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The Gamma Buzz: Gluing by Oscillations in the Waking Brain

Buzsáki György

in Rhythms of the Brain

The most characteristic field pattern of the waking, activated neocortex is gamma oscillation. Its generation depends on the time decay of GABAA-receptor-mediated Laurent inhibition and/or shunting. ... More

The most characteristic field pattern of the waking, activated neocortex is gamma oscillation. Its generation depends on the time decay of GABAA-receptor-mediated Laurent inhibition and/or shunting. These receptors are uniformly distributed in the cerebral cortex and other brain regions. Because inhibitory postsynaptic potentials mediated by these neurons are reliable, they provide a more efficient means for timing than excitatory postsynaptic potentials. Due to the localized axon arbors of basket and chandelier cells and the local gap junctions, gamma oscillations in the cortex are often confined to a small piece of tissue. Coupling of distant gamma oscillators requires fast-conducting conduits, provided by the widespread axon collaterals of long-range interneurons and possibly by the long axons of some pyramidal cells. The physiological importance of the gamma rhythm is supported by the observation that neuronal assemblies in the waking brain self-organize themselves into temporal packages of 15 to 30 milliseconds.Less

Communication for Promoting Connections

Marina Umaschi Bers

in Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground

With the advances of Web 2.0 and social media applications, it becomes evident that while new technologies today are said to isolate youth, they also provide opportunities for them to communicate and ... More

With the advances of Web 2.0 and social media applications, it becomes evident that while new technologies today are said to isolate youth, they also provide opportunities for them to communicate and form new types of connections. This chapter will explore the range of relationships established and maintained by the use of technology. The media has recently devoted a great deal of effort into raising awareness of cyberbullying and other dangers associated with communicating online. Allowing a child to socialize using Facebook, Virtual Worlds, or online gaming is certainly a major risk. However, the question is whether or not the risk is worthwhile. There are ways to restrict what can be said online that can protect children, but this chapters explores ways for technologies to effectively embrace open communication that facilitates interaction, promotes language development, and strengthens connections between people.Less

“Spaces of Time through Times of Space”: Haunting the “Wandering Rocks”

Luke Gibbons

in Joyce'S Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory

The importance of simultaneity in literary modernism is often taken to represent the triumph of space over time, but in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Ulysses, Joyce subjects synchronicity itself ... More

The importance of simultaneity in literary modernism is often taken to represent the triumph of space over time, but in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Ulysses, Joyce subjects synchronicity itself to raids from uneven temporalities. Standard Time was introduced to facilitate global communications, transport, and trade under modernity, but in colonial Ireland, Greenwich Mean Time was a contested zone. This lent itself to montage effects closer to the palimpsest than to the transverse time of the present. The past constantly intrudes on the present in a manner that makes it unclear whether these are flashbacks or spectral irruptions of the past into the present. Though the flashback is pre-eminently a modernist device, its introduction in cinema and fiction coincided with its emergence as a defining attribute of trauma and shell-shock in the aftermath of World War I. Space and time are themselves out of joint due to the violent upheavals of modernity in early-twentieth-century Ireland.Less

Inviting Bodies

Becky Thompson

in Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice

What might a classroom look like where students are invited to bring their minds, bodies, and spirits? How might learning be enhanced with this invitation? This chapter chronicles how Thompson was ... More

What might a classroom look like where students are invited to bring their minds, bodies, and spirits? How might learning be enhanced with this invitation? This chapter chronicles how Thompson was first invited fully into a classroom as a graduate student by the marvelous mentoring of a professor who taught a legendary course at Brandeis University, “Birth and Death.” Maurice Stein modeled a way to keep intimacy, intensity, and intellectual depth in the classroom while teaching about the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear war, attempted genocide of Indigenous people, and child abuse by incorporating meditation, paired listening, and collaborative teaching. After graduate school, Thompson stumbled through creating syllabi and pedagogy that invited students into the classroom, realizing that liberatory teaching requires understanding what hinders embodiment—how many of us ransom off our body parts below the neck on our way to becoming academics. Finding ourselves again is key to creating intellectually rigorous classroom environments. Thompson explores how she turned students away from their questioning spirits, and what healing she needed to do to change that. Less

Impact of Statehood on the Hebrew Literary Imagination: Haim Hazaz and the Zionist Narrative

Arnold J. Band

in Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America

This chapter explores how Hebrew writers coped with Israel's establishment through an analysis of Haim Hazaz, one of the most celebrated writers of Modern Hebrew, who, born in Eastern Europe in 1898, ... More

