Art and Gist

December 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Brainerd and Reyna propose a process for the relationship between knowledge and memory which they refer to as the ‘fuzzy trace’. This concept identifies a cognitive structure in the brain which is formed by repeated exposure to, and education about, specific experiences. So, for example, the experience of learning to drive a car, and of repeated driving behaviours, will create a mental schema or ‘trace’ of this behaviour. Similarly, repeated exposure to art, and education about art, will create a ‘trace’ of this art. This fuzzy trace is a kind of abstraction of all of the experiences, and represents the core, crystallised knowledge about the subject, and all of the individual experiences can be seen as ‘instances’ of this trace, (and I realise I am mixing metaphors wildly here). Significantly, this trace, or ‘gist’ as Brainerd and Reyna more colloquially call it, is then mobilised when new, related, experiences are encountered. So when driving a car, our moment by moment experience is referred to the existing ‘gist’, and this referring affects our actions and behaviour. Similarly, when we experience a new work of art, this experience is evaluated and understood in reference to our existing ‘gist’, and this referring produces the (critical) action and behaviour we have with regard to this artwork. This process works entirely subconsciously, and we do not think rationally prior to making a response or producing an action. Instead we get a feeling of ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’; an intuition about the experience which guides our behaviour.

Posted in Art, Brainerd, C. J. & Reyna, V. F., Fuzzy trace, Gist, Schema | No Comments »

Virtual Environments of the Mind

December 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

What we choose to think about changes the way we feel. This is an obviousness, but it is worth looking at in more detail. The way we feel, our feelings, are the observable, experienced evidence of complex cognitive processes; processes which are non-rational, non-conscious, and multi-valent. The cognition which results in feelings is far more complex than that which is available to us consciously (1). This suggest that when we think of a certain idea, and this thinking makes us feel a certain way, the content of our conscious thoughts is causing changes to take place across the complex networks of non-conscious processing, resulting in certain emotionally-tagged, felt responses.

Remembering also that, ultimately, feelings and the cognitive processes of which they are a result, exist because they confer (or conferred in the past) some kind of survival and/or reproductive advantage to the organism experiencing those feelings; we feel pain when we put our hand on a hotplate because this feeling motivates the adaptively advantageous action of moving the hand. More complex feelings; love, jealousy, fear etc. confer similar advantages, but with more circuitous pathways between the stimulus, the feeling engendered by the stimulus, and an appropriate response. This implies that our ability to produce certain feelings by the action of dwelling on particular conscious thoughts effectively modifies what might be called the ‘virtual environment’ of our minds. This in turn causes an emotional response to be evoked which would be adaptively advantageous in that environment.

1. For an interesting explanation of this, see the gist or Fuzzy Trace theory of Reyna and Brainerd. Adv Child Dev Behav. 2001;28:41-100.

Posted in Cognition, Emotion, Evolution, Feeling, Fuzzy trace | No Comments »