to the rest of the house, through photo albums, cabinets and cupboards, scaling my materialistic nemesis down to just three things to solidify one’s current existence…if that’s even possible- This is a game after all.

I need to ask myself- why do I need these 3 items to last for me, to escape the flame right now? Of course every time I play, I often change my mind about what I would take. The ever-evolving consciousness repositions it’s acquiescent self to any shape or form we wish to take on, seeking peace and perhaps personal improvement.

Would it be the three single most used items in my life? - laptop, ipod and phone. The three most irreplaceable in sentimental value? The three most literally irreplaceable (last photographic evidence of a granddad you never met) ? Or Irreplaceable certificates and qualifications? Do any of these things really mean anything to me and how really is it possible to separate the metalmarks from the swallowtails and decide which ones we really want to keep? After all, they’ve all gathered as much materialistic dust as they can manage, and I wanna spare these redundant sunavabitches the wrath of a burning building.

When I play my little fire evacuation game, and it’s been a hard day I try and make things easier on myself and the items count increases from 3 to as many as I can carry with my bare hands or otherwise a small carry case. All these things came to mind when I was packing for moving house 2 weeks ago, and I also thought about how, if I had to escape in a fire, those 3 items I should take is a hilariously bold move with a room that needs 12 brown boxes to house it’s contents. I might as well stay in and burn.

Moving isn’t anything new to me, i’ve moved 5 times before between continents, but it actually gets harder every time. Growing up in a family of ardent lepidopterists does that to you….My dad has kept possibly every replaced battery once used for his alarm clock, and also, all the pretty letters my mum has ever written him, received through transatlantic travel They were neatly placed inside the brown leather saddlebag he used to carry around. My mum keeps a ‘bottle of love’ I gave her when I was 6- a jam jar with a random assortment of (terrible) paper scrawls. As well as all every doll, or toy horse I loved and betrayed. I keep a conch that I took from a fisherman and sometimes I curl up on my bed with it pressed to my ear, listening to the waves of the shore I stole it from, and willing it to suck me inside. Some things we’ve had for so long, that we can barely remember those memories that used to flap and beat in our minds. Just ordinary things, too, and it’s all the more depressing to see when they’ve long lost their colours and have remained lifeless for years.

I don’t think Materialism is something that should be feared, it’s a way of holding onto life, holding onto our own sense of self and where we belong in this big wide world.

And for that reason, a movie I saw recently “Bunny and the Bull” by Paul King made me smile a few times. Obviously I let my preconceptions about it being made by the Boosh director dull any real expectations. It was indeed highly decorative, and visually rich, but it was also a very sensitive movie, centred on a painfully sensitive character- Stephen, whose life appears dominated by materialism, categorisation, organisation and perhaps OCD, to the point where he is terrified of leaving his own front door to a horribly unstructured world. What a nightmare!

Stephen’s home is wallpapered top to bottom with brown boxes, categorising almost everything he has ever used, owned, touched or produced (he stores his urine). One day when his meticulous daily routine is disrupted, he turns to the items in his boxes to recreate his unorganised past, hidden well from his consciousness through careful organisation of the present.

(This paragraph is a bit of a spoiler for the film so skip if you wish) The core of Stephen’s rather strange past story and strange current circumstances is only revealed at the end of his reminiscence when his bold, charismatic and close friend Bunny dies, leaving poor, shy, sensitive Stephen devoid of the safety and comfort he found through the abrasive Bunny. Were Stephen’s hoards of useless ‘stuff’ representative of his need to fill the emptiness he felt in bereavement? Does it represent a need to stay faintly attached to ‘real life’ through ‘real items’, providing closure through the comfort of knowing that most things can be kept safe and close to us always, even though Bunny was lost. Does it represent a coping mechanism, which allows him to structure his life at his own pace and in his own way than faltering for the unreliability of reality? In the end, Stephen manages to overcome his inner demons and begins to leave his house into the cold, inner city air. If Stephen were real, I would have liked to have asked him at that very moment, which 3 items he would salvage if his house were to burn down right behind him.

I should imagine it would be his scarf, hat and gloves.

It’s how we work- If only we didn’t attach ourselves so deeply to pretty, engaging, yet essentially useless items! They would still have wings, and would have just flown from a burning building. Maybe we’d see them around some day.

Growing some Antlers instead.

