If there were only one way to strike the spark which could ignite genius, humans would have devised the flint and steel for that a long time ago. Our minds do not work that way—they work in multiple ways. As the Japanese Haiku master Matsuo Bashō wrote many years ago:

Four temple gates

four ways

beneath a single moon

There are many ways to ignite that spark: our ability to think does depend upon the flint and steel of words alone.

In Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, authors Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein remind us that many of the world’s most influential thinkers found more than one way to enter their temples of innovation. Many were polymaths, artists as well as scientists, scientists within their arts.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Physicist … and musician

Actress … and inventor [1]

Ethologist … and artist

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr

Desmond Morris

Desmond Morris

Some found that ideas arrived from being able to look at a problem from multiple perspectives (perceiving), by recognizing repetition and relationships (patterning), by reducing systems and processes into basic terms (abstracting), by physicalizing thought itself (embodied thinking), through creating externalized systems (modeling), and through plain old mucking about and having fun (playing). None of these avenues necessarily exists alone, unconnected to the others. An essential part of transformative thinking is the synthesizing that can, and does, occur: a synosia of thought that has implications for educating others to be creative and for being creative in the way we educate others.

“Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can’t print the results.”Mark Twain

Most of all, it is clear that deep within the layers of thought is feeling … that insistent human force which drives thought itself—the muse, the impulse, the igniting spark.

via CEP818 – Thinking Differently.

Embodied Thinking involves two skills which generally feed into each other – Kinesthetic Thinking and Empathizing. Kinesthetic thinking means thinking with the body, including the sensations of muscle, skin and sinew; and the feelings in the body of movement, balance, and tensions. For example, in his thought experiments, Einstein imagined himself as a photon, and described not only what he saw, but what he

felt in his body (Root-Bernstein, 2003). Besides this trait of bodily thinking, an important element of embodied thinking is empathizing, or

imagining oneself in another’s position, walking in their shoes, or feeling what they might feel. Actors, poets, and novelists, for example frequently empathize with other people, animals, and characters in order to portray them in interesting ways. Individuals in the sciences must also sometimes apply empathetic thinking to understand other organisms, even non-living things and processes.

via CEP818 – Embodiment.

[[Greek anth flowering, flourishing + eo self- (sui), dawn, shining + sophia wisdom]] 1 wisdom flowering 2 wisdom about flourishing human beings 3 the essential, embodied wisdom of a flowering, luminous human being

Greetings! This is a legacy website I (Kye Nelson) first built a decade ago. My heartfelt desire then, as now, was to offer this website as part of the answer to the current need for a more ‘real’ and humane kind of thinking. I think we are just beginning to establish a new cultural pattern in which thinking from the depths of who we are and know, is to be expected. When these new ways of thinking become better established, the world built by our formal thinking can be more sound, better for us and for other living beings.

Antheosophia provides information and support for thinking and acting from this deep ground. Practices found here can help you to find this level in yourself, and then to clearly articulate what you haven’t before been able to say. Such an articulation can be informal, but if you choose, you can also build new theory and practice from this level.

You may be interested in:

basic information about Thinking At the Edge

consultation and mentoring to learn how to guide yourself by referring to your implicit knowing in a wide variety of contexts–or if you would like individual guidance in working with the practices of Finding Your Place and Thinking At the Edge, which can help you think with what you know tacitly, from experience. [Note: There are now also other practices, developed after this website's time]

Antheosophia also contains

an extensive library of information about other ways of working with the tacit wisdom of the whole person. thinking, learning, and working that remember there’s a “me” looking out from this person’s eyes, and ways of listening to, and working with, our felt experience of being in the world.

And you can find

stories and philosophical play here, written from this level.

Thinking has become separated from the body, from feeling, and from contemplation in our common understanding. But thinking can be a beautiful bodily process, like breathing. One can rest in it just as deeply as one can rest in one’s breath, or one’s movement.

