This is a fantasic conversation, I am sorry that I missed the onset. I am
very interested in this study, as it relates to my own study in art and
cognitive development. If anyone has any further reading on this, please
include the links. I would appreciate that.
Regards -
Deborah
~~~~~~~
Christopher,
This did catch my eye in the earlier flurry and I saved it to respond
after some thought even though it didn't lead in a productive direction..
psyart is clearly a goldmine of information here, albeit pretty
psychoanalytic and cognitive. there is also lit-med. Your comment on
neuroaesthetics is intriguing. There was a lengthy discussion on poetics a
month or so back on neuropoetry after someone mentioned she is working on a
thesis on the topic.
Psychologically speaking I think Pennebaker is moving in the direction of
developing programs for computer analysis of speech patterns.rather than any
of the subjects he touches on and I would think, since he is not a clinician
he would agree that he does no more than touch on these subjects. I would
tend to see computer analysis of speech patterns as one test in a battery of
twn or so tests given in an assessment as contrary to assumptions
psychologists do see people as complex and not measured in any way by one
test.
tom bell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 1:33 PM
Subject: Poets & Researchers
> Philip's original reference to 'the treatments of poetry in current
> psychological, psychiatric and cognitive studies' struck me as widely
drawn.
> Too much so, perhaps, to be helpful.
>
> That said, what's loosely termed 'cognitive studies' (or, say,
> 'neuroaesthetics', yet another fashionable term) interests me. And rather
> than Big Theory, pace Chris Jones and the various Great French Thinkers,
> it's the smaller practical work in developing principled, evidence based,
> disprovable hypotheses as to how we respond to what's on the page and/or
in
> the ear and how we appear to conceptualise that seems to me most
> provocative.
>
> Work on reading and how comprehension can be disrupted and altered by
visual
> ordering, for example: attention shift theories, and the link between
> attentional anticipation and semantic anticipation in processing written
> text; the possible implications of things like the Stroop effect (not
> difficult to see how this was played with by, say, Jasper Johns, BTW; the
> interesting question is _why_); the effect of repetition, partial
homophony
> etc on semantic priming, and so on and so forth.
>
> Work on rhythm, to take another example, including that of the Indiana
group
> on (self) entrainment and interference patterns in how we generate and
> respond to rhythm.
>
> The various strands of cognitive metaphor theory, as to how we may (or
may
> not) conceptualise our worlds with (it is hypothesised) measurably
different
> processing speeds are probably too familiar to need elaborating here.
>
> PsyArt is an online journal with a psychological perspective. However, it
> does contain some more 'cognitive' material:
> http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/, in case this should be of
interest.
>
> As to the tenor of recent discussions, I have some sympathy with Tom's
> expressed disappointment. However, this from one of Robin's posts caught
my
> eye:
> <snip>
> It is (I assume) pretty much of a truism that something [sociologically]
> outre occurred with Lowell / Berryman / Jarrell / Schwartz, and in the
next
> generation, Plath and Sexton -- two generations, all American, all
suicidal,
> most friends and some taught by the others.
> <snip>
>
> Now James Pennebaker's checking of pronouns seems to me not hugely
different
> from how one might approach linguistic corpora in general: one must start
> somewhere, after all. And I don't think, BTW, that there are different
sorts
> of 'I' in this context. As a particular sort of indexical, what 'I' is
and
> how it functions seems to me to differ very little (if at all) from the
role
> of the impersonal third person pronoun in a donkey sentence. If there are
> problems (and there are) they are cognitive rather than linguistic.
>
> That said, JP's taxonomy (more 'I's; more dodgy poets, as it were) seems
a
> matter of phenetics rather than (as Robin hints at above) something more
> phylogenetic. But looking at how texts branch off from one another just
as
> poets (like everyone else) grow through affiliation might be the point at
> which one or other of the various flavours of reader response theory and
> Bruner's narrative psychology start to come together. (The point of
greatest
> interest is always just out of sight.)
>
> And, in fact, how classification affects what you think you may have
found
> seems to me a problem in all these areas. There's a paper by Fauconnier &
> Turner which discusses *digging one's own grave* as an example of a
blended
> space in which the resulting metaphor is emergent. What they don't
consider
> (or consider insufficiently, to my mind) is the possibility that digging
> one's own grave was (literally) all too possible in professions such as
> mining.
>
> At which point I shall stop.
>
> CW
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