Her "extended mind" includes: 1. a tote bag full of various notes and maps, and 2. her sister Aline (whose "account of her life [she trusts] as strongly as she used to trust her own memory"). Johnson has a terrible impairment, but reading about her impairments, we see things that are true about ourselves. We may feel that our mind is entirely inside our heads, but the people and things that surround us function enmeshed with our memory. I was especially struck by this paragraph:
Johnson was wearing a magenta turtleneck with black sweatpants and plastic Mardi Gras necklaces. (An amnesiac cannot be trusted with gold.) She had worn the same outfit to the Princeton lab. Some of her favorite clothes are growing threadbare, but it’s difficult to replace them, because she doesn’t accept new clothes as hers.She doesn’t accept new clothes as hers... We're not that impaired. New things can become ours. But I know the feeling. It's something like what George Carlin was talking about in his delightful monologue "Stuff":
"That's all your house is - a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it." But that's your extended mind, too.
"Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house." Well, of course, you're going to need your mind.
"You get over to your friend's house... and he gives you a little place to sleep, a little bed right next to his windowsill or something... You put your stuff up there. You got your Visine, you got your nail clippers, and you put everything up. It takes about an hour and a half, but after a while you finally feel okay, say, 'All right, I got my nail clippers, I must be okay.'"
What things (and people) do you accept as yours? How are they part of what makes feel okay... makes you remember who you are and what you are doing here?
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Google says that in the future, its determinations about what is true and what is untrue will play a role in how search-engine rankings are configured.
I can't wait until the hive-mind snuffs the information required for critical thinking completely. Resistance is futile. What we know will be what we should know in order to come to the correct conclusion.
"Everything that you think, do, or say, is in the pill you took to-day."
We thought it would be a pill and it turns out that it is just a giant corporation that makes money hand over fist, and that has an 85% market share and can control what we can learn.
"50 First Dates" DVD with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore has the leading woman unable to convert the day's memories to permanent memories. I don't want to give away the plot but it's the major thing in the romance.
"50 First Dates" DVD with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore has the leading woman unable to convert the day's memories to permanent memories.
Transient Global Amnesia. My dad had a few bouts of that. It's less fun and more scary than you think it might be.
"philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the idea of 'the extended mind'..."
Which sounds like it was a direct copy of Richard Dawkins' idea of "the extended phenotype."
Just finished the series "Caprica" for a second time. Reminds me of the premise of the show and the beginning of cylons: taking every scrap of digital information that is "out there" regarding a person that has passed away, compiling it into a software program that represents the person, then uploading it to a robot. Voila - your loved one is back from the grave.
So help me out. If Lonni Sue Johnson cannot be trusted with gold necklaces, why does she dress with any necklace at all? Extending that logic, she cannot be trusted with dressing herself, personal hygiene, bathing, eating . . . anything at all.
If she cannot remember, how can she draw? If she draws, how do we know it is for pleasure? More likely it is driven by her mental impairment.
So today's lesson is: Trust is a terrible thing to lose, but the mind is far more important.
I was born a twin, I have an older sister and 2 younger sisters and a brother, for many memories they are my extended mind. I have a husband of almost 57 years and 3 very much grown children, they are also my extended mind. I really get the concept. We all share memories, some are the same but we all have different memories of the exact same event. We share these often, but extended mind is the result.
If I have my cell phone I can hold my own anywhere looking up stuff on Google, texting in front of others when I want to be rude, sending photos to the ones I miss, finding directions, calling for breakdown help, transferring money.
But that is all foundation. There's a book called On Growth and Form that I like to have with me and the question it raises, the growth and form of plants, goes around with me also.
"There's a book called On Growth and Form that I like to have with me and the question it raises, the growth and form of plants, goes around with me also."
D'Arcy Thompson! One of my all-time favorites. Carry a tiny bit with me in my actual mind.
...she doesn’t accept new clothes as hers.
That sounds bogus. How does she remember what clothes are hers?
In residency we carried around manuals with quick "how to's" (like the Wash Manual).
We called those our "peripheral brain"
Strange coincidence. Tonight's Netflix DVD is "Before I go to Sleep". Nicole Kidman doesn't remember anything from one day to the next.
Yes I know we are trawling the bottom of Netflix but their streaming service has even worse movies.
The limits of the 'extended mind' metaphor are apparent when you hear people claim that they don't need to remember anything or learn anything because they can find it if they want it using google. The reason that's unsatisfactory is the same reason that 'memories' in your notebook aren't real memories.
Really our DNA is our stuff. We only entrust it to a woman we trust to care for it since it is us. Women are very valuable.
We got rid of some stuff today!!
My son took stuff, and moved into his girlfriend's house.
What you say?? Co-habituating?
No, I don't think so. He's paying for a bedroom, and she has her own bedroom.
I have my Medicated, and Unmedicated, minds.
They each remember different things.
I could argue they are two distinct beings, but there is a range of memory that only exists between the two.
I waver.
I am Laslo.
Some of my stuff is worth dying for
Since becoming an adult (of sorts), every year on my birthday I've always called my mother to thank her for not taking what I'm sure was the advice of everyone around her and aborting me way back in 1953-54. She always (politely) laughs at my tired sick joke as if hearing it for the first time and then claims it would've been unthinkable.
Not to mention, illegal, I try not to forget to remind her.
"Yes, well..." she murmurs and chuckles softly.
We swap memories of her pregnancy and my birth — the same memories we've shared on the same date of the same month every year since about 1975.
Me: I remember feeling safe and warm and thinking to myself — hey, what's the big dang hurry? This IS heaven. Why can't suffering wait?
She: Well, I don't remember it quite that way, dear. But it is true that you did take your sweet time. We had to wait and wait for you. Now that part is true.
And then I'll thank her again for keeping the memories in my extended mind straight for me and she'll say something along the lines of —"Well, it isn't always easy but you were worth every minute of it."
They're describing external storage and retrieval, rather than an integrated, functional mind.
Tonight's Netflix DVD is "Before I go to Sleep". Nicole Kidman doesn't remember anything from one day to the next.
Try Memento
...quite a good film.
What things (and people) do you accept as yours? How are they part of what makes feel okay... makes you remember who you are and what you are doing here?
My sewing machine. And yes, I've been known to take one on vacation when I've rented a house for the week. My chef's knife, because I'm particular about knives; Joy perfume, just because I love the smell; and a poster of Renoir's The Boating Party because it reminds me of many happy times with friends.
Sewing grounds me. It became increasingly important over the years as having a completed slipcover in month or a skirt in an evening gave me regular satisfaction during a period when my engineering projects would take a year or more from spec to installation. I need to build stuff, and I need to have it finished.
As to people who authenticate me, my cousin who grew up next door but I haven't seen for about a decade and my youngest sister. Both call me on my B.S.
@eddie willers
In my que. Thanks!
So, what's the difference between "extended mind" and "compensations for stuff that's missing or doesn't work anymore"?
The things to remember about crutches is, (1) they make your legs weaker (just as memory aids make your natural memory weaker) and (2) they may not be there when you need them.
If all your memory is in your phone, what do you do when the battery dies?
Crutches don't make your legs weaker. Not using them, and your body needing to get some vitamins from somewhere by breaking down tissue, weakens them.
But you don't need to do very much to prevent weakening them.
Smilin' Jack said...
3/29/15, 7:30 PM
...she doesn’t accept new clothes as hers.
"That sounds bogus. How does she remember what clothes are hers?"
She already owned in 2007, when she had viral encephalitis.
Her sister doesn't know where to buy or how to get the exact same thing.
Her underclothes are probably no problem.
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