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Adapted from Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (U.S.), HarperCollins (U.K.)

Someone is watching you, intently, but you can't see them. Then you notice, drawn somehow by their eyes. You're amid a sponge garden, the seafloor scattered with shrublike clumps of bright orange sponge. Tangled in one of these sponges and the gray-green seaweed around it is an animal about the size of a cat. Its body seems to be everywhere and nowhere. The only parts you can keep a fix on are a small head and the two eyes. As you make your way around the sponge, so, too, do those eyes, keeping their distance, keeping part of the sponge between the two of you. The creature's color perfectly matches the seaweed, except that some of its skin is folded into tiny, towerlike peaks with tips that match the orange of the sponge. Eventually it raises its head high, then rockets away under jet propulsion.

A second meeting with an octopus: this one is in a den. Shells are strewn in front, arranged with some pieces of old glass. You stop in front of its house, and the two of you look at each other. This one is small, about the size of a tennis ball. You reach forward a hand and stretch out one finger, and one octopus arm slowly uncoils and comes out to touch you. The suckers grab your skin, and the hold is disconcertingly tight. It tugs your finger, tasting it as it pulls you gently in. The arm is packed with sensors, hundreds of them in each of the dozens of suckers. The arm itself is alive with neurons, a nest of nervous activity. Behind the arm, large round eyes watch you the whole time.

Octopuses and their relatives (cuttlefish and squid) represent an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Since my first encounters with these creatures about a decade ago, I have been intrigued by the powerful sense of engagement that is possible when interacting with them. Our most recent common ancestor is so distant-more than twice as ancient as the first dinosaurs-that they represent an entirely independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

Comparing Brains

Octopuses, cuttlefish and squid belong to a class of marine mollusks called cephalopods, along with now extinct creatures called ammonites and belemnites. The fossil record of octopuses remains skimpy. As the only cephalopods without an external or internal shell and no hard parts except for a beak, they do not preserve well. But at some stage during their evolution, they radiated-around 300 species are known at present, including deep-sea as well as reef-dwelling forms. They range from less than an inch in length to the giant Pacific octopus, which weighs in at 100 pounds and spans 20 feet from arm tip to arm tip.

As the cephalopod body evolved toward these modern forms-internalizing the shell or losing it altogether-another transformation occurred: some of the cephalopods became smart. "Smart" is a contentious term to use, so let's begin cautiously. First of all, these animals evolved large nervous systems, including large brains. Large in what sense? A common octopus ( Octopus vulgaris) has about 500 million neurons in its body. That is a lot by almost any standard. Human beings have many more-something nearing 100 billion-but the octopus is in the same range as various mammals, close to the range of dogs, and cephalopods have much larger nervous systems than all other invertebrates.

Absolute size is important, but it is usually regarded as less informative than relative size-the size of the brain as a fraction of the size of the body. This tells us how much an animal is "investing" in its brain. Octopuses also score high by this measure, roughly in the range of vertebrates, though not as high as mammals. Biologists regard all these assessments of size, however, as only a very rough guide to the brainpower an animal has. Some brains are organized differently from others, with more or fewer synapses, which can also be more or less complicated. The most startling finding in recent work on animal intelligence is how smart some birds are, especially parrots and crows. Birds have quite small brains in absolute terms, though very high-powered ones.

When we try to compare one animal's brainpower with another's, we also run into the problem that there is no single scale on which intelligence can be sensibly measured. Different animals are good at different things, as makes sense given the different lives they live. When cephalopods are compared with mammals, the lack of any common anatomy only increases the difficulties. Vertebrate brains all have a common architecture. But when vertebrate brains are compared with octopus brains, all bets-or rather all mappings-are off. Octopuses have not even collected the majority of their neurons inside their brains; most of the neurons are in their arms.

Given all this, the way to work out how smart octopuses are is to look at what they can do. Octopuses have done fairly well on tests of their intelligence in the laboratory, without showing themselves to be Einsteins. They can learn to navigate simple mazes. They can use visual cues to discriminate between two familiar environments and then take the best route toward some reward. They can learn to unscrew jars to obtain the food inside-even from the inside out. But octopuses are slow learners in all these contexts. Against this background of mixed experimental results, however, there are countless anecdotes suggesting that a lot more is going on.

Escape and Thievery

The most famous octopus tales involve escape and thievery, in which roving aquarium octopuses raid neighboring tanks at night for food. Those stories-the basis for octopod hijinks in the 2016 Disney-Pixar film Finding Dory -are not especially indicative of high intelligence. Neighboring tanks are not so different from tide pools, even if the entrance and exit take more effort. But here is a behavior I find more intriguing: in at least two aquariums, octopuses have learned to turn off the lights by squirting jets of water at the bulbs and short-circuiting the power supply. At the University of Otago in New Zealand, this game became so expensive that the octopus had to be released back to the wild.

Click or tap to enlarge

This story illustrates a more general fact: octopuses have an ability to adapt to the special circumstances of captivity and to their interactions with human keepers. Anecdotally at least, it has long appeared that captive octopuses can recognize and behave differently toward individual human keepers. In the same lab in New Zealand that had the "lights-out" problem, an octopus took a dislike to one member of the staff, for no obvious reason. Whenever that person passed by on the walkway behind the tank, she received a half-gallon jet of water down the back of her neck.

