Shared Minds — Professor Dan O'Sullivan

Body

Open the piece → www.ccfrost.com/SharedMinds/SMHW10

Reading

Stanford Seminar - Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

Grid cells

created in the brain while the rat is moving around
they are constantly being rewritten
they are created and tied to space

People do better thinking with their hands

gestures are more expressive than language

space is special

its essential for survival,
function or action trumps size in the body, the space around the body
we experience the world as a larger space outside of our mind.
we experience the world both top down and front on
When we see action we take special reaction in preparation, action hijacks

We construct we explore, and its full of distortions
this distortion changes our space
information in general is like a collage
we play a lot of wordless games
baby ball rolling all the way to basketball

Or minds go from thought to thought the way our feet go from place to place

Lecture slide titled “Metaphoric spaces: language” listing the phrases “out of depth,” “at the top of the class,” “feeling up,” “fell into depression,” “grew closer” and “out of the box.”

maps can get made out of all kinds of things, just relationally

Ancient Graphics Show

people, animals and things
place and space
time event
number

Modern Graphics show the same things

Modern graphics began with the enlightenment

almost all graphs plot one or two variables against time

Cognitive Design Principles

Show each step
each part is a new step
embellish the action with guidelines or arrows

Lecture slide titled “Cognitive design principles” reading step-by-step, perspective of action, guidelines and arrows, beside a six-panel exploded assembly diagram of a rolling cart.

Good graphics schematize

verticality is loaded because of gravity

Lecture slide titled “Meaningful marks” pairing an icon with a thing, a point with a place or idea, a line with a relation, an arrow with an asymmetric relation, and a container with a set or area.

All these graphics and maps work because of context

paths and nodes are important, distance is not

Arrows dont really exist before the 21st century, but theyre great for functional descriptions

but theyre disambiguous

messy lines make ambiguity, artists say the ideas emerge from the page

Themes
we organize by themes

then er organize things as categories which go on shelves
catalogs hierarchies orders boxes lines

Lecture slide titled “1-1 correspondences, repetitions, cycles, embeddings” showing a photograph of a banquet table in red gingham, each seat set with the same plate, bowl, cup and cutlery.

Writing

Listen to Barbara Tversky who studies “embodied cognition” and write a short reaction.

Stanford Seminar - Mind in Motion

Barbara Tversky talks about thinking at that border of the abstract and the embodied. You are not a brain in a vat but instead use your body and the physical world to think. What practical ideas can you draw from her talk for making your interface?

I had my mind blown thinking about Mind in Motion last semester when it was referenced by Yesul Song in Intangible Interactions. At the time, I was working on MyMap with Aram and Fabri, a mental memory mapping device. For the interface I had been working on, lingering in a place meant the gps signal was more erratic and a heavier array of pixels centered around your location was colored in. The idea of this device was so that we can extend our memory into space through a fixed size map showing our previous locations. In hiking we talk about a green tunnel of foliage that the trail cuts through which can extend for several miles. In our waking lives we often encounter such tunnels first experiencing a new city where our perception of the space around us extends only to the other side of the road. So, in such a space inadequately explored, we may be lost mere blocks away from where we started.

I feel the body is deeply important for my sense of cognition. I have had this experience where things from a podcast i listened to days before pop back into my mind in the certain location I previously was. Or had similar thoughts while running a particular root, or at special places in the forest near my old house.

She also talks about how the same cell architecture in your brain used for physical navigation is used for processing very abstract concepts. Examine your figures of speech to see how much of your most conceptual is based on physical metaphor

Its interesting how maybe its like GPU’s are great for the parallel computing of spacial graphics and language, or whatever. I really think the mind is more spiritual. Out of my head, disembodied, Im behind on my tasks, I was engulfed by my reading, I cant stand it anymore, the feeling burned hot within me, it was the end of my rope, fallen.

Making

Create an interface the challenges your perception beyond the mouse and keyboard. Ask for more from your body. Engage it in a flow rather than a sequence. Involve your buttocks. See if you can use 1) the webcam with p5Live Media to transmit real time video and audio or 2) ML5 to track motion or 3) a VR headset with ThreeJS,a to engage your neck.

Previously in Matt Ross Touch Designer Class, I made an interface where the user raised the sun by holding their arms above their heads for 3 minutes. Inverting causality, the sun was brought up through its worship. I rewarded the user with birdsongs and an array of colors spanning the sunrise.

Lets iterate on that concept by making an interface which counts your exuberant prayers