nonTROPPO.org

I had never concieved of it, yet with the advent of anæsthesia, there came a resistance to the utility of it for surgical interventions!

Before the advent of anaesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy - a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today.
The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anaesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anaesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations. So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganised resistance.

Utopian surgery? The case against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth

A rather amazing, but i suppose inevitable extension of the use of functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) - for the benefit of consumer analysis and marketing. They are going to use fMRI to analyse how consumers react to products/advertising. I don’t quite know how they will structure their analysis - wow the anterior cingulate has lit up, this product idea is just great! - but the whole idea is somewhat disturbing. What lengths will marketers go to to push their products…

The next time someone is laughing or smiling while talking with you, observe how similarly you react to them. We always tend to laugh or smile as well, often without realising it. Even more subtle is the way our behaviour and social interactions change depending on who we are interacting with. If one tries to conciously control it, it can be very difficult to stop doing without constant self-monitoring. This has recently been tested, by asking people see photos of others faces and to make their own facial expressions while their face muscles were monitored. The subjects were asked to conciously try to make specific faces even if the photo they saw was of an opposite emotion. There was a clear distinction between making ‘same-emotion’ responses (smiling at a smiling man) than ‘reverse-emotion’ (smiling at a frowning man) ones. This suggests we subconciously imitate the ‘other’ in some way. Although it is quite weird to think of, this is a kind of ‘auto-empathy’. What I wonder is if we have the reverse mechanism (I assume we must), to subconciously process when people are not following along with how we are expressing ourselves.

It always amazes me when I take the tube or the bus and when observing people, see how diverse human face and body pattern can be. I love to see the stream of that diversity flooding in and out with every stop, and I sometimes play a game of mixing up people - putting hair-styles of the punk on the old man, or a floral dress on the business executive. I also imagine people with different eye-colour or face structure, using my imagination to reconstruct someones visual appearance. The image you see here is a web version of just such a game. Of course, as a visual neuroscientist, I know how exquisitely sensitive our face perception is. We are also very fast at telling racial face differences. This link is interesting because it plays on such neural mechanisms to create very striking facial montages (although the original portraits are also striking, doubling the effect).

There is a very interesting article in the Guardian today, on a subjective report on remaining conscious while undergoing brain surgery. I have always wanted to do something similar (obviously not because I had Parkinsons though, or epilepsy etc.), after reading on the pioneering work by Penfield where he stimulated the cortex to determine epileptic foci and got subjective reports from patients, I was curious how it feels. Although more of the article is on the build-up to the operation, it is nevertheless thought-provoking…

I was outraged by reading an article by the American Psychological Association on work carried out over neural mechanisms to detect social cheating. In the last three paragraphs it describes work in which a nonliterate group in Ecuador were tested for their ability to detect social cheating. Leda Cosmides, a co-author mentioned:

“They were just as good as detecting cheating as highly educated students in the developed world”
“…people have developed an evolutionary strategy for determining when somebody has violated a tit-for-tat agreement. It appears to be buffered against cultural variation.”

I’ll not question the evolutionary slant absolutely unjustified by the type of study, but focus my outrage on the implicit suggestion that ‘dumb natives’ can perform as well as ‘us’. Why the fuck do you even have to study that? Isn’t it obvious; all humans live in social groups, why should studying renissance art theory make you smarter in dealing with other humans???!!! Maybe it’s just me, but there is an underlying cultural arrogance in the logic behind authoring such research that i find really offensive.

As I’ve discussed with my friend Katharina, sometime the space between objects, and focussing on ‘what is not there’ rather than what is, can greatly aid in an appreciation of ones surroundings. Katharina suggests that it also makes one more ‘creative’. From that perspective then, the recent analysis of a 500 year old Zen garden in Japan (see image above) should come as little surprise. The researchers used a medial axis analysis to determine the structural placement of the rocks from the point where one views the garden, and found that lines of symmetry, medially placed between the stones naturally converged to the viewing zone. Randomly placing the stones did not yield such a symmetry pattern. The pattern resembled a tree reaching out from viewing spot (the red point in the second image), and it is suggested that the mind picks up on such ‘structure’ in the space between the stones. This may be one reason why the garden has such a calming aesthetic. I am somewhat skeptical as to how far one can stretch this type of analysis to the experiential level of Zen mediatation. But nevertheless it is an elegant analysis of the structure in the space that goes someway to explaining its impact on us. This suggests that subconsciously we may focus on the space between objects in this type of environment, which gives up the experiential boost outlined above…