Neural Ghosts and The Focus of At­ten­tion

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• NeuroArts

• Neural Ghosts and The Focus of At­ten­tion

• Jane Grant

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: NeuroArts

  Con­scious­ness as at­ten­tion to mem­ory is a term that neu­ro­sci­en­tist Eu­gene Izhike­vich uses to de­scribe a phe­nom­e­non in which the cor­tex re-lives or re-vis­its a spe­cific pat­tern of neural ac­tiv­ity in the ab­sence of sen­sory in­for­ma­tion. The model brain or cor­tex, de­prived of stim­u­la­tion, jour­neys around its own tem­po­ral ar­chi­tec­tures con­jur­ing past ‘ex­pe­ri­ences’ or ‘mem­o­ries’, pulling them into the pre­sent. Ev­i­dence that these path­ways con­tinue to be re-vis­ited once stim­u­la­tion oc­curs again is com­pelling. Re­fer­ring to re­cent re­search in de­vel­op­ing the sonic art­work Ghost, and two ear­lier works: Thresh­old and The Frag­mented Or­ches­tra, all of which have at their core the Spike Tim­ing De­pen­dant Plas­tic­ity model of Eu­gene Izhike­vich, I will dis­cuss the phe­nom­ena of ‘sonic ghosts’ a term I have used to de­scribe the buffer­ing up of the neural past with the neural pre­sent.

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Category:

• Panel