It's not my fault really that Nottingham have had some p4k 'gems' in the past few weeks, and thus i am provoked most unfairly to keep these gigs in the blog roll, despite my reluctancy- i am reluctant. i am.....

On Monday night, The Antlers played at the Social....and it was incredible.

It seems we need to start providing bands with some sort of award if their live shows can actually outshine their album/hype mutualism. When i first listened to "Hospice" i thought it was an awesome album, as did probably everyone who bought/downloaded it. I tried my best to ignore the contentious maps of meaning through the inter-webs that crumbled around Pete Silberman's beautifully constructed tower as if it didn't exist- and i couldn't see it falter. I paid no attention to the lyrical density or the fact that albums like this can have real 'concepts'.

...But it became apparent to me on Monday night, that "Hospice" cannot be exclusively phlegmatic on any level- the more you listen to it, the more obvious the hidebound of someone's extremely painful experience, and it's quite frankly, terribly haunting. Not merely because of the emotional burden that goes hand in hand with scenes of illness, hospitals and death that form the bathing fluid of Hospice, but because these emotions can be so probing to even those who haven't fully experienced them.

Death is inevitable, and we all have death anxiety; Irvin D. Yalom (who wrote a wonderful collection of stories called "Love's Executioner and other tales of Psychotherapy") calls it the 'price of admission to self-awareness'. Everything i've realised is down to evolution and telekinesis.... and an extension of such is the way death anxiety works on a collective consciousness. Everyone knows what it is to die, what it means to not exist or to not have someone else exist, to come to terms with the fact that it's a lonely old world and no one person has much of a chance of existing with you forever, no matter how much you love them or need them or want them.

It's also only when we face death that we have the sudden capacity to do remarkable things for others and for ourselves.

'though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us'

the fact is that she won't survive, the idea is that i keep bedside manners and do the best i can.....which means she can throw the thermometer right back at me if she wants to, she can scream and curse and then apologise as many times over as she wants, she can tell me to leave because she doesn't like my tone, even though i'm only trying to make her smile, but something keeps me standing by the hospital bed.

Peter Silberman's lyrics cut through me like a thousand knives; all of which can be found very neatly presented here

"There's a bear inside your stomach, a cubs been kicking you for weeks, and if this isn't all a dream, then we'll cut him from beneath. Well we're not scared of making caves, or finding food for him to eat. We're terrified of one another, terrified of what that means. But we'll make only quick decisions, and you'll keep me in the waiting room, and all the while i'll know we're fucked and not getting un-fucked soon. When we get home we're bigger strangers, than we've ever been before. You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor..."

I guess the track "Bear" is somewhat obviously touching on the idea of abortion, but it kinda reminded me about a form of cancer therapy based on 'visual imaging'; an admittedly pathetic sense of self-healing where the patient creates a visual metaphor for their chemotherapy fighting against a visual metaphor for their cancer. I thought of the bear inside her stomach as this wild and growing tumour in her body, and them not feeling scared of finding food and caves was the created sense of boldness they both had in getting through chemotherapy, he mentions making 'all the right appointments' in an earlier verse, and being terrified of one another stands for each others situations; one coping with a terminal illness and the other knowing and sensing the huge loss that is about to present itself, yet somehow the relationship needs to stay together, until it is no more.

You think you can say everything to someone who you know is going away for a very long time, but things just don't work that way, and all you care is that they don't notice how scared you are. I didn't ever intend to cut these lyrics up like this, but they come alive on that album, and whatever it means, the last thing i want to do is vitiate them. But what is this album if it isn't one to rip up? Hospice is so overexposed, it's actually underexposed....you can't understand another person's grief. This is where collective consciousness doesn't work.

I'm scared to sleep i hate my voice 'cause it only makes you angry. I only talk when you are sleeping. That's when i tell you everything, and i imagine that somehow you're going to hear me'.

When i try to move my arms sometimes, they weight too much to lift. I think you buried me awake (my one and only parting gift). But you return to me at night, just when i think i may have fallen asleep. your face is up against mine, and i'm too terrified to speak................

Good Literature for an Emotional Breakdown...with love from Russia

My struggle with reading for want of a more interesting book each time this summer has got me thinking of the Twentieth Century Russian Literature module i grew to adore in First Year. The module was the most depressing thing i've ever studied (obviously not because i didn't enjoy it) but because the process of falling in love with it required ripping the literature apart tentatively, layer by lamentable layer to it's bitterly sorrowful core. I remember sobbing over open pages the night before the exam, not because of fear of failure, but because it hurt to come to the realisation that through the swathes of surrealism, dark humour and fantastic tales of dodgy science and lovingly fraudulent characters in these books, there lay only (and not so well disguised after all) genuine human suffering.

