October 28, 2009 · 12:13 pm

all good cognitive stuff

Quantised perception, perceptual acceleration (or not) in times of high adrenalin, etc, here. Also, a fact about phantom limb. Maybe the next stage is to induce the phantom limb experience in subjects who haven’t lost anything, thereby enabling them to make personal choices about their neural structures & procedures. I can see this as being part of the industrial process that produced Seria-Mau in Light. It would be another resource for the tailors. (Not that “extrapolations” –ie, rubbishy assumptions–like this are something you necessarily want to parade in the text itself; the author needs to make lots of them, & the story & texture should depend upon them, but the reader should see as few as possible.)

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3 Responses to all good cognitive stuff

  1. Martin M
    October 28, 2009 at 12:48 pm

    This made me think that analysing Body Dysmorphic Disorder might provide hints as to how we’d navigate a different body – and that led me to the web site below.

    In one of those chance perfections, if you had to imagine an inventor of cultivar science, the consultant’s name somehow couldn’t be bettered:

    http://www.btinternet.com/~david.veale/bddinfo.html

  2. Duke of Sussex
    October 28, 2009 at 5:13 pm

    “the reader should see as few as possible”.
    I like this. Authorial sleight of hand allowing readers to fill head space as though they were compensating for missing limbs.

    It is the unsaid that persists and the reason why work like Course of the Heart, Ice Monkey, Incalling and New Rays still reverberate around my skull years after reading them.

    Worlds are built on scant phrases. I still half expect to open a book on English folkore and read about the Pike Boys enacting their tradition in a remote Fenland village.

    I came across a nice piece by Bachelard on the relationship between author and reader where he refers to the reader being the writer;s ghost who is able to participate in the joy of the work’s creation.

  3. Graeme Talboys
    October 29, 2009 at 1:01 pm

    Phantom limbs can play havoc if you’re trying to navigate into orbit without instruments.