(Week 9) Reading resists boredom… with other thoughts and inquiries

“[Reading] resists boredom. Voluntarily picking up a book, we expect – indeed demand – to have our interest engaged […] reading liberates us from routine and tedium as well as the pain life more actively inflicts. Even the kind of verbal production read only for information or ideas involves us in alternative worlds of conceptualization and imagination.” – Boredom p.1

“To us, who are regaled every morning and evening with intelligence, and are supplied from day to day with materials for conversation, it is difficult to conceive how a man can subsist without a newspaper, or to what entertainment companies can assemble, in those regions of the earth that have neither Chronicles nor Magazines, neither Gazettes nor Advertisers, neither Journals nor Evening Posts.” – The idler no.7

The first excerpt explains to us how reading is an act that directly opposes boredom – interest. The latter is a thought about how it is hard to imagine not having anything of interest to read – which I agree is pretty hard to imagine – since apparently the English can’t seem to sit still and do nothing just for one second. Either way, the idler no. 7 goes on to explain why he thinks the morning and evening papers should communicate and create suspense and interest from news stories, which hints at the notion that people read papers and magazines back then more because they have nothing else to do and less because they actually found news interesting. But this doesn’t make sense because the former excerpt said that to read something means that it must inherently be interesting for the person to read it in the first place…

Speaking of reading uninteresting things, lets talk about the ramblers of this week: Euphelia and Bellaria. I hate these b!%&#es, but it’s not their fault. Let’s not talk about how Bellaria changes clothes four times a day and says that she has no times to read because she has to go walk in the park twice every day and accept or decline massive amounts of party invites. Let us do talk about how she’s super pretty, and knows she’s super pretty, and talks about how guys will apparently do anything for her. Second thought, let’s not. Euphelia, how can you get bored of nature and flowers and autumn? You live in God Damn England!! Isn’t it always gloomy there? And your mother is an “economist of pleasure?” (1) WTF is that? You can’t schedule your own planner or something? (2) You have no spare time because you planned a card-game and the opera on the same night? Sounds like too much effin’ spare time to me… Sorry I don’t have anything smart to say about this week’s Ramblers, but neither did Bellaria and Euphelia.

I did love the Addison reading on the Royal Exchange. If only he was alive today to see what it has evolved into. He loves this diverse, daily gathering of people so much that he starts to cry about it at times. Wierd, but I admire his passion for something practical and honest; at least your not throwing pebbles in the water because you decided you hate flowers one day and can’t make friends with country folk. Aa-Euphelia-hem! Pardon me, sore throat, seasonal flu is coming around.

Yeah, that’s really all I gotta say about that… I really didn’t mean to write this much, but hey! I was bored…

(Week 8) Memory: How is the process of recognition dependent upon superimposition?

“The structures which memory stores are not actual little pictures, but quasi-pictures, “representations” in the sense that the information stored cause a change in the brain that encodes or molds it in a certain way and in a particular “place” in the brain. […] What is involved in remembering is the association and recollection of previously impressed material when the original is no longer present to us. If the object should become actually present to our senses again and we can compare our mental image to it for accuracy, we are engaged in a process of recognizing rather than of remembering or recollecting.” – Models for the Memory (chapter 1)

“Superimpositional storage: memories are blended, not laid down independently once and for all, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. […] By ‘superimpositional storage’ I mean the property that one network of units and connections may be used to store a number of representations, so long as they are sufficiently distinct to coexist without confusion.’” – John Sutton

Before I talk about superimposition, I would like to contrast the process of recognizing and remembering/recollecting. The first excerpt above explains to us that every new character we take into memory will affect all previously impressed material of similar character: in the sense that if one is to recollect in his or her head what a chair looks like, he or she will not remember a specific chair – unless it is by choice, and only possible if this specific chair is particularly distinct to all other chairs the person has encountered – but an ideal version of a chair influenced by all the various “quasi-pictures” of chairs already embedded in memory. Recollecting would be to conjure up an image of a chair without having actually present, while recognizing would be to see a chair and to recognize it is a chair when compared to all the images of the chairs (or a collective ideal image of a chair) in the mind.

            The second excerpt is my interpretation to the first part of the first excerpt. Superimposition is the way our memories try to remember and distinguish all the different shapes and sizes (etc.) of chairs someone has encountered in real life. Although, since the brain’s memory function works via connectivity of associations, the ability to distinguish between chairs is dependent upon how orthogonal one chair is to another – for two sets of chairs that are similar within the brain, it is most likely that it will be harder for the brain to distinguish between the two.