I think i felt more emotionally destroyed by these books because of the brilliantly submissive style of writing the authors adopted to follow censorship guidelines set by the Soviet government. As a result, everything about the books; the characters, the plots seemed 'unreliable', not because of the author's intention to deceive the reader exactly, but because of the need to reveal as much as possible through as little as possible, which felt slightly abusive. In practical psychology, the individual is easily reduced to a vulnerable state through the realisation of their childhood state. I felt like reading these books did something similar to me, because of the sense of struggle to find and validate the familiar or 'the obvious'.

The module covered some lesser known works of russian literature (as opposed to the Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) in the context of the changes that occurred within the country during the Soviet period.

‘Dammit, i spent five years doing nothing but extracting cerebral appages...You know how much work i did on the subject- an unbelievable amount. And now comes the crucial question-what for? So that one fine day a nice little dog could be transformed into a specimen of so-called humanity so revolting that he makes one’s hair stand on end.....this doctor, is what happens when a researcher, instead of keeping in step with nature, tries to force the pace, and lift the veil’.

I wrote my essay on Bulgakov's relatively under-appreciated 'Heart of a Dog' (the full english translation can be found here) as opposed to his most recognised novel 'The Master and Margarita" (which i actually haven't read yet). Heart of a dog has the 'mad scientist' moniker highly in place as it follows the story of a Dr. Preobrazhensky- a bourgeoisie surgeon with a typical distaste for the proletarians echoed by his ambition to transform a lowly street dog (Sharikov) into a human being- who ironically turns out to be a proletariat who Preobrazhensky must either come to terms with or destroy. As you can imagine the end is inevitable.. It is a relatively simple storyline that Bulgakov builds upon beautifully to allow for worlds of exploration in thematic structure which includes the obvious conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariats and also class struggle to a Communist utopia in Russia.

Preobrazhensky complains about the carpet being removed from the staircase in his block of flats, by the management committee of soviet communists, he says in anger,

‘Did Marx forbid people to keep their staircases carpeted?’

Being somewhat of a 'scientist' myself, i particularly enjoyed the portrayal of science under the Soviet system in Heart of a Dog. The short comings of science in the novel reflect the short comings of the political system. Not only did the Soviet Union limit the ability of science to improve by restricting the type of research conducted (i.e. genetic research was discouraged in order to culturally isolate Russia from capitalist influence of Germany where genetics was a prime area of study), but also by channelling the obsession with space research and animal experimentation that lead to unethical scientific practise (i.e. Demikhov's two headed dog - also there was a program recently on channel 4 about Soviet Dogs in Space if one is interested)

"There is always a place for heroism in our lives"

"Omon Ra"by Victor Pelevin (full English translation here) was probably my favourite of all the novels we studied, because it epitomises the playfulness of Russian Literature in expressing those strong values of friendship, compassion, bravery, all the nice things that make good adventure stories, yet is a thoroughly harrowing, awesome bit of Russian sci-fi which follows the young Omon, a boy with an aspiration to leave his dull soviet life to be a fighter pilot. Omon's brilliant ability in aeronautics has him unexpectedly accepted into a space program to the moon where he is trained up to be a astronaut. Along the way, Pelevin sensitively presents humanity in a heartless world with a brilliant plot twist. Heart-Breaking:

"all of my childhood dreams about the future were born of gentle sadness native to those evenings that seem to be detached from the rest of your life, when you lie in deep grass by the remains of someone else's campfire, your bicycle resting nearby, the west still bearing purple bands from the sun that had just set, while in the east there are already first stars popping up. I haven't seen or experienced very much in my life, but I liked most of what I have, and I always counted on the trip to the Moon to absorb everything that I passed by in hopes of encountering it again later, to take it in more finally and forever this time; how was I to know that the best things in life are always seen as if from the corner of one's eye? While I was a kid, I often imagined extraterrestrial vistas: stone-strewn planes, furrowed by craters and illuminated by otherworldly light, sharp mountain peaks in the distance, black sky with the glowing coal of the sun and stars around it; I pictured the layers of space dust, many feet deep, and the stones resting motionless on the lunar surface for billions and billions of years - I was for some reason strongly impressed by the thought of a stone being able to remain in one place for all that time, and then I would bend down and pick it up with the thick fingers of my spacesuit. I thought of looking up and seeing the blue globe of Earth above, looking like the school globe distorted by the teared-over lenses of the gas mask, and how this ultimate moment of my life will connect me to all those other moments when I felt myself on the verge of something wondrous and unfathomable"

I should be reading that one again soon.