This chapter explores how Hebrew writers coped with Israel's establishment through an analysis of Haim Hazaz, one of the most celebrated writers of Modern Hebrew, who, born in Eastern Europe in 1898, experienced pogroms and the Russian Revolution and spent eight years in Paris before moving to Palestine in 1931. Like many of his generation, he viewed art as an instrument for furthering national ends. Hazaz's characters are often framed against the historic events that he himself experienced, including the Russian Revolution, the struggle for the state, the ingathering of exiles, and settlement of the land. The chapter reveals that Hazaz was in transition between the traditional rhetoric of his generation, which tended to the messianic, and the mundane realities of life in a Jewish state.Less

The Thief Who Came to Dinner

Nick Wilson

in The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age

The title of this chapter alludes to the sense in which Early Music started out as a largely unwelcome visitor by the professional establishment;but over the years it has increasingly become an ... More

The title of this chapter alludes to the sense in which Early Music started out as a largely unwelcome visitor by the professional establishment;but over the years it has increasingly become an integral, even much-loved part of the classical music field. At issue is the ‘mainstreaming’ of Early Music. The chapter considers the extent to which Early Music has ceded ground to the classical music mainstream. A balance sheet of the early music movement is presented. This works through seven key areas where transformation has taken place: legitimacy; repertoire; training; recordings; authenticity; leadership; and integration. The chapter draws on survey evidence from the most comprehensive study of early music performers and instrument-makers (2003) so far carried out. After weighing up all the evidence the chapter concludes that there has been movement on both sides (i.e. symmetrical syncretism), but Early Music’s journey of research and experimentation is far from over.Less

Genres of Blur

Martin Jay

in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

In an influential essay of 1983, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz exhorted social scientists to blur genres and overcome the boundaries of disciplinary isolation. This essay undertakes an ... More

In an influential essay of 1983, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz exhorted social scientists to blur genres and overcome the boundaries of disciplinary isolation. This essay undertakes an examination of the ways in which literal visual blurring occurs – by focal discordances, the inability of the eye to register accelerated speed, or the intersection of two visual orders, as in the phenomenon of anamorphosis – and examines their implications for the ways in which disciplines can interact. Rather than implying seamless integration, the results suggest that unreconciled, albeit productive tensions can arise from the attempt to overcome boundaries in the name of interdisciplinary fusion. Different focal points or non-synchronous narratives, as well as the overlapping of different perspectival vantage points, resist the smoothing over of real contradictions through methodological harmonization or what Edward O. Wilson called ‘consilience’.”Less

Verbal-Visual Style and Words Visualised

Jennifer O'Meara

in Engaging Dialogue: Cinematic Verbalism in American Independent Cinema

This chapter examines the relationship between dialogue and what is simultaneously shown on screen, in order to develop an understanding of verbal-visual style in contemporary indie cinema. In ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between dialogue and what is simultaneously shown on screen, in order to develop an understanding of verbal-visual style in contemporary indie cinema. In considering what makes certain combinations of words and images jarring or pleasurable for audiences, the chapter includes analysis of: textual speech; voice-over as a double-layered structure; and textual signposts. The chapter also examines words that are visualised, as with intertitles and text that is embedded in the mise-en-scene. It finds that the six writer-directors considered ‘cinematic verbalists’ can substitute verbal interest for visual interest, or for visual interest that depends on the verbal for its impact. The chapter charts the relationships between visual and verbal synchronicity, as well as between observational styles of viewing and audiences being positioned as eavesdroppers: when they must piece together verbal information.Less

Modernity and the Dreaming

Gananath Obeyesekere

in The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience

This chapter focuses on Western dreaming from the early nineteenth century to our own times. It examines the somewhat discredited secularization thesis originally enunciated by Max Weber, who posited ... More

This chapter focuses on Western dreaming from the early nineteenth century to our own times. It examines the somewhat discredited secularization thesis originally enunciated by Max Weber, who posited the idea that, with the development of rationality in the West, there is a concomitant erosion of the worlds of enchantment, the magical garden cultivated by many a traditional society. It then discusses the “first topography” of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, especially the distinction he made between the dream as dreamt, or its manifest content, and the latent content, which reveals the various elements from the past that help to form the manifest dream; Jung's controversial idea of “synchronicity,” the theoretical bridge connecting dreams and oneiromancy; and Jung's psychosis during the period 1914 to 1916.Less

The Synchronicity Confusion

in The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations

This chapter, which analyzes the concept of synchronicity, or acausal meaningful coincidence, originally introduced by Carl Jung, shows that it is incorrect to claim that synchronicity is a principle ... More

This chapter, which analyzes the concept of synchronicity, or acausal meaningful coincidence, originally introduced by Carl Jung, shows that it is incorrect to claim that synchronicity is a principle in nature which organizes events into meaningful clusters. It proposes that, if genuinely nonrandom meaningful coincidences occur, this would be best explained in terms of a refined, extensive and potentially very intimidating form of large-scale psychokinesis.Less

