The Muse in the Machine |
| the muse in the machine, computerizing the poetry of
human thought by david gelernter (1995). (his first book after having
the unabomber blew his hands off.) p. 14 "Let's invent something called a person's mental focus." It correlates with current position on the mental spectrum. One end of the spectrum corresponds to maximum mental focus, and the other end to minimum. As we twiddle the know from the high analytical end to the low metaphoric side, we are gradually turning mental focus lower. Many separate cognitive events accompany the move down-spectrum, ranging from a loss of control over the thought-stream to an increased propensity to have creative insights and to encounter vivid imaginings or even hallucinations, a relaxation of logic, a loss of "goal directedness: and all directedness, and the emotion as the main glue of thought. But it is essential to grasp that this is no mere jumble of processes that just happen (allegedly) to be correlated. These are all consequences of one underlying event. They are consequences of the relaxation or lowering or widening of the crucial property I have called mental focus. Lowering mental focus causes all of these processes to occur. summary of next two pages. lower focus leads to creativity - restructuring things, making analogies, "chaining"…then to a "creative state" where inspiration just happens, the mind creating its own agenda, involuntary memories, hallucination…and finally, to sleep. higher focus leads to the familiar territory of logic, analysis, and problem-solving. low focus = broad, inclusive; high focus = narrow, penetrating. p. 76 High-focus thought centers on two related mental acts: honing in, and suppressing individual idiosyncrasies in favor of common features. Honing in, on some aspect of your thoughts or of the world before you, has the side-effect of causing you to disregard context and ambiance. Sandwiching memories together in such a way that only the common features emerge suppresses, in the same sense, the accidents of detail and tone that set individuals apart. High-focus thinking is abstract and numb. But it is rational, powerful, and leaves the thinker firmly in control. Making high-focus thought the norm, setting it at the center of our cognitive universe, is the supreme and defining achievement of the modern mind. At low focus, memories that underlie two adjacent thoughts in a train might be completely different in every detail except that, for whatever reason - maybe, for a deep and evocative reason - they made you feel the same way when you originally experienced them. Two memories that seem completely different might nonetheless evoke the same emotion. p 149 The spectrum idea puts emotion at the center of the cognitive universe. creativity. spirituality. out of control. |
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