To be able to rest deeply in one’s embodied thinking it helps to learn first to attend to the felt sense level in one’s already-existing contemplative practice. The practice of Focusing is a systematic way of working with this subtle level of embodied experience. When teachers are available who are skilled in teaching this ability as part of contemplative practice across spiritual traditions, this level becomes more widely available to anyone, no matter what their path.

via antheosophia: free people, embodied thinking, flourishing wisdom.

open funding

How are our senses formed by culture? What is the world like to societies that emphasize touch or hearing rather than sight?

This research explores the life of the senses in society. To a greater or lesser extent, every domain of sensory experience, from the sight of an artwork to the scent of perfume to the savour of dinner, is a field of cultural elaboration. Hence the necessity of adopting an anthropological approach to the study of the sensorium.

Sensory experience may be structured and invested with meaning in many different ways across cultures, as I have learned from field research in the interior and coastal regions of Papua New Guinea, the Andean region of Argentina, the American southwest, and the Pitt Rivers Musem in Oxford.

Click here to visit the Senses website.

Anthropology of Consumption.

What has the globalization of the consumer society meant for the small-scale societies typically studied by anthropologists? How has Western culture changed as a result of the influx of “exotic” goods and practices from around the world over the last few decades?

This research explores issues of cultural imperialism and appropriation, of colonization and decolonization, of how the West represents its “others” and how those “others” in turn represent the West – all through the medium of the meanings and uses which consumer goods carry and/or have ascribed to them when they cross cultural borders.

Click here to visit the Cross-Cultural Consumption website.

Anthropology of Law.

How do Native American ideas of justice differ from those found in the Anglo-American legal tradition? How important is it for judicial reasoning to be culturally reflexive? This research focuses on the challenges to conventional Anglo-American notions of law and justice posed by the legal traditions of diverse First Nations people – most notably the Dene and the Hopi. It also explores how the ideology of legal liberalism, which holds that justice must be culture-blind, has had many unfortunate consequences, and needs now to be supplanted by a culturally-reflexive style of legal reasoning.

Click here to visit the Centaur Jurisprudence Research Project website.

Click here to visit the Canadian Jurisprudence website.

Canadian Studies.

Could there be a constitutional dimension to the creative process? How is cultural production constituted in Canada and the United States?

Cultural studies teaches that cultures tend to constitute themselves in contradistinction to each other, and that the mode of organization of society shapes the creative activity of the imaginary. Building on these notions, this research focusses on the Canada/U.S. border. It shows how the constitutions of Canada and the United States differ in certain key respects, and goes on to trace the influence of these differences on cultural production in the two countries. The works of various exemplary figures or “cultural icons” from the fields of painting, music, and literature are analyzed – including, among others, Alex Colville, Glenn Gould, Grey Owl, Lucy Maude Montgomery, and Margaret Atwood, along with their American counterparts.

Click here to visit the Canadian Icon website.

Click here to view a selection of recently published and soon to be published papers and lectures

via David Howes – Anthropology professor at Concordia University. Research Areas..

Science | Health

17 Nov 11

Synaesthesia

Applying tiny electric currents across the visual brain altered the experience of synaesthesia.

‘Hyper-excitability’ in regions of the brain may underlie synaesthesia, an unusual condition where some people experience a ‘blending of the senses’, Oxford University researchers suggest.

The neuroscientists used some of the latest brain stimulation techniques with people who ‘see’ colours when reading numbers or words, a common form of the condition called ‘grapheme-colour synaesthesia’.

They investigated activity in the visual-processing part of their brain, and compared it against the brain activity seen in a control group of people without synaesthesia.

They found that people with this type of synaesthesia had a higher level of ‘excitability’ in their primary visual cortex. It took much less stimulation for neurons in this part of the brain to fire.

The researchers also showed that changing the excitability, making it harder or easier for the neurons to fire, could increase or lessen the effects of the synaesthesia.

