Las Tecnologías de la Comunicación y la Información han cambiado drásticamente la manera en la que accedemos al conocimiento y procesamos datos, cómo aprendemos y trabajamos y nuestra manera de relacionarnos con otros seres humanos. El interés creciente que despiertan las consecuencias del uso de las TCIs se ha manifestado en múltiples estudios aislados que analizan estos fenómenos desde puntos de vista diferentes. Este artículo tiene como objetivo proporcionar una perspectiva unificadora de estos trabajos, reflexionando sobre las consecuencias que el (...) uso de las TCI está teniendo en nuestras habilidades intelectuales y en cómo nos percibimos a nosotros mismos como seres humanos. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to posit a conceptual model for the way ideas, conceptions, or feelings are represented or ‘figured’ in memory with the help of the imagination, and to use this model to begin to outline what I believe constitutes part of our culture’s ‘memory-image’ of the serial killer in both fact and fiction. Human memory is not simply a passive storehouse of information. It is an active process whereby relations are created by way of the imagination. (...) The ‘memory image’ is connected to what we wish to remember, but also to other images stored in memory, and inscribes itself in a vast ‘figural network’. I show how a given metaphor – ‘capitalism as cannibalism’ – can find its way in a given figural network, that of our memory-image of the serial killer. I investigate the rhetorical network that surrounds cannibalism and examine how this network offers our imagination a topos for our memory-image of the serial killer. Finally, I look at two films that activate this topos in their representation of serial killing, even though they avoid any direct thematization of it. The absence of any act of cannibalism in these films makes its ‘presence’ in our experience of them all the more compelling. (shrink)

The measure of what can be considered “new” is what is already known. What is “new” – be it a (technical) invention, a new method, or a newly discovered natural phenomenon – must distinguish itself...

FramesIn 1934 the Belgian artist René Magritte painted a room with a view. On an easel in front of the window stands a painting depicting the very piece of landscape blocked from sight. Magritte named his painting La Condition Humaine (“The Human Condition”), which is quite apt, for the life of everyone is determined by windows, doors, mirrors and many other frames. Indeed, to avert anxiety, one actually cultivates social behavior born of the fear of being “outside the frame.” Because (...) of this apprehension, we organize all reality into a series of preestablished frames. (shrink)

This article investigates points of intersection between medievalism and memory. It mainly focuses on the formative period of the 19th century when the Norse past, the so-called Viking Age, as well as Old Norse mythology became integral parts of Danish national identity. The article homes in on Adam Oehlenschl.ger’s rejuvenation of the mythological materials and his reflections on the usefulness of the local mythologies, both for a national spirit and for poetic renewal. It is demonstrated that 19th century medievalism, with (...) its focus on mythology, essentially was a project of cultural memory, that is, of recollecting knowledge from culture’s childhood, and, additionally, that poetry, and with that imagination, plays a prominent role for the construction of a meaningful past. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe secret of invention or the art of inventing has recently become the object of positive or experimental research, aimed at discovering the logic of the initial mental processes that lead to “innovation.” But the problem is old and goes back to antiquity: The art of memory, rhetoric, symbolics. Does the succession of thought in invention follow a rule, such that its variations could be classified? Here I offer but a general direction: There is an analogy between the two (...) relations: invention/innovation and fecundation/maturation – namely, a male and a female principle.The Ancients thought that inventing was a divine art and that man receives the spark to then brood over its fruit in his mind. Today's still dominant materialist tendency insists on the importance of this secondary maturation and minimizes the role of the primordial spark.Thus becomes possible the ranking according to a unique order — but not without hesitations and guilt — of thinkers as far apart as Mandeville, Adam Smith, Hegel, Buffon, Rousseau, and Herder, to find the contemporary trend to which François Dagognet belongs. (shrink)

In this commentary, we discuss an important pattern of results in the literature on the neural basis of expertise: decrease of cerebral activation at the beginning of acquisition of expertise and functional cerebral reorganization as a consequence of years of practice. We show how these two results can be integrated with the neural reuse framework.