I wrote about Platonov's "Foundation Pit" in the exam; an account of dystopia set during the first year of the Five-Year plan, evolves around the idea of the Kohlhoz- the complete Collectivization of farms ordered by Stalin and the destruction of the Kulaks (rich peasants) resulting in a horrific famine and death of thousands of innocent people. The plot is straightforward; the peasants are building a 'foundation pit' so as to build on top of it a huge house to accomodate all the proletariats of the world where they can live in peace together, and find 'happiness through labour' away from the destructive world. The peasants are steeped in a hopeless existence glossed with illusions of a empty promise unable to recognise that they stand knee deep in dirt. Yet they 'do it for their children' and use the young girl Nastya as the little hope that they work for, the little girl who represents the new Russia who they are building the pit for. *Spoiler* one can't help but be amused that at the end of the novel the pit serves as a very large grave for the little girl who dies as a result of neglect from the workers, too caught up in their own dreams that they abandon reality.

However, reading this book is a little less straightforward as although from the outset Platonov seems to wallow in crude 'pity for the pitiful', his surreal style of writing (precursor to modern existentialism) about people and their lives rather confusedly, produces words just as futile as the endeavours of these peasants who dig mindlessly night and day for a pit that is forever doomed to be completed. It seems that Platonov has this extraordinary talent for immersing his characters and his readers in emotional angst, stubbornly producing the existence of the suffering peasants in his novel into the mind of the reader ever present now as they were back then.

‘they lay in their empty coffins as if they were cramped little homes, feeling shut in and at peace’.

It is interesting to note that Platonov grew up next to a railway, where his father worked as a railway engineer. It is said that the young Platonov considered the trains as living and breathing machines, which is most evident in the breath of life he gives to his works, especially the foundation pit, where the characters in themselves are represented as hollow, starving, hopeless souls, filled only with pretty passionate pointless words.....It is a great read if only for the writing style but be prepared to get serious, seriously absurd.

I hope to be this enthusiastic about a book again some day. Forster's "Passage to India" almost killed me. I can't start on "Midnight's Children" just yet either.

Brain Music: Four Tet

I never appreciated Kieren Hebden's work so much before, but since starting revision for Yr 1 Psychology properly, 'Pause' is the one album i have on repeat almost constantly. It's a been a while since 2001, but the record is still just pacifying 'brain music' that seems to flow as one with the neurones firing around in my confused cerebral hemispheres. Maybe it's the context of my work this week (which has been a lot to do specifically with brain areas and their functions) but i couldn't help but think of 'four tet' as 'four tête' i.e. four heads, which in reality is quite true of the brain anatomy.

The motor cortex and frontal cortex can be thought of as one since they both belong to the Frontal lobe of the brain. The sensory is part of the Parietal lobe, and the visual is part of the Temporal lobe. While the Occipital lobe constitutes the cerebellum area.

Each of these lobes have a specific function, so seem to be four separately functioning 'heads', yet they all combine so beautifully into a integrated system. Unique in their capacities, yet entirely dependent. 'Pause' by 'Four heads' is such a complete album, listening to it makes me feel so aware of this integration of all these working parts of my head, and the stimulation of motivation that fabricate themselves from physical brain matter.

'Twenty Three' specifically reminds me of CSI music, the one that they use in the sequences of 'laboratory investigation scenes' where samples are being analysed, and tested, and fingerprints are taken etc etc. The rhythm is a driving force for my brain, in a highly positive sense, which for me portrays it as less of a 'slave system' in remembering this bombardment of information, but as a strong, and fully capable organ, that i shouldn't ever be afraid of exhausting.