‘The hyperexcitability of the visual area may underlie synaesthesia in people who experience colours triggered by words or numbers,’ says Dr Devin Terhune, first author on the Oxford University study. ‘This new finding challenges previous theories to explain the condition.’‘The magnitude of the difference is extremely large. This is a fundamental difference in the brains of synaesthetes that may relate to the development of their synaesthesia,’ he adds.

The study is published in the journal Current Biology and was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Cogito Foundation.

People experience synaesthesia in a variety of ways. Some people may ‘see’ sounds, in that hearing sounds triggers them to see particular colours at the same time. Others might experience colours while reading simple black text. Some estimates suggest that synaesthesia affects perhaps as much as 4% of the population.

This ‘blending of the senses’ is automatic and involuntary. Whether it is a sound, or number, or taste that triggers the experience of another sense, the connections are always the same. In the case of grapheme-colour synaesthesia, particular letters, numbers or words will always stimulate precisely the same colours.

‘We tend to assume that we experience the world in the same way as everyone else. Synaesthesia is a compelling example of how some people perceive the world in a fundamentally different way,’ says Dr Terhune.

Synaesthesia is a compelling example of how some people perceive the world in a fundamentally different way

Dr Devin Terhune

Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, who headed the research group, added: ‘Studying synaesthesia can tell us about how the brain develops, how perceptions and cognitions become automatic. It gives us an insight into the brain processes underlying conscious awareness.’

The research team used two brain stimulation techniques that are non-invasive, using devices placed on the outside of the head to apply either very weak magnetic fields or tiny electric currents to specific parts of the brain. They are research tools, known to be safe, and designed to be just strong enough to temporarily influence neural activity in that part of the brain and see what effect this has on brain processes.

The first test used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which a weak magnetic field was used to stimulate neurons to fire in the main visual-processing region of the brain, the primary visual cortex.

The researchers measured the stimulation necessary for the study volunteers to experience streaks of light in their vision, much like the after-images seen after looking at a bright light.

Every person has a different threshold necessary for neurons to fire. But the five people in the study with grapheme-colour synaesthesia only needed tiny amounts of stimulation in comparison to those without synaesthesia.

This result was only found in the visual area of the brain. The same test on the volunteers’ motor cortex showed no differences between those with synaesthesia and the control group.

‘This propensity for the neurons to fire in the visual area of the brain shows this region may be more sensitive, more excitable in those with this form of synaesthesia,’ explains Dr Terhune.

The researchers then used a second technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) to see whether this hyperexcitability was related to the experience of synaesthesia in the five volunteers.

The approach applies a very small electric current across regions of the brain to change the threshold for neurons to fire. Applying the current in one direction makes it harder for them to fire, while applying it in the other direction makes it easier.

The researchers found that turning the excitability up or down in the primary visual cortex led the five synaesthetes to have a stronger experience of colours connected with words or numbers, or would diminish or eliminate it entirely.

‘It may be that we become aware of things because our neurons pass a certain threshold. In synaesthesia this appears to be the case. With a lower threshold for hyperexcitable neurons, it’s easier for neurons to fire and this accesses the conscious experience of colour,’ says Dr Cohen Kadosh.

via Synaesthesia linked to a hyper-excitable brain – University of Oxford.

Posted by Science Oxford on December 9, 2010 | comments

Review by Alison Cooper

An audience braving the bitter cold were rewarded with a warm welcome at Science Oxford Live on the 25th November 2010 to explore the five senses of touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell, with neuroscientist Professor Charles Spence. They cringed at the world’s loudest crisp packet, now withdrawn from sale as found to be too irritating and lingered over chocolate and wine, while an explanation of innovative packaging for cleaning products set the mood for spring. Speaker Charles Spence took the time to satisfy their questioning in full, explaining how designers of all kinds delight in playing with the sensory experiences scientists seek to understand.

