THESIS: late 14c., “unaccented syllable or note,” from L. thesis “unaccented syllable in poetry,” later “stressed part of a metrical foot,” from Gk. thesis “a proposition,” also “downbeat” (in music), originally “a setting down or placing,” from root of tithenai “to place, put, set,” from PIE base *dhe- “to put, to do” (see factitious). Sense in logic of “a proposition, statement to be proved” is first recorded 1570s; that of “dissertation written by a candidate for a university degree” is from 1650s.
I. Thesis Statement
For my thesis experiment I’d like to create a paper (book) sculpture which can mix and play audio in recombinatory ways depending on how one moves the paper. The question I’m approaching with this project is how can I make a book site-specific, where does a book take place? The heart of this question arises from my attachment to books during my childhood when I moved around a lot and when the consistent friends and environments I had were the books I carried with me. Books have always represented an imaginary space and time that I could access from anywhere, and mostly anytime (I used to have a system where I could read while taking a shower). Moreover, the medium itself offered an ability to access narratives both linearly and randomly by simply turning pages, which always gave me an inexplicable sense of pleasure and security.
There are definitely more qualities about books that I have in mind, but for now, suffice to say that I’d like to connect this narrative experience with a specific site: the ocean-beach. (The actual ones I have in mind are not close by so I might have to take a trip or find another option such as a local beach). Sea sounds constitute some of the most visceral experiences I’ve had with the sea and I’d like to connect the book sculpture with the sea, and seashore, by tying page movements with the sea’s sound scape. This relationship offers a way to juxtapose two temporalities and spaces, to be both site-specific and transitional. Eventually, I’d also like to explore a writing aspect. Even simply leaving the pages blank to write on will create an interesting texture and experience. But an avenue to also consider is how the sea could both speak and write to the book by analyzing sea waves and its sound waves and recording it into the book.
II. Process
The aesthetics of this project will depend very much on the materials, and I’m very excited to start working with the following tools and forms:
pop-up books
origami constructions
soft circuit materials such as paper, conductive inks and threads
c) Of course, I’ll be playing with all sorts of different types of paper shapes and experimenting with what I can construct out of different types of paper:
d) I’ll also be experimenting with recordings, both in terms of recording sea sounds as well as what types of interesting imprints we can make on paper. Paper Tattoo
site-specific relationship: how can you make a book site-specific?
obsession with language, writing, paper, and weaving
the sea
For me working an installation is working in relation to a particular place. You’re coming in and you’re in some sense animating the space, and you don’t know what that space or situation will do to you, or vice-versa, what you will do to it. Like you make yourself blank so you can pay attention to what comes up, what it makes you think of, what it makes you feel. All those ways that your skin is an organ, and the membranes are incredibly smart. Immediately you walk through any threshold and… you smell, you feel the temperature and the light and all those things that have enormous influence.
…thinking of the border that’s between the liquidity of the water and the solid ground. And the churning edge that always is and that edges are always conflicted or fraught places. And perhaps the most conflicted and fraught is the one that’s formed by the largest organ of our body, which is our skin and that makes, creates, an interior that’s always in relationship to an exterior. And I think that it’s really out of that border or edge that the work really forms.
I. Empathy and social class: dependency increases empathy
According to Dacher Keltner (Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley) and Michael Kraus (postdoctral fellow in health psychology at UC San Francisco), less wealthy people are more generous, more polite, and respond more contagiously to the emotions of others as opposed to their wealthier counterparts (interview on Forum, KQEDradio, Dec 30, 2010).
In their report, “Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior“, ‘lower class individuals’ demonstrated in four separate studies more prosocial characteristics defined respectively as (1) generous, (2) charitable, (3) trusting, and (4) helpful. In another abstract, “Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy” Keltner and Kraus also reported that compared to ‘upper-class individuals,’ ‘lower-class individuals’ scored higher on empathic accuracy, judging other people’s emotions, and inferring emotions from static images of eye muscle movements. In both reports, the researchers suggested that people from less wealthy background were more aware of their dependency on other people and tended “to explain social events in terms of features of the external environment.” Keltner and Kraus were careful to point out that in reality, the relationship between class and empathy is very complex, and other factors obviously also influence people’s empathic skills. Nonetheless what is fascinating is that Keltner and Krauss also mentioned that when they had individuals in their labs imagine themselves as being from another social economic status (SES), their scores reflected the same test results; that is, people who imagined themselves to be from a lower SES scored higher, by the same proportions, as the scores from people actually in those SES and those who imagined themselves to be from a higher SES scored lower on these tests.