American Synchronicity: Turn-of-the-Century Tower Clocks, Street Clocks, and Time Balls

Alexis McCrossen

in Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life

This chapter discusses how the public adapted to the use of synchronized public clocks in telling time. After the adoption of national standard time, Americans living in towns and cities began to ... More

This chapter discusses how the public adapted to the use of synchronized public clocks in telling time. After the adoption of national standard time, Americans living in towns and cities began to rely on public clocks for a sense of synchronicity, which was called the “perfect accord.” Public clocks not only inspired devotion among citizens, but also gave rise to suspicion. This suspicion was rooted in the incidents of public clocks being unsynchronized, resulting in confusion about which clock should be followed. Amidst the confusion, railroad clocks garnered more authority as they adopted standard time for the train schedules. This practice led citizens to move toward the modern time discipline.Less

The Yijing’s Journey to the West

Geoffrey Redmond and Tze-ki Hon

in Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes)

The French Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730) was the first Westerner to seriously engage with the Chinese Book of Changes. He was also the first to recognize the similarity of the hexagram ... More

The French Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730) was the first Westerner to seriously engage with the Chinese Book of Changes. He was also the first to recognize the similarity of the hexagram arrays of Shao Yong to the system of binary mathematics discovered by his friend, Gottfried Leibniz. Bouvet interpreted the Yijing in terms of “figurism,” the doctrine that some non-Christian religions foreshadowed the truths of Christianity. Recently the Yijing has been taken as prefiguring modern modes of thought such as depth psychology, the DNA double helix, quantum physics, and computer science. These have no real precedent in Chinese tradition. Of more substance is what has become the dominant contemporary paradigm for understanding the Yijing—that of Carl Jung who interpreted it in terms of the unconscious and his concept of “synchronicity.” During the 1960s the Yijing became a hippie and New Age classic, part of a movement to explore the spirituality of non-Western cultures. Esoteric arts, such as divination, attracted considerable interest among those who regarded scientific thinking as limiting. Since the appearance of a highly readable English translation—that of Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes (Princeton University Press, one volume, 2nd edition, 1961)—the Yijing has become a classic of world literature.Less

Introduction

Holly Rogers

in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film

The Introduction situates the subsequent chapters within the wider discourses on music and the moving image, and on experimental film. It identifies several threads that run through the book, most of ... More

The Introduction situates the subsequent chapters within the wider discourses on music and the moving image, and on experimental film. It identifies several threads that run through the book, most of which concern the identification of a critical space that opens up between previously constructed binaries when audiovisuality is treated experimentally: between music and noise, active and passive consumption, popular and avant-garde practices and audiovisual synchronicity and dissonance. Despite the divergent practices of experimental film’s many histories, these threads enable the identification of persistent and common forms of sonic innovation.Less

Audiovisual Dissonance in Found-Footage Film

Holly Rogers

in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film

Drawing on ideas of the Surrealist automatic and filmic détournement, artists working with found footage are able to construct new meanings and aesthetics by deconstructing completed audiovisual ... More

Drawing on ideas of the Surrealist automatic and filmic détournement, artists working with found footage are able to construct new meanings and aesthetics by deconstructing completed audiovisual texts. When original music is retained, or replaced by a new sonic collage, the disjointed sonic flow problematises and enhances the collage aesthetic by extending the possibilities for juxtaposition not only in a linear fashion, but also in a vertical, audiovisual direction, a process that highlights the materiality and artifice of the new combination of images. Here, pre-used footage can be collaged in such a way as to bring to the fore the conventions of mainstream cinematography and the languages of mass media. The result is not audiovisual synchronicity, but rather collision, or dissonance. Through the close reading of several found-footage films, this chapter traces the evolution of an activated form of audiovisual consumption that arises from a process of alienated listening.Less

Accelerators

G. Barr, R. Devenish, R. Walczak, and T. Weidberg

in Particle Physics in the LHC Era

This chapter gives an introduction to accelerator physics, concentrating on synchrotrons. Accelerating cavities for standing and travelling radiofrequency (RF) waves, the synchronicity requirement, ... More

This chapter gives an introduction to accelerator physics, concentrating on synchrotrons. Accelerating cavities for standing and travelling radiofrequency (RF) waves, the synchronicity requirement, and the beam bunch structure are explained, as well as the energy loss due to synchrotron radiation. The beam emittance and the amplitude β‎ function are introduced to describe the ensemble of beam trajectories. Dipole and quadrupole magnets, which act as the most important elements of so-called beam optics, are described. The LHC superconducting dipole magnets are described in some detail as an example. Colliders and fixed-target accelerators are then compared in terms of the centre-of-mass energy and the luminosity. As an important example, antiproton–proton colliders, including the use of stochastic cooling, are described and the chapter concludes with the outlook for accelerator developments in future decades.Less