Hyperrhiz 11
Mainlining the Neo-Cortex
Glen Gatin
Citation: Gatin, Glen. “Mainlining the Neo-Cortex.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 11, 2015. doi:10.20415/hyp/011.g03
Abstract: This piece was developed as an exercise at the 2014 Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC. The challenge was to create a piece of electronic literature using digital applications for consumption in digital environment.The essential question posed relates to the physiological aspects of poetry or prose. If poetry written in iambic pentameter mimics the beat of the heart, recited with each line requiring one lung full of breath, what physiological substrate can connect with words and ideas presented at much higher speed? Perhaps something approaching the speed of synaptic connections provides a better visualization.
View Project: Mainlining the Neo-Cortex
Artist Statement
The Process: Free online tools which do not require an institutional server were chosen for the most part. Elements of text were organized using Google docs centering on a theme of rapid sequential visual presentation (RSVP) and cognitive neuro-psychology research about the physiological elements of reading. Various gimmicks and gadgets were used to illustrate the RSVP concepts.
The text was posted to an active webpage (Blogger) so that it could be read with the Spreed RSVP application, available as an add-on to the Chrome web browser. Camatasia video application was used to screen capture Spreed as the application presented the text at 400 words per minute. A death metal rock music clip was selected to add force to the penetrating sensation of RSVP. Audacity was used to edit and convert file format. The edited MP3 file was imported into Camtasia and aligned with the video. The Camtasia video was uploaded to Screencast.com and the video was embedded on the Blogger site.
Credits
Audio credit: Fidei Defensor — Hostis Hvmani Generis (Latin: Enemy of Mankind) from the "Cognoscenti" album. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N6IFiYU398&feature=youtube_gdata_player. Used with permission.
Text Transcript
The first and last sound we ever hear is the sound of a human heart. Let it flow Poems written in iambic pentameter are meant be read to the pace of a heartbeat. da DUMB. An iamb is a pair of syllables one unaccented and one accented, five of them in a row are a pentameter. An iambic pentameter takes about the volume of air contained by the human lungs to express. The Grand Old Duke of York He had ten thou sand men He marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down a gain What bodily function do poems written in Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation faster than the fastest heartbeat, exploding your arteries, slower than neural transmission, newly tickling your neocortical synapses. About the pace than mitochondria reads the code in our RNA CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA, AGG UCU, UCC, UCA, UCG, AGU, AGC UUA, UUG, CUU, CUC, CUA, CUG Licking the meaning codons off that strand of ancient ancestors, the ones who survived when visual acuity was as important as sexual fecundity. Is is a Fibonotchi number Blink subliminal sex sells Limbik Frequencies lets me enjoy musicality without having to concentrate, it is more participatory. Twitter stream, 140 character stream of conscious of humanity, the roiling festering song/cry/moan/bark/growl/sigh/laugh/giggle/scream/howl/shit/piss/fuck/idiot/ Urbandictionary Eyelight savings time Fixations and saccades Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed in many experiments over 20 years that the reading eye fixates on most content words (especially nouns and verbs) in a rapid series of stops and jumps called fixations and saccades. When fixated, the eye rests for about .25 seconds (250 milliseconds) on a content word and takes in a span of about seven to nine letters to the right of the fixation and three to four letters to the left before it jumps over to the next fixation point. More letters are processed to the right of the fixation if the eye is scanning from left to right. The opposite would be true for reading a language that is scanned from right to left, such as Hebrew or Arabic. Unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, n grams We think that text and material expressions of literature are superior because we can actually see a physical construct, but now magnetic-force microscopy has revealed that bits are physically represented on the surface of a hard drive. It is the same old story, until we had a microscope anyone who suggested we were made up of tiny invisible cells was considered a dangerous lunatic. Although we may not be aware of it, we do not skip over words, read print selectively, or recognize words by sampling a few letters of the print, as whole language theorists proposed in the 1970s. Reading is accomplished with letter-by-letter processing of the word (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001, 2002). Fluent readers do perceive each and every letter of print. Thus, we can distinguish casual from causal, grill from girl, and primeval from prime evil. Better readers process the internal details of printed words and match them to the individual speech sounds that make up the spoken word. Even when "chunks" are recognized, they can be analyzed into their individual phoneme-grapheme correspondences on demand…. Eye movement studies have shown that mature, proficient readers do not skip words, use context to process words, or bypass phonics in establishing word recognition. Reading requires letter-wise processing of print and the ability to match symbols with the speech sounds they represent. the 'mind as computer' metaphor is equally misleading, representing cognition as a set of individual data stores, when in fact even a simple concept like 'Paris' is more like a wave of interconnected neural activations, an activation that takes place in the very same body of water as the next wave (which may be 'plaster' or 'France' or 'Hilton' or whatever) Messy bricoleurs putting together the rags and bones, the buttons and strings, the refrigerator magnets, nephews pictures. The real power is the magnetism that keeps our stuff stuck on the fridge. Random stuff stolen from Facebook: Dearest creature in creation Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, Viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won't it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It's a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!! 7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 70 PROV3 HOW OUR M1ND5 C4N DO 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG3! 1N 7H3 &3GNN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD Bu7 YOUR M1ND 1s R34D1NG 17 4U70M47C4LLY W17H ou7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0u7 17, B3 PROUD! ONLY C3R741N P39PL3 C4N R3AD 7H5. PL3453 FORW4RD 1F u C4N R34D 7H15