II. Mirror Neurons: to see is to feel
According to Vittorio Gallese, professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and one of the discoverers of mirror neurons, “Our brains, and those of other primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, embodied simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds.” Indeed, as Marco Iacoboni explains in his 2008 Google lecture in Mountain View, CA the brain’s aforementioned functional mechanism hinges on mimicry, which may be the neurological basis of empathy (the ‘experiential insight’ of other minds).
First direct recording of mirror neurons in human brain (4/13/2010)
To summarize, when neurologists were studying the relationship between motor neurons and the physical action of grasping, they found that there was a set of motor neurons that were fired not only when the subject grasped something but also when the subject watched someone else grasp something. This set of neurons, called “mirror neurons,” is arguably a key factor in allowing us to put ourselves in someone else’ shoes and to feel another person’s emotions almost immediately, as Gallese explained:
When I see the facial expression of someone else, and this perception leads me to experience that expression as a particular affective state, I do not accomplish this type of understanding through an argument by analogy. The other’s emotion is constituted, experienced and therefore directly understood by means of an embodied simulation producing a shared body state. It is the activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding.
Outlining some of the neural mechanisms behind an “embodied simulation,” Iacoboni states that mirror neurons are connected to emotional experiences because when mirror neurons are fired, they will also trigger, via the insula region, responses in the limbic system where emotional responses occur. The diagram below models this relationship in a study on the mirror neuron system and affective responses to music:
Thus, the process of understanding another person’s emotions and intentions is not so much based on conscious analysis and deductive reasoning as it is on an automatic simulation of others’ experiences. As Gallese wrote:
I employ the term ‘embodied simulation’ as an automatic, unconscious, and pre-reflexive functional mechanism, whose function is the modeling of objects, agents, and events. Simulation… is therefore not necessarily the result of a willed and conscious cognitive effort, aimed at interpreting the intentions hidden in the overt behavior of others, but rather a basic functional mechanism of our brain.
Even without going into the question of emotions and empathy, studies into mirror neurons point to a neurological infrastructure that allows us to ‘feel’ the physical pain of another. As neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran describes in this brief TED talk below, when our mirror neurons fire upon seeing another person getting stabbed in the arm, the only reason why we don’t actually experience the pain of getting stabbed is because there are pain receptors in the skin that signal to the brain that we are not getting stabbed.
However, if we prevent the skin’s pain receptors from telling the brain “not to feel pain” (using some sort of anesthetization procedure), the observer will actually feel the pain of being stabbed from watching someone else being stabbed. Thus, “you’ve dissolved the barrier between self and other” which is why Ramachandran calls mirror neurons the “Gandhi neurons”:
Mirror neurons, states Iacoboni, can be bio-markers of sociability, as studies with children have demonstrated. In testing for interpersonal competence and emphatic concern, brain scans of mirror neuron areas showed that, whether observing or imitating, mirror neuron activation correlated with these areas of social competence. There have also been extensive studies into the relationship between autism and mirror neurons, as well as the function of mirror neurons in decreasing pain in phantom limbs. And while the evidence is still inconclusive as to the specific role that the mirror neuron system plays in empathy, as Jean Decety from the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago recently pointed out, neuroscientists such as Gallese, Iacoboni, and Ramanchandran, make a strong case for understanding empathy as a neurological function and this understanding in turn offers a paradigm shift in understanding cognition itself as immediate and intuitive. As Gallese puts it: “The shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of others, by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional attunement. Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’ intentions into the observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality of familiarity we entertain with other individuals. This is what ‘being empathic’ is about.”
III. Oxytocin
Last year, an article by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative reported that the neuropeptide, oxytocin, may activate the mirror neuron system. As with mirror neurons, research into the relationship between oxytocin levels and autism demonstrated that people with autism generally produced lower levels of oxytocin, and when given the oxytocin nasal spray, autistic patients seemed to be more receptive and open in social interactions. But these studies are not yet conclusive and the long-term side effects of such oxytocin treatments (which were given to children as young as two years of age) are unknown. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any other reports or abstracts detailing the connection between mirror neurons and oxytocin; however, oxytocin seems to add an interesting piece of the puzzle for understanding how empathy might work on a physiological level.
Oxytocin Diagram (Ink on paper Apr 2006 68cm x 45cm) In the Oxytocin Drawings people are positioned to represent the chemical structure of an Oxytocin Molecule.
