Author: James Vornov

One of my most vivid insights during my first years in training as a Neurologist was the realization that the brain functioned as a mosaic. The many divisions of the brain  each has its own function- they collaborate but work largely independently. When part of the brain is damaged by a stroke, after a period that’s like shock, the rest of the brain carries on as before, just missing an ability due to the loss of function. It’s a lot like loosing a limb. Loose the part of the brain that produces speech, moves the left arm or sees the right side of the world and those particular abilities are deleted.

Its hard to reconcile this view of brain as mosaic with our subjective sensation of a single “I”. There seems to be a single identity inside each of us that we identify as ourselves, as our consciousness, our mind. We wonder whether animals have a similar unitary experience of identity. And we wonder whether a machine could ever experience self.

Putting aside these interesting questions about animal and computer minds, there is a related question of where the mind resides. To my pragmatic way of thinking, asking where these sensations are experienced is like asking where in some one’s body the personhood resides. I am my body and no matter how many parts of my body might be lost or replaced, my personhood is my body. Simply. The truly remarkable subjective illusion of conscious unity makes it seems like the mind has to be something or somewhere other than just the function of the brain in its totality. But I say that this mind is a mosaic of functioning brain areas.

I haven’t read Damasio’s latest: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, but I did see the review in the NYT by Ned Block. It interesting how Block wants to define consciousness much as I do, this odd subjective sensation of inhabiting a brain that interacts with an environment, criticizing Damasio for emphasizing “knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings.”

Damasio has been interested in how the subjective sensation of awareness arises in the brain. It seems unfair for Block to review a book by criticizing the author’s choice of subject rather than their approach to the subject. These questions of self awareness and more abstract thought are really more interesting than mapping experience in the brain. Damasio’s subject here seems to be the one that I’ve been writing about recently, which is how we view the metaphor and artifacts that we create in a uniquely human way. Language, metaphore and, above all I think, models capable of  running internal mental simulations are what let us imagine, plan and coordinate activity in ways never before seen on the planet.

I want to link this neurobiology of experience with the growing understanding of how language and metaphor are embodied in the brain and environment. I’m more and more convinced that the more real we see these abstractions as being real, the better we can deal with them in the world. My best example of this currently is equating fear, the emotion, with loss of control, loss of the feeling of mastery.

After all, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty can not be done well if motivated by fear of unknown, uncontrollable future events.

I never got the GTD focus on context.

While David Allen’s Getting Things Done was a big influence on my approach to simplifying life. I embraced the clean desk, the labeled files and next action approach quickly with great gains in effectiveness. But while I tried to adopt his approach to filing next actions by context, it never stuck. I never saw the value in it other than keeping an “errands” list.

Context should be a powerful organizing principle. After all, the options available to choose from should be strongly dependent on what’s in front of you. Moving from place to place should be equivalent to moving from task to task. Even in the virtual world, moving from Photoshop to Word should be a context shift.

We’ve pretty much erased context with technology. Communications channels are open and available 24/7. There are synchronous channels like phone calls that require the other party to be available and willing to talk. There are asynchronous channels like email and social networks that have variable latency but are always available. Except for physical errand involving material goods- grocery shopping, dry cleaning for example or other people- business meetings, haircuts, I can pretty much do any work I want to anywhere I am.

So there’s no context guiding action. In fact complexity in introduced by the sheer number of different ways I can do anything at any time. Want to jot down a note? There’s my pen and notebook. Or a post-it-note. Or Evernote. Evernote on the iPhone, iPad, Mac Book Pro, work Windows XP laptop. Or email to myself.

Its true that one solution would be to impoverish myself by eliminating choices. Do I need the Evernote on iPad option? Do I really need the iPad at all? Maybe I could just do everything on the iPhone.

I think choice is good. I’d rather have options, but find it helpful to take a moment and create what are basically rituals. Conscious, stereotyped behavior that’s consistent and relatively arbitrary just so that I don’t keep making the same decisions over and over again and then spending more time unravelling what I’ve done after the fact.

Ritual is human way to collapse complexity into simpler behavior paths and gain more control over the cognitive environment.

Stacked, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This is a bit of an experiment with Photoshop’s Lighting Effects filter. Vincent Versace uses it extensively to light photographs after the fact. In this image, I was trying to be subtle about making what was relatively flat lighting with nice texture into something that was pretty convincingly sunlit.

Perhaps its a bit too subtle, but it certainly is a believable unreality to my eye.

That blank sheet of paper in front of me is pretty confrontational. It challenges me to decide what to do with it. The camera challenges me to pick it up and point it at something.

True, once I’m looking through the viewfinder, I go into some sort of  “Photographer” mode. My personal identity simplifies down to a guy looking through a little square. All of the circuitry that thinks about lens choice, aperture, light angle, shadow depth all spring into action unbidden.

I even hear Vincent Versace’s voice in my ear murmuring “Own the frame . . . own the frame”.

I capture, move, capture, adjust, scroll through images on the camera’s screen, adjust, capture, move.

There’s a flow where my vision, the set of tools and my environment all meld into a seamless extension of me.

Of course writing this post wasn’t all that different. I came to the text editor with the germ of an idea and soon found myself in a flood of ideas, unaware of the keyboard, word choice or what computer OS I was using. Me integrated into a set of tools interacting with an environment. Here the environment isn’t real at all. Just ASCII strings.

Engaging in all of the complexity of a blank sheet of paper or the unstructured visual environment puts the me that sits in my head “out there”. Words and cameras have that power.

The Internet has the opposite power. Sure I’m in a flow out there when browsing, but it’s a flow that’s not much use that emerges. It’s often a seamless flow, but its not controlled by a creative process, but by a consumptive process. Looking for a stimulus “out there” that will satisfy. A new email, maybe with good news. A post or tweet I agree with, that validates my point of view. News of a long awaited OS update- maybe just rumor of a new piece of gear. Not yet? Cycle out to something else and come back again later. Later? 5 minutes then 10 minutes.

Who’s the actor here? Who’s choosing?

Time for lunch. Where does the day go?

The Golden Hour, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I captured this last night to experiment with the warm and cool light idea. This is the view looking across the street from my house. The sun was down, but the D7000’s ability to capture crisply at ISO 800 plus the 35mm f/1.8 DX prime made this possible.

Perspective Always Helps, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I finally did a first scan through all of the Yellowstone trip photos. Feels good to have an image backlog.

Silo, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Looking at classic color landscape (Galen Rowell, others) there is often a beautiful interplay of warm and cool. Often its the warmth of low angle sun on rock playing against the dark sky. I tend to make the mistake of waiting for warmth in the sky instead of using its coolness as a foil.