[When i was little, and i felt things were too tuff, i always used to imagine bits of brain falling off inside my body and tumbling into the rest of my body, and the hollow of my chest and empty belly. Now i realise it is so far from that sort of fragility! ]

Another source of joy comes from the beginning of 'Mosquitoes' where the sound resembles that of a blue whale song (You have to wait a whiel before you hear the whale,there are better ones, i haven't properly explored to find some decent sound clips). I love listening to whale and dolphin sonar communication; for the thrill of it just being so foreign to me, and how there's this whole other language i will never be able to learn, no matter what. Kieren's work on this album is both foreign and familiar, which must be why it is so entrancing. Like whale song is familiar as a language of some kind, the children making noise on the track 'Park' is familiar, but the setting of the song is in a other-worldly medium. Just as whale song will never be comprehensible to us, nor will anyone be able to understand it for what it really is, other than a form of sonar communication.

'Glue of the world' stimulates my working memory, 'Everything is alright' are the action potentials flowing through my motor neurones to my fingers that allow me to keep keep keep keep keep keep keep keep on on on on on on on on on on on on on typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing..........................

...............................................................................................

...........................................and never stopping....

Video Gaming and Perceptual Processes

Game Developer's Conference 2009 is upon us.

At home, i rarely experience a personal moment that isn't soundtracked by my brother's nintendo/playstation/computer games. Off late i'm becoming increasingly concerned for him- the amount of time he spends in front of screens is ridiculous, and i'm sure there's actually a very small percentage of reality that his eyes see these days. It's exhausting even thinking about having to prise him away from his digiblip pseudo universe, and i sometimes wonder if he'll develop into what i conceive of as a normal human being. By this i don't mean that i think he is getting aggressive, or anti-social, or using games as a 'emotional vent' or all the other increasingly outlandish claims that 'psychologists' make in newspapers and TV. He's a pretty normal seven yr old, as are the majority of his classmates who are hardcore gamers.

But with this generation, growing up in an age where video games have gone past the loveably defunct graphics and thoughtless, mild mannered gaming of Atari and Sega days, turning more and more to cold, calculated, plotted shootings and murder that bend around basic ethics....something will have to give? I guess everyone wonders how this fantastic world of realistic gaming doesn't change the way kids perceive the world through a physical and communicative medium. Does it necessarily mean corruption?

This is what psychologists should really be interested in.

The past few days i've been studying perception and what it means to 'perceive'. i.e. is perception just an extension of our cognitive abilities? Or are there mechanisms that are uniquely perceptual processes. The basic idea seems to be that perception is a sort of 'slave' to higher-order processes like interpreting and understanding information and cannot be altered by how the participant 'desires' to see the world. BUT a perceptual system can be 'tuned up' to collect evidence of a particular type from the environment. A well known experiment is Blakemore and Cooper's kitty rearing study. Kitty H was grown up in an environment composed of horizontal lines, while Kitty V reared in a vertical environment. Recordings of single neurons in their brains showed that orientation-selective cells had a preferred orientation of within 45ºof the exposed orientation in the environment. The kittens eventually became blind to lines and edges in the non-preferred direction. i.e. kitty H could not perceive vertical lines…

Essentially, perceptual systems at the heart of our biological make-up are sensitive to the environment, their sole purpose is to provide us with a valid account of what there is out there- A ‘best first guess’ is what they say. The action we take upon whatever we see is then up to our cognitive systems to interpret- but this can’t be done without a initial valid account of what we are actually ‘seeing’i.e. perception should be able to communicate effectively to the cognitive system that there is a rabid dog dripping with foam at the mouth running towards us, and the decision to run or lie down silently and wait our horrible death is up to the mind’s central processing unit. Most likely we will choose the first option, and hence perception is of an essential survival value- this makes a lot of sense. But what does this have to do with gaming?

I recently came across an informative article called ‘Rage Against The Machines’, with a refreshing view of video game culture. The article discusses gaming in the perspective of a product created by humans for humans, and therefore the incomprehensibility and insecurities that people have with gaming are entirely irrational. He discusses gaming constructively, with the impacts it has on the way children learn complex social behaviours, as a developing cultural activity (the PS game Ico is apparently visually based on the works of Giorgio de Chirico) and the place of gaming amongst other leisure activities such as reading and sport which gaming has relatively little economic impact on. The article actually mentions a bit from Richard Bartle’s biting article in the Guardian attacking those who discredit the future of gaming.

“Games are mainstream. Drown, or learn to swim”

Soon there will be a society where gaming will be a vital part of developing culture. What of these people? How will they work? How do they perceive? What will they turn into? Indeed Piaget's best work on child development did include 'learning through play'. This is just 21st century play.