He illustrated how this is all in the spirit of science as combining different sensual elements can both entice and confuse our response. More red colour and things taste sweeter as we naturally think of ripe berries and listening to chicken noises can enhance the taste of egg. Our brains mix the cocktail of information from our senses to produce our overall experience. Could this be why as the saying goes, ‘food always tastes better outdoors?’ Familiarity can influence this super additive sensual effect, a drop of sugar on the tongue can increase ability to smell almond with salt having the same effect for a Japanese palate more used to this taste combination.

Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is capitalising on this phenomenon, pairing blood orange with orange beetroot for an unexpected colour and taste combination and using digitised sea sounds to accompany fish. This interesting innovation can be sampled in his restaurant the Fat Duck near Slough. The Science Oxford audience suggested that while the medium is novel the idea of using sounds, especially music to enhance the eating experience is age old. I will resist the temptation to quote Shakespeare for fear of sounding too cheesy.

The audience were very willing to test things out for themselves by sampling dark and milk chocolate squares. For me, it was absolutely certain even before catching a whiff, milk chocolate was clearly wobbly rounded shape buba with a medium deep not played on a woodwind. Dark high percentage coco could only be spiky tuki played on a violin. While this seemed to reflect the audience consensus, and previous studies, there was plenty of space for individuality. A musician pointed out that he is so in tune with sound elements that other sensual cues fade into the background.

The audience were intrigued about how sensory cues could be used to influence settings for social benefit, such as painting walls in prison a particular shade of pale pink, shown to be calming, and careful choice of colour and scent in hospitals to appropriately stimulate and relax. They warned that in some situations reactions could be mixed if people suspect artificial sense enhancement is at work. Charles Spence emphasised that he considers the underlying intent and execution of manipulation is the important issue. Personally, he appreciates sensual enhancement where it increases enjoyment of an experience. A starter for a sizzling debate?

via Science Oxford Online » Blog Archive » Secrets of the *Senses*.

Sensate is an online, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Our aim is to build on the current groundswell of pioneering activities in the digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and innovative media practice to provide a forum for scholarly and artistic experiments not conducive to the printed page.

New forms of scholarship: Web-based publications and resources expand the traditional paradigm of academic discourse and open new possibilities for scholarship and artistic creation. Fundamental to this expansion is reimagining what constitutes a ‘piece’ of scholarship or art. Some of the work featured in Sensate might take the form of audiovisual ethnographic research, multimedia mash-ups, experiments in media archaeology, participatory media projects, or digitized collections of archival media, artifacts, maps, or objects. Due to the diversity of accommodated forms (many of which surely have not yet been imagined), works published in Sensate are not conventional articles but aim to become convergences of collaborations that can evolve over time.

Audiovisual media production as epistemology: Audiovisual media have a different relationship to (and reveal different dimensions of) the world from linguistic systems. Sensate serves as both a tool and venue for the expression and critique of these modes, fostering the experimentation necessary to better understand them. Scholars have posited the inherent excess of meaning in an image, or the capacity for evocation and embodied perception through sound, but Sensate seeks to further this analysis by putting it to critical practice—foregrounding inquiry through the very processes of making. Our project goes beyond audio interviews and photo essays—which often still maintain and privilege the verbal, didactic decorum of the academy—to assert and explore the productive differences, overlappings, and gaps between the written word and other mediums of academic and artistic expression.

Form+Content: A key assertion of our mission arises from the desire to attend to both form and content, discourse and depiction, signifier and signified, where meaning does not end with what is written or shown but persists through process and iteration. With Sensate, we highlight processes of knowledge production which in turn give significant weight to the meaning potential of images, sounds, and juxtapositions of various media. We hope to foster emergent and generative scholarship.

Innovations in publishing: Since first dreaming up the journal over a year ago, we have been working to develop our own experimental, open-source publishing platform, Zeega. The name Zeega is inspired by Dziga Vertov, the pioneering media artist whose work radically reconfigured the possibilities of film, radio and collaboration through such classics as Man with a Movie Camera. (And this platform truly is an experiment, so we ask your patience in navigating the work, as there certainly might be the occasional bug). Zeega aims to afford new models of multimedia authorship, seamlessly integrating audio, video, text, and maps from across the web and enabling nonlinear exploration.