Oxytocin, secreted by the pituitary gland and regulated by the hypothalamus, is not stored in the body but only produced/released by the brain only when you ‘need it’ and has long been associated with reproduction: it is well-documented that females produce oxytocin during labour and when they’re breast-feeding and both sexes produce oxytocin during sex. It has been found to be produced when people are watching emotional movies, when making eye contact, when hugging or being touched, and during rituals such as weddings (where the bride has the highest amount of oxytocin, then her mother, and then in decreasing order relative to the closeness to the bride and groom). In general, studies over the last ten years have shown that oxytocin levels correspond to the levels of trust and generosity that people show to strangers in various ways.
For example, in experiments testing the effects of oxytocin on people’s performances in a “trust game” (created in the mid-90s by three experimental economists), Paul J. Zak, professor of economics and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, found in 2007 that:
a) people’s brains released more oxytocin when other people showed them trust
b) people with higher levels of oxytocin reciprocated trust
c) artificially increasing levels of oxytocin in people’s brains increased their trust and generosity
The first two outcomes suggested that oxytocin made people more likely to interact and trust strangers, and numerous studies since then have corroborated this apparent relationship. The third point was tested using nasal spray doses of oxytocin and the results appeared even more dramatic: the subjects who received a dose of oxytocin gave 17% more money than their placebo counterparts and twice as many oxytocin subjects as placebo subjects gave up all their money. Although there were some oxytocin subjects who did not exhibit a high degree of trust, these and other experiments indicate a correspondence between oxytocin and openness towards strangers and there is even some suggestion that engaging with social network sites like Facebook and Twitter also increases levels of oxytocin in the brain.
Interestingly enough, since I first started looking into oxytocin, new reports have been published indicating that this trust is more discriminating than previously assumed. Oxytocin may also incline people to favor those they identify with in a tribal way—that is, with those within their perceived social cliques or racial groups. In various double-blind tests (where neither patients nor doctors knew who was given oxytocin and who was given a placebo), Carsten de Dreu, from the University of Amsterdam, found that oxytocin strengthens our tendencies to identify and dehumanize “outsiders” and that while it does increase trust and cooperation within communities, it also enhances natural biases and prejudices against those perceived to be outside that community. According to a recent NYTimes report on these findings, Bruno B. Averbeck, an expert on the brain’s emotional processes at the National Institute of Mental Health, stated that “it’s really surprising to me that this neurotransmitter can so specifically affect these social behaviors” as found in Dreu’s experiments, but that it was also important to keep in mind that the conscious mind can also override the emotional responses encouraged by oxytocin.
On the other hand, as the Handbook of Adult Resilience (John W. Reich, Alex J. Zautra, John Stuart Hall, Guilford Press, 2010) noted, oxytocin also seems to help the conscious mind by “…facilitat[ing] an indivdiual’s ability to infer the mental states of others” (48). Moreover, it seems to help people deal with stress better:
In humans, it appears that the combination of social support and oxytocin is most effective in reducing anxiety and HPA reactivity in response to psychosocial stress. Thus, in an experimental study by Heinrichs, Baumgartner, Kirschbaum, and Ehlert (2003) participants who received both social support and oxytocin had lower levels of cortisol, and reported greater calmness and lower anxiety during the Trier Social Stress Test than the placebo group, with and without social support, and the oxytocin-only group. (46)
According to recent studies by Professors Sarina Rodrigues (Oregan State University) and Laura Saslow (UC Berkeley), oxytocin does indeed relate to stress reactivity (i.e. it seems to help reduce stress) and it even seems to be linked to a person’s ability to be more empathetically intelligent at a genetic level. To be specific, Rodrigues and Saslow found that of the three combinations of the genetic variation of oxytocin receptors (labeled as AA, AG, and GG), one variation (GG) corresponded to higher abilities in emotional processing and other-oriented behavior. In stress reactivity tests involving white noise and countdowns, they found that women were overall more sensitive but that women and men with the GG variation had lower increases in heart rate. And in empathy tests of “reading the mind in eyes” which measures the ability to infer emotional states by eyes, women did better than men and both genders with the GG genetic variation were 22.7% less likely to make mistakes on the empathy test. Like Averbeck, Rodrigues emphasized that just because someone does or does not have the GG genetic variation does not necessarily mean they are more or less empathetic. Nonetheless, their findings suggest that there are genetic predispositions toward empathy.
