#cognitive maps

[athousandgateaux]

the eradication of generative mechanisms of Black suffering [are not] in the interests of the White political prisoners such as David Gilbert and Judith Clark, Kuwasi Balagoon's codefendants -- their ideological opposition to the court, capitalism, and imperialism not withstanding, because such ideological oppositions mark conflicts within the world rather than an antagonism to the world. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering would mean the end of the world and they would find themselves peering into an abyss (or incomprehensible transition) between epistemes; between, that is, the body of ideas that determine that knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time. In other words, they would find themselves suspended between worlds. This trajectory is too iconoclastic for working class, postcolonial, and/or radical feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead.

Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents” from An Introduction to Afro-Pessimism, pg. 145

[protoslacker]

[I]f everything from weather to sports is laden with violent imagery, perceptions and emotions become needlessly distorted. Political carnage and carnage in the classroom, weaponized songs and weapons of war, snipers on the hockey rink and mass shooters – all blur together across our cognitive maps. There’s a reason why writers, talking heads and politicians deploy warspeak: It commands people’s attention in an increasingly frenzied and fractured media environment.

Robert Myers at The Conversation. The ‘warspeak’ permeating everyday language puts us all in the trenches

[thedarlingandthedirty]

prettywhores >> mental mapping // peculiar portals 

[mergist]

There is no reason to believe that cognitive maps are like iconic maps except, rather than being inscribed in the dirt, or on a rock, or imprinted on paper, they are somehow inscribed in neural tissue. They seem to be more like lists of significant places intertwined with bearings and headings between one place and another. The vital significance of these places is part and parcel of the map; the "map" is not a neutral spatial substrate to which vital significance is later attached. The space of cognitive maps is not merely about physical position; it is about needs and satisfiers, vantage points and opportunities for action.

-William Benzon, Reading Graphs Maps and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti, pg. 57

[anomalousitch]

On smart governance - to read.

[anomalousitch]

Found this jewel of a resource on cognitive and sensory maps. 

[principleofplenitude]

Human beings have long had different ways of navigating. Milner follows the distinction made by the aviator Harry Gatty in Nature Is Your Guide (1958) between ‘home-centred’ and ‘self-centred’ navigation. Using the former, you consider your position in a relation to a single fixed reference point. [...] In a self-centred wayfinding system, ‘we define our position objectively, sometimes with help from tools such as maps or GPS, but rarely by where we are in relation to our homes. Dead reckoning is kept to a minimum. The centre of our world is us.’ (You might have thought that was more subjective than objective, but apparently not.) We also use a ‘local-reference’ system, which ‘defines location in reference to a prominent enviromental feature’, such as a mountain, or the Shard. The Polynesians who populated the remote islands of the Pacific in a great eastward migration across hundreds of miles of open water used a system called etak, which allowed them to navigate according to the positions of islands that they couldn’t see but knew were over the horizon. They kept track of them using a combination of dead reckoning and star positions. In 1948, the psychologist Edward Tolman published an article called ‘Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men’. Watching rats finding their way through a maze, Tolman rejected the strict behaviourist idea that each individual wrong turn was a separate negative stimulus to which the rat responded by not taking it again, and each individual correct turn was a separate positive stimulus to which the rat responded by taking it again, in favour of the idea that the rat was somehow building up in its brain a ‘cognitive map’ of the maze. Tolman distinguished between two kinds of cognitive map: a ‘strip map’ of the correct route through a maze and a ‘comprehensive map’ of the entire maze. If you have only a strip map in your head and stray from the path, you’re instantly lost. And with GPS, Milner writes, ‘the soothing voice of the turn-by-turn directions, guiding us through an unfamiliar environment, is the personification of the strip map.’

“X Marks the Self” from London Review of Books

[superpionono]

Being vs Reacting

Hola Everybody, Though I have known it at an intellectual level, the past election cycle has made me actually integrate the fact that there is no Left — no progressive movement — in the US. I was looking at the calendar and I realized I have just a couple of days and I will completed my commitment to post at least one blog per day for the whole year of 2016. I don’t know if I will continue into…

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