Neurology/perception
===
===
Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience
edited by Anna Munster
Anna Munster
Introduction: Neuro-perception and What's at Stake in Giving Neurology Its Nerves?
For the last few years, all things ‘neuro’ have been doing the rounds in the creative arts and humanities. We have had the declensions ‘neuropolitics’ and ‘noopolitics’; we have panicked about screen media and the internet rewiring our plastic brains; we have marvelled at artists incorporating MRIs into videos, photomedia and installations. Little wonder at such a response – after all, weren’t the 1990s officially declared, by US Presidential proclamation to be the ‘Decade of the Brain’? Neuroscience – the collective nomenclature we give the sciences of the brain – is in fact a disparate assemblage of disciplines, methods and practices for understanding, healing, transposing, interpreting, imaging and, most importantly, constituting the nervous system in organisms. To get a sense of how diverse these sciences are, we can simply draw a small list up of some of them: for example, neuroanatomy, behavioural neuroscience, computational neuroscience, neuroethnology, molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, and so on. These all designate various specialities within neuroscience but also, sometimes vastly different methods, philosophical approaches and indeed ways of realising the brain as organ, system, structure or entity. Within or across any of these specialities, competing and dissonant approaches to how the nervous system is seen to function exist. A decade, indeed more than a century, of practice and research in neuroscience has only multiplied the neural as a vast field of unknown quanta and qualia. (more...)
Nervous perception: germinal articles in neuroscience on sensorimotor experience
‘What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain’, J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts (originally published 1959, Proceedings of the IRE, 47, 11: 1940–1951. This is a link to the article on the ‘Papers’ page of Jerry Lettvin’s wiki (now maintained by his son, the neuroscientist Jonathan Lettvin. Permission to link externally to this article was given by Jonathon Lettvin). Once you have clicked on the link, you need to scroll down to ‘22’ to download the pdf.
‘Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience’, Evan Thompson (originally published 2005, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4, 4: 407–427). This is a link to the author’s copy on his website, on the page ‘Selected Articles’. After clicking the link, scroll down to the heading ‘2006’ and select the pdf for download.
‘Colour vision, evolution, and perceptual content’, Evan Thompson (originally published 1995, Synthese, 104: 1–32). This is a link to the author’s pdf version of the article on his website, on the page ‘Selected Articles’. After clicking the link, scroll down to the heading ‘1995’ and select the pdf for download.
'Experience without the head’, Alva Noë (originally published 2006, Perceptual Experience, Tamar Szabo Gendler ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 411–433). This is a link to the author’s draft of the article on the ‘Articles’ page of the author’s website. After clicking in the link, scroll to the article title to download a pdf.
‘Mirror neurons: A sensorimotor representation system’, Vittorio Gallese and Christian Keysers (originally published 2001, Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 24, 5: 983–4). This is a link to this article, stored on a directory of the University of Parma, Italy. After clicking on the link below, scroll down to the active link ‘Gallese-Keysers 2001.pdf
‘The role of fixational eye movements in visual perception’ Susan Martinez-Conde, Stephen L. Macknik and David H. Hubel ( originally published 2004, Nature Neuroscience, 5: 229–240), This is a publications page for David Hubel. After clicking on the link, scroll down to ‘2004’ and select the article)
Studies and commentaries on aspects of sensorimotor experience in the perceptual systems of humans and nonhumans
‘What the bat's voice tells the bat's brain’, Nachum Ulanovsky and Cynthia F. Moss. (2007). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. This is an external link to a free access, full text version of this article.
'Sensorimotor cortex as a critical component of an 'extended' mirror neuron system: Does it solve the development, correspondence, and control problems in mirroring?' Jaime A Pineda. (2008). Behavioral and Brain Functions, 4:47. This article is open access and can be accessed in full in this collection by clicking on this link.
'Contingency is crucial for creating imitative responses', C. Catmur. (2011). Frontiers in Neuroscience, 5. This article is open access and can be accessed in full in this collection by clicking on this link.
‘Corticomotor excitability during observation and imagination of a work of art’, Fortunato Battaglia, Sarah H. Lisanby and David Freedberg. (2011). Frontiers in Neuroscience, 5. This article is open access and can be accessed in full in this collection by clicking on this link.
‘Contributions of fixational eye movements to the discrimination of briefly presented stimuli’, Michele Rucci and Gaëlle Desbordes. (2003). Journal of Vision,3,11. This is a free access article and can be freely read online by clicking on this link.
Other online resources about perception and sensorimotor experience from neuroscientfic, philosophical and creative practices
‘ William Forsythe & Alva Noë’. (2009), LIVE at the New York Public Library, October 9. This is a link to a free access video of a conversation between Alva Noe and William Forsyth on perception as something we do; that is, enactive perception not something that is simply inside our heads
Visual Illusions is part of Stephen Macknick’s freely accessible website. Macknick is a neuroscientist who has worked on relations betwen the brain, vision and magic/illusion. The site allows you to interact with visual illusions.
Garrison Institute Interview with Evan Thompson ( 2011). This is a freely accessible interview on YouTube with Evan Thompson on the ocntribution of phenomenologies of experience to the neuroscience of perception.
Neuroculture.org is a freely accessible website that provides examples of artists and scholars working at teh inetrsection of art and neuroscience. Many of these works are critical of the hype surrounding neuroscience, others actively explore the relations between neuroscience, art and peception.