            In other words, superimpositional storage plays a huge role in recollection and recognition in that it interprets new memory traces not by its individual characteristics but with everything and anything that is a memory trace in the brain. The more similar the new trace is to any other traces already in the brain, the harder it will be to distinguish because it is presumed that the more similar the memory traces are, the higher chance that they would be processed within the same (or closely interwoven) network of units and connections (groups of neural linkages), potentially leading to distortion or error when the memory is needed to be tapped.

            Some would say that superimpositional storage has a major downside in that every memory is practically distorted the moment one recollects something for the first time, while I would argue that this is probably the reason the brain can store a practically infinite amount of memory while never running out of “disk space” like a computer would.

Week 7: What is enraging the musician?

The Enraged Musician – by Hogarth

“An exogenous cue is an external event such as the abrupt onset of a stimulus at a peripheral location that involuntarily draws the attentional spotlight to its location. […] An endogenous cue is typically a symbol such as a central arrow head that must be identified before a voluntary shift in attention to the designated location can be made […] indicating that their benefits are due to conscious control of the attentional spotlight.” – Historical Overview of Research on Attention by Johnson

“The taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or train of thought.” – William James’s definition of attention.

In the painting, the musician is clearly annoyed at the many various distractions immediately outside window. It is an exaggeration of the hubbub of city life. As the musician is trying to concentrate his attention upon his classical music-making, he is unable to do so because the same modes of sensation needed to listen to his own music is being overrun by the lingering noises on the outside of his window.

            This depiction of distraction may serve as a good example of exogenous control versus endogenous control of attention. As stated in the quote above, exogenous control of attention refers to a passive, almost reflex-like, attention in which it is non-voluntary and is being controlled by external influences (i.e. loud noises, visual cues – spotlight). On the other hand, endogenous control of attention is the active and voluntary type of attention; this type of attention is commonly associated with a more voluntary activation of specific stimulus (i.e. reading, manual labor).

            Recent studies (post-1975) show that it is hard to use multitask when the tasks being performed use the same stimulus or response modalities (Johnson p.20). “Multiple task performance typically is better when the tasks use different input-output modes than when they use the same modes.”  Relating this back to the Enraged Musician, we can assume that the exogenous control of his attention via loud noises is overpowering the same stimuli needed for his endogenous control of attention toward his music; here, exogenous attention is distracting by taking away from his endogenous attention’s “clearness” (James’s definition of attention).

            Taking into account the excerpts and interpretations above, attention can be thought of as the currency for mental activity – philosophers seem to attribute the action of directing attention with a cost of brain processing power – and it is limited. Thus, since the brain compartmentalizes all its modes of sensation and reflection spatially, multitasking tends to get harder when the multiple tasks (brain activity) use the same brain space as opposed to spreading out the work-load to various compartments of the brain. This is personified in Hogarth’s painting in that the musician is annoyed at the fact that he cannot focus all of his attention to playing the violin.

Week 6: How come Arabella doesn’t influence any of my actions or decisions as the Heroes and Heroines in her romances affect hers?

“In romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any application to himself,” – Samuel Johnson (The Rambler)

“But when an adventurer is leveled with the rest of the world, […] young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope by observing his behavior and success to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.” – Samuel Johnson (The Rambler)

The reason I chose two quotes from the same essay is because (1) I didn’t necessarily need a quote from this week’s reading of Female Quixote and (2) the two quotes here are describing two opposing ways in which a novel may affect a person-- there is actually a third reason: I didn't really understand what the thesis of the essay was and thus couldn't grasp the main point he was getting at. Although Johnson categorizes them as how old and new romances affect readers differently, I would give another distinction between the two descriptions as people who identify and people that do not identify with the protagonist (or antagonist if that’s how you see yourself).

The first description explains why it is that the youth wouldn’t necessarily imitate the actions of heroes and villains because people do not usually see themselves as being all totally good or totally bad. In reality, people are both, meaning that our motives generally stem from our own necessities and individual values while action heroes’ motives are usually practically unrealistic.

The other option is when the reader does identify with the main characters within a story. Johnson says it’s because the “adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world.” For example, I guy like me with, an average physique, wouldn’t necessarily adhere to Hercules’s actions, but I would understand the frustration Mr. Glanville has of Arabella because that is something most men go through – being dumbfounded by the (seemingly) irrational decisions and actions of their lover.

Reading The Female Quixote, for me, resembles the former description of not identifying with the protagonist of the story. I would never look to Arabella for dating advice in a real-life situation. On the other hand, when Arabella is reading her romances and absorbing all the ideals presented in those stories, she sees herself in the Heroines of her novels, to her they are, Johnson would say, on the same level playing field. This conforms to the latter description of novels influencing actions of the youth. We see Arabella using the events in her romances as guidelines as to how one should court throughout all of book I. The only difference with Arabella and I is that I do not see my life as being an ancient romance, unfortunately Arabella identifies with that more than she conforms to the real world.