Re-Enter Billy Elliot Stage Left, Exit Britain Stage Right

Meta-effectiveness, or developing oneself with practical and factual knowledge resources, is challenging enough. (Witness Cognitive Productivity.) But (how) can we, and should we develop ourselves with the art of others? Continue reading Re-Enter Billy Elliot Stage Left, Exit Britain Stage Right

Mata Hari’s Emotions

According to Michel Aubé, if motivation involves managing resources, then emotion, a subset of motivation, involves managing commitments (human resources). Combine this idea with the fact that emotional episodes involve perturbance, where a cluster of affectively charged mental content, or motivators, tend to disrupt and maintain attention. Continue reading Mata Hari’s Emotions

Report on Book Report on Kurt Palka (The Piano Maker, et al.): What if a Great Novel is Worth Re-reading?

I’ve been responding deeply enough to art since I launched CogZest to own up to the fact “it” has become a project of mine, beyond the one I committed to from the outset of CogZest, i.e., The Zest of Brel. My long term plan includes editing, publishing and contributing to a book provisionally called Cognitive Responses to Art. However, I’ve also made “it” a major focus of Discontinuities.
Continue reading Report on Book Report on Kurt Palka (The Piano Maker, et al.): What if a Great Novel is Worth Re-reading?

Why Is A Christmas Story — The Musical — So Hilarious? Inside Jokes, The Mating Mind and Mental Spaces We’d Rather Not Explore

“You don’t mean to say that this charming, clever young lady has been so foolish as to accept you?”
Lord Caversham to Lord Goring in Oscar Wilde’s, An Ideal Husband

“Evolution is an examination with two papers. To succeed demands a pass in both.”
Steve Jones, Darwin’s Ghost (p. 76)

The Arts Club of Vancouver’s performance of A Christmas Story—The Musical had me in stiches. But why?

A Christmas Story—The Musical
Continue reading Why Is A Christmas Story — The Musical — So Hilarious? Inside Jokes, The Mating Mind and Mental Spaces We’d Rather Not Explore

Lovers, Intellectual Loneliness, and an Enigma

CogZest is for and about beautiful, passionate minds. So, it’s natural for me to respond to The Imitation Game.

The film received mixed reviews. Many of those knowledgeable about Turing and the Enigma project were disappointed by the film’s lack of fidelity, particularly given how fascinating these subjects are in reality. I did not expect to see a documentary, nor something outside Hollywood’s style, so I wasn’t disappointed. I’ve used the divertissement’s themes as a cognitive springboard rather than a trampoline to which I frequently return for inspiration, let alone for factual information.

It being Valentine’s day (and given that I am nursing an R&D project dealing with romantic love), it seems appropriate to launch into the theme of intellectual loneliness, companionship and romantic love, to which The Imitation Game alluded.

Continue reading Lovers, Intellectual Loneliness, and an Enigma

Meta-painting & Science of the Human Mind: An Epistolary Response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements

Preface

This epistolary essay was written in 2014 (with some later updates) as a response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements: Relation, Perception and Meaning painting exhibition of Sept. 2014 in New Westminster. I blogged about the exhibition prior to writing this essay.

In 2014, Lam Wong’s 21 Elements: Relation, Perception and Meaning book was published. That book contains photos of all the paintings in his exhibition. A chapter of 21 Elements, written by Lam, which includes pictures of several of the paintings from his book, are available in this PDF.

Photos of the paintings from 21 Elements are available on Lam’s website.

A version of the essay below appears in the second edition of 21 Elements, published in 2022. That’s a limited edition print.

A version of the essay below, interleaved with photos of the paintings, will appear in Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind. The letter reflects many of the themes of Discontinuities, including, of course, affective epistolary communication.

Contents

  • Attentively developing expertise through time
  • N-ary relations in art and meta machinery
  • Perception: The construction of conjectures
  • Rational faith and love in the dark
  • Language of cognitive-affective mind
  • Perturbance: Loss of control of mental processing of motivators
  • Attachment, acceptance, love and happiness
  • Universality of affect
  • Using visual art to improve ourselves
  • Consciousness, the great integrator (or integration)
  • To the tune of Kevin Shield’s Goodbye

Meta-painting & Science of the Human Mind: An Epistolary Response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements

Shadows of shadows passing. It is now 1831, and as always I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential. Since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception, music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, colour becomes pallor, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless. Edgar Allan Poe

Dear ______,

I had the pleasure of attending, on several occasions, Lam Wong’s 21 Elements: Relation, Perception and Meaning exhibition and of discussing his art with him. As a result, I am moved to share my reflections with you.

Continue reading Meta-painting & Science of the Human Mind: An Epistolary Response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements

University Teaching Requires Lovingly Opposing the Student: Claude Lamontagne’s Rationalist Reflexions

I have uploaded a timeless address given by Claude Lamontagne,  Professor of Psychology, on the occasion of him receiving the 2001 University of Ottawa Teaching Award.

I’ve uploaded this address this evening in order to share the gem, and so that I can link to it in an essay I am writing on Lam Wong’s recent 21 Elements exhibition of paintings on “Relation, Perception and Meaning”. (The essay will be in the next edition of Wong’s book, 21 Elements.) It is fitting that Lamontagne’s paper should itself be so beautifully artistic!   Professor of Psychology, on the occasion of him receiving the 2001 University of Ottawa Teaching Award.

Lamontagne’s address is “University Teaching: A critical Rationalist’s Reflexions”.

Continue reading University Teaching Requires Lovingly Opposing the Student: Claude Lamontagne’s Rationalist Reflexions

Exhibition of Lam Wong’s Paintings on Relation, Perception and Meaning (Sept. 2- 27, 2014, New Westminster)

If you love visual art and are around Metro-Vancouver this month, then consider attending the exhibition of Lam Wong’s paintings on “Relation, perception and meaning”. It runs from Sept 2 to Sept 27 at the Arts Council Gallery of New Westminster in Queen’s Park (closed Mondays).

You can tell from the title of this exhibition that Lam Wong’s interests overlap with those of cognitive scientists.

Continue reading Exhibition of Lam Wong’s Paintings on Relation, Perception and Meaning (Sept. 2- 27, 2014, New Westminster)