March « 2010 « ontheimage.com

We take visual imagination for granted. But the blank inner world of a patient called MX demonstrates the rich neural processes needed to create the images in our heads.

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From Carl Zimmer at Discover…

One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind.

The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read.

Then these images all vanished. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a “reverberation” in his head and a tingling in his left arm. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness. More…

flinching

In the viral video realm, amateur Iraq war footage ranks just behind pornography, celebrities’ drunken exploits, and shark attacks. Do these videos represent what Sontag called our “right to view,” or are they a porn medium made from leftovers of a world filming its self-destruction?

From Nicholas Sautin at Guernica…

From two hundred yards, a handheld digital camera tracks a Humvee down a desolate road. Voices, in Arabic: “Keep the camera on it!” “Allahu akbar.” Most of the audience at last year’s MoMA screening of Mauro Andrizzi’s documentary Iraqi Short Films was probably thinking what I was. It was hardly surprising that many of them got up to leave before the conclusion of the film. I am going to watch these American soldiers die. The Humvee and the soldiers trundle along, perfectly in the center of the crosshairs of the camera. Then, unceremoniously, the Humvee explodes into a ball of flame. There is an audible gasp from the person sitting behind me. A few seconds later—and here is where many in the audience got up to leave—a second vehicle inches its way, in excruciating real time, to the crash site before also bursting into flame. More…

Monthly Archive for March, 2010

The Brain: Look Deep Into the Mind’s Eye

We take visual imagination for granted. But the blank inner world of a patient called MX demonstrates the rich neural processes needed to create the images in our heads.

The Pleasure of Flinching

In the viral video realm, amateur Iraq war footage ranks just behind pornography, celebrities’ drunken exploits, and shark attacks. Do these videos represent what Sontag called our “right to view,” or are they a porn medium made from leftovers of a world filming its self-destruction?