Sensate is an issueless journal: Not bound by the organizational structure of issues, volumes, or tables of contents, an issueless journal provides new ways of experiencing published media. Sensate intends to foster new modes of relational thought, as it is structured around tagclouds and networked associations rather than constrained by conventions of chronology. Content is accessed through advanced search queries and linked through related tags, thus making browsing more intuitive and driven by novel configurations of content, form and method.

Free and open-access: In an effort to render more permeable the walls of academia, Sensate is free and open to the public. A central premise of our work is expanding the domain of public knowledge production and sharing, blurring the boundaries between the traditionally segregated worlds of academic work and other public spheres. Work featured in Sensate is published under a Creative Commons license, and we will be making Zeega itself available as a tool with which to experiment in these new forms of scholarly publication.

Online+Offline: Integrating events, seminars, film series, and workshops into the online portion of the journal, we contend that digital media is not inherently place-less, nor “virtual” but provides a new tool with which to connect with physical locales, spaces, sites and people.

We hope that you will find many ways to engage with not only the content, but the growing network of Sensate collaborators. We welcome any feedback, provocations, and invitations for collaboration. As with any experiment, many results are unknown.

Sincerely,

Julia, Jesse, Anh-Thu, Peter, Phil, Joana, Ben, Kara, James, Matt, Jeremy, and Tom

Special thanks: Countless individuals and organizations have made Sensate possible. The Sensory Ethnography Lab and metaLAB (at) Harvard are vital spaces of incubation. And we’d like to especially thank the early-stage critics who joined us in March to provide feedback on the first draft of the project: Lindsey Lodhie, Rekha Murthy, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Matt Shanley and Karen Stein.

Sensate is made possible in part by the generous support of the Provostial Funds Committee, Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, at Harvard University.

via Sensate Journal » About.

The Senses and Society is a journal founded in 2006 by Michael Bull and David Howes, together with Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. It is published three times a year. The journal carries full-length articles and a range of reviews (sensory design, book, conference and exhibition). The inaugural issue is available free on-line. To view the inaugural issue, or to consult the table of contents of each issue published to date, please visit Berg Journals

Aims and Scope of the Journal

A heightened interest in the role of the senses in culture and society is sweeping the human sciences, supplanting older paradigms and challenging conventional theories of representation.

This pioneering journal provides a crucial forum for the exploration of this vital new area of inquiry. It brings together groundbreaking work in the humanities and social sciences and incorporates cutting-edge developments in art, design and architecture. Every volume contains something for and about each of the senses, both singly and in all sorts of novel configurations.

Sensation is fundamental to our experience of the world. Shaped by culture, gender and class, the senses mediate between mind and body, idea and object, self and environment. The senses are increasingly extended beyond the body through technology, and catered to by designers and marketers, yet persistently elude all efforts to capture and control them. Artists now experiment with the senses in bold new ways, disrupting conventional canons of aesthetics.

How many senses are there?

What are the uses of the senses – all of them?

How is perception shaped by cultures and technologies?

In what ways are the senses hierarchized by gender, class, or race?

What are the social implications of the growing emphasis on the management of sensation (or, commercialization of the sensorium)?

How might a focus on the cultural life of the senses yield new insights into processes of cognition and emotion?

The Senses & Society aims to:

Explore the intersection between culture and the senses

Promote research on the politics of perception and the aesthetics of everyday life

Address architectural, marketing and design initiatives in relation to the senses

Publish reviews of books and multi-sensory exhibitions throughout the world

Publish special issues concentrating on particular themes relating to the senses

The burgeoning appeal of sensory studies has recently resulted in the appearance of a new journal. The Senses and Society is now complemented by Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice. Sensate is “an online, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences” based in the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University.

via The Senses and Society – Sensory Studies.