Perception seems most important in our modern visual culture, more than it did in generations before. It makes me wonder sometimes whether the pressure of a visual culture is big enough to significantly alter the way our perceptual system works, starting from my brother's generation.

Games such as Bioshock and Mass effect with their uber fancy graphics and painstakingly detailed character descriptions lead individuals through fantastic worlds, where noone can be trusted, yet the need to engage and make a connecion with this freakish world is vital. Bioshock for example, is set in an alternate history 1960 in an underwater world called Rapture, Jack (player) must survive attacks by mutated beings that inhabit Rapture. It's full of DNA harvesting, ex-Nazi collaborators and complex moral decisions with bloodthirsty spatterings...

Bioshock

Mass effect

In reality we look for expressions in people's faces and body language to aid us in our social interactions with other people. In video games, there is no difference (oh apart from the fact that we're dealing with aliens and mutants). The world continues to destruct itself with violence and selfishness, innocent people die everyday, and everything seems to be spiralling into a grim and compassionless future. Maybe it's the hard skin and keen eye that develops from playing games like Grand Theft Auto and Bioshock that's needed to cope. 'Survival of the fittest' taken to the extreme.....

This is the kind of thing that they should include in dull cognitive psychology books.

In line with this i’ve been listening to The Advantage self-titled nintendoesque album- basically covers a lot of video game songs…

And also: This is shit hot.

Dreams and Psychoanalysis: "A Cinematic Representation"

Magritte's Portrait of Edward James 1937

Hello, it’s Mango-has-gone-off-Monday! (well it was yesterday when i wrote this and forgot to post it)

So YESTERDAY i could make no mango smoothie because the mango had as you now know, completely gone off. Is it obvious that i’ve already stopped trying with these posts.....?

I came across this article today in the guardian on mental illness as a occupational hazard for poets. Mostly, i just enjoyed this part:

“Batty and Wardle have both 'done time' on psychiatric wards and written resonant, gutsy and humorous poems about their experience”

Here we are, blistering evidence that mental illness in the long term increases everyone’s ability to be a creative tour de force (but conditions apply) on a mission to an ultimate utter lack of creativity (suicide). I’m not going to lie, among all the sadness of this month including Goody’s cancer-hit-and-run, i have undoubtedly found it difficult to keep the frown upside down. Getting as little sleep as possible allows me to avoid the point of contact where my unconscious finds ‘expression’ in the animated and illusory world of dreams. However, the past few days, an unbearable slumber has over ridden my otherwise unfailing adamance. The outcome: Teething Nightmares.

I’ve been having repetitive dreams of being shot, and always in an act of cowardice. i.e. the shooter will ask me to hand everything over, and tell him the whereabouts of my family and all my personal details, and if i do, he will leave me alone. Inevitably, i tell him everything, and then he turns around and shoots me heartlessly. Mostly, this occurs in the first person, but the other night, i dreamt that once i was shot, i realised i was a little girl and not myself. I had unwittingly walked into someone else’s body, and now enduring their pain. Then i had to watch the little girl being placed on a foreign hospital table, spurting blood; the bullet had hit her in the stomach, yet all this while, it was me who was feeling the pain, like i had replaced her soul with my own.

Even more bizarrely, the rest of the dream continued with me switching roles between myself, the doctor and my grieving mother, like some tireless schizophrenic. A sort of "Doppelgänger effect’ from the inside out (since i don’t tend to remember whether these people looked like me, but they all definitely were me in spirit). This was the only part that i was really interested in; the various infestations of me within different characters or ‘roles’.

The point of me saying all this is: i believe that a recurring dream must be something of significance. By the by, i came across a book entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema’ the other day. Normally i wouldn’t have the will to read something like this, but felt less compelled to rebuke it when i realised it was a well disguised coffee table reading handbook to the interpretation of dreams.

On cinema:

“ If you only knew how strange it is to be there, it is not life, but it’s shadow, it is not motion, but it’s soundless spectra”

Maxim Gorky (cited in Popple 1996:97)

The book was basically trying to address the fact that dreaming as the epitome in psychoanalytic interpretation is directly comparable to the big screen, in terms of both cinema and dreaming act as a type of ‘psychical apparatus’ in learning to tell the difference between what we perceive and what we imagine. Mainly so we don’t end up like Uncle Josh:

Josh here is unable to distinguish between the film and reality. This is a crude example, really.