What is ‘certainty’ in our everyday life and work? AI changing what it means to ‘be certain’. For example, when we engage with others and are doing our work, we make judgments in which we ‘trust our instinct’. Are we still able to do so if we engage with the ‘certainty’ of the machine? How is ‘being certain’ in ‘dialogue’ affected by our conceptions of what it means to be human in interaction with the ‘machine’, and consequent distinctions between body (...) and mind? Descartes first likened the human body to a machine (albeit a machine created by God) and endowed reason as being a transcendent universal instrument. La Mettrie proposed that language and culture separates humans from ‘animals’. However, in Diderot’s writing, ‘knowledge’ is seen as embodied, coming from our senses and language, and where gesture and rhythm evolve in practice. For D’Alembert, human ‘instinct’ is a skill, a learnt practice, and Rousseau believes that human certainty is something that cannot be measured. These questionings of the dichotomies of body and mind and human and animal, that relate practice and knowledge, also question the place and meaning of ‘rules’ of engaged practice. For Wittgenstein, one learns to make judgments through personal experience, ‘rules in practice’, whereby language is necessarily culturally situated and embodied, and calculation and Judgement are part of each other. (shrink)

This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way (...) of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on aninventivecapacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture. (shrink)

K. Danziger, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 305 pp. £24.99. ISBN: 978-0-521-89815-7 (hdbk) and 978-0-521-72641-2 (pbk).

The mnemonic techniques of the past, like mind maps, metaphors, and narrative theory, offer research students, especially doctoral candidates, another cognitive support. These techniques pre-date computers, so shift cognitive organization from the page or the computer screen to the mind. This article compares early memory theory and the process of research thinking. Three useful pointers to the thesis writer emerge from mnemonics: the use of concrete images to conceptualize the abstract; the use of mental architecture to conceive of structure; and (...) recognition that the cognitive structuring process is ontologically significant. It is hoped that in an age of electronics a reminder of the capacity of the human mind to establish an architectural filing system may be encouraging to doctoral students engaged with structuring their theses. (shrink)

Jeffrey Olick is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of memory studies today. Yet, none of his works have been translated into Russian. “Figurations of memory” is one of his most important texts. It is dedicated to the process-relational methodology. J. Olick criticizes traditional approaches to collective memory as a static thing, whereas it should be studied as a process. On the other hand, the author criticizes a mainstream understanding of memory as a unified object. Instead, he (...) suggests that there are multiple mnemonic forms and practices that should be investigated. As a result he presents a new methodology that is based on analysis of the four essential aspects of memory work: field, medium, genre, and profile. This method of analysis leads to emergence of additional empirical categories, such as official, vernacular, public, and private memory; affective, aesthetic-expressive, instrumental-cognitive, and political-moral media; the normal legitimation, German traditions, German victimhood, and German guilt genres; and the reliable, moral, and normal profiles. Though the final model may seem rather complex, the author claims that it is clearer and more precise that other models of research of collective memory. He claims that this methodology is universal for studying a large number of sociological topics. (shrink)

Integrative biological simulations have a varied and controversial history in the biological sciences. From computational models of organelles, cells, and simple organisms, to physiological models of tissues, organ systems, and ecosystems, a diverse array of biological systems have been the target of large-scale computational modeling efforts. Nonetheless, these research agendas have yet to prove decisively their value among the broader community of theoretical and experimental biologists. In this commentary, we examine a range of philosophical and practical issues relevant to understanding (...) the potential of integrative simulations. We discuss the role of theory and modeling in different areas of physics and suggest that certain sub-disciplines of physics provide useful cultural analogies for imagining the future role of simulations in biological research. We examine philosophical issues related to modeling which consistently arise in discussions about integrative simulations and suggest a pragmatic viewpoint that balances a belief in philosophy with the recognition of the relative infancy of our state of philosophical understanding. Finally, we discuss community workflow and publication practices to allow research to be readily discoverable and amenable to incorporation into simulations. We argue that there are aligned incentives in widespread adoption of practices which will both advance the needs of integrative simulation efforts as well as other contemporary trends in the biological sciences, ranging from open science and data sharing to improving reproducibility. (shrink)