I think uncle Josh is hallucinating, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he may be an idiot and can’t tell he’s watching a film. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time to hallucinate and have someone interpret that as your inability to perceive. Uncle Josh is a kind of ‘mirror’ that unites the external picture to the internal, his emotions are manifest in the screen, similar to how i felt mine were manifest in the other people in my dream. Again, i take this to be the inability of my self to distinguish between other people’s emotions and my own...

This is ultimately ‘doubling’/ idea of establishing an ego etc, which the book references to ‘Der Student Von Prag (The Student of Prague) using the idea of a ‘double’ where in the footprints of Faust, impoverished scholar Balduin gives up his reflection to a sorcerer in exchange for wealth. Silly boy. Balduin finally drives himself to suicide where he shoots the apparition of his double ultimately killing himself. Rather like that scene from Fight Club right at the end.

Der Student Von Prag...

So ultimately, i am no longer inclined to analyse my dreams in terms of Oedipus or the individuating ego because i am not that insane yet. Freud aptly implies that dreams show that a normal capacity for hallucination persists in us all: in other words, i should go to bed at a decent hour until furthur notice..

Next psychoanalysis and film installment will probably be on Hitchcock. Just kidding! Actually it will. But maybe first on inter-group processes...

Popple, S. (1996) ‘The Diffuse Beam: Cinema and Change’, in C. Williams (ed.) Cinema; in The Beginnings and the Future, London: University of Westminster Press, 82-99

Sleeping in halves, Sleeping in wholes.

Man Ray, Solarisation 1931, © Man Ray Trust, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008

Ok, so now that i've reflected on my first post on this blog in a rather different frame of mind, it's obvious how ridiculously melodramatic that is (and there i was, hoping not to try and make epic introductions)

I'm a melodramatic person, it has to be said. I promise to not ever put anything quite as dramatic again. 

In my defense, i'm pretty lost in my work, lost in society, and lost in my head right now. This morning, i effectively just needed to get myself from my house to university since i'd unwittingly stayed at home the night before to sort some things out. Due to my knack for cutting off with reality, i had to drive back to my house 4 times after a half a journey completion down the dual carriage way to get an item i'd forgotten and crucially needed that day. That means i forgot four things four times and made a total of 8 half journeys. Amounting to what would have been 4 full journeys up and down. It was like a part of me was not even 'with me'. 

I was half asleep. This is pretty funny, because dolphins do this anyway quite literally. The two hemisphere of their brains sleep independently, and seems to serve as some crucial survival value- quite the opposite to the connotations of being 'half asleep'. 

I covered sleep some time ago in a tutorial. I think this video should be pretty interesting; i haven't really got round to all (6?) parts of it yet.

The Ugly Love: An introduction

As a wonderfully unsophisticated blogger, i’m going to try and pull this off.

Hopefully with some relative charm.

Last night, I was a disgracebook status ‘F.R.U.S.T.R.A.T.E.D’, at having come to the realization that a big part of my ‘interest spectra’ had almost totally disintegrated. Something that used to make me want to know more, was almost indistinguishable from the other things that i vaguely show an interest in and move along from just as hastily.

I’m being contradictory for a very good reason. I have an ugly love for Psychology:

Missable.

Replaceable.

Mostly now unfathomable.

At university, it is a rather dire science, that i sometimes feel is as cold as the laboratory. Just to demonstrate my romanticism; at the beginning of first year, i thought our lab sessions consisted of a mass of white coated first years observing wired bodies studying a Kanizsa figure or inkblots through a glass observatory. If not that, then at least some pigeon and coloured bulb action, please. It is not any of those things, instead we sit like zombies in front of computer screens calculating t-tests and pressing keys according to whether we see a word or non-word.

As a result of my failure to engage myself with my course, i'm having a bit of fun with it, starting a blog and what not. It's one last try of redemption for all those people, myself included, who have the ugly love.

Mostly, the blog will just be a ‘supplement’ to the topics i cover on my psychology course that will hopefully include art, music, films, books, interesting articles i happen to come across, and anecdotes from friends and strangers alike.

Bridging the gap between academia and general intrigue has never been more riveting. Because if i don’t have the motivation to keep this blog updated, then it inevitably means i don’t have the motivation to finish my course. If i do finish it, then it would be a complete and utter waste of my time.