Neuroscientist Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia also had one cuttlefish that reliably squirted streams of water at all new visitors to the lab but not at people who were often around. In 2010 the late biologist Roland C. Anderson and his colleagues at the Seattle Aquarium tested recognition in giant Pacific octopuses in an experiment that involved a "nice" keeper who regularly fed eight animals and a "mean" keeper who touched them with a bristly stick. After two weeks, all the octopuses behaved differently toward the two keepers, confirming that they can distinguish among individual people, even when they wear identical uniforms.

Philosopher Stefan Linquist of the University of Guelph in Ontario, who once studied octopus behavior, puts it like this: "When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural. With octopuses it is totally different. They know that they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. All their behaviors are affected by their awareness of captivity." Linquist's octopuses would mess around with their tank and deliberately plug the outflow valves by poking in their arms, perhaps to increase the water level. Of course, this flooded the entire lab.

The tales of octopuses squirting experimenters reminded me of something I had seen myself. Captive octopuses often try to escape, and when they do, they seem unerringly able to pick the one moment you are not watching them. I thought I might be imagining this tendency, until I heard a talk a few years ago by marine biologist David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University, who works with octopuses full-time. He, too, said that octopuses seem to track in subtle ways whether he is watching them or not, and they make their move when he is not. I suppose this makes sense as a natural behavior in octopuses; you want to make a run for it when the barracuda is not looking at you. But the fact that octopuses can so quickly do this with humans-both with scuba mask and without-is impressive.

Another octopus behavior that has made its way from anecdote to experimental investigation is play. An innovator in cephalopod research, Jennifer Mather of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, along with Anderson, did the first studies of this behavior, and it has now been investigated in detail. Some octopuses-and only some-will spend time blowing pill bottles around their tank with their jet, "bouncing" the bottle back and forth on the stream of water coming from the tank's intake valve. In general, the initial interest an octopus takes in any new object is gustatory-can I eat it? But once an object is found to be inedible, that does not always mean it is uninteresting. Work by Michael Kuba, now at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, has confirmed that octopuses can quickly tell that some items are not food and are often still quite interested in exploring and manipulating them.

Thinking on Their Feet

Let's look more closely now at how the nervous system behind these behaviors evolved. The history of large brains has, very roughly, the shape of a letter Y. At the branching center of the Y is the last common ancestor of vertebrates and mollusks-some 600 million years ago. That ancestor was probably a flattened, wormlike creature with a simple nervous system. It may have had simple eyes. Its neurons may have been partly bunched together at its front, but there would not have been much of a brain there.

From that stage the evolution of nervous systems proceeds independently in many lines, including two that led to large brains of different design. On our lineage, the chordate design emerges, with a cord of nerves down the middle of the animal's back and a brain at one end. This design is seen in fish, reptiles, birds and mammals.

On the other side, the cephalopods' side, a different body plan evolved and a different kind of nervous system. Invertebrates' neurons are often collected into many ganglia, little knots that are spread through the body and connected to one another. The ganglia can be arranged in pairs, linked by connectors that run along the body and across it, like lines of latitude and longitude. This is sometimes called a ladderlike nervous system.

As cephalopods evolved, some ganglia became large and complex, and new ones were added. Neurons concentrated at the front of the animal, forming something more and more like a brain. The old ladderlike design was partly submerged, but only partly. For instance, in an octopus, the majority of neurons are in the arms themselves-nearly twice as many in total as in the central brain. The arms have their own sensors and controllers. They have not only the sense of touch but also the capacity to sense chemicals-to smell or taste. Each sucker on an octopus's arm may have 10,000 neurons to handle taste and touch. Even an arm that has been surgically removed can perform various basic motions, such as reaching and grasping.

The internal coordination of each arm can be quite graceful, too. When an octopus pulls in a piece of food, the grasping by the very end of the arm creates two waves of muscle activation, one heading inward from the tip and the other heading outward from the base. Where these two waves meet, a joint is formed that is something like a temporary elbow. The nervous systems in each arm also include loops in the neurons (recurrent connections, in the jargon) that may give the arm a simple form of short-term memory, although it is not known what this system does for the octopus.

How does an octopus's brain relate to its arms? Early work looking at both behavior and anatomy gave the impression that the arms enjoyed considerable independence. As Roger T. Hanlon and John B. Messenger put it in their 1996 book Cephalopod Behaviour, the arms seemed "curiously divorced" from the brain, at least in the control of basic motions. But octopuses can pull themselves together in some contexts. As I mentioned earlier, when you approach an octopus in the wild, in at least some species the octopus sends out one arm to inspect you-behavior that suggests a kind of deliberateness, an action guided by the brain.

In fact, some kind of mixture of localized and top-down control might be at work. The best experimental research I know that bears on this topic comes out of the lab of neurobiologist Binyamin Hochner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2011 researchers Tamar Gutnick and Ruth Byrne, along with Hochner and Kuba, conducted a very clever experiment to test whether an octopus could learn to guide a single arm along a mazelike path to a specific place to obtain food. The task was set up so that the arm's own chemical sensors would not suffice to guide it to the food; the arm would have to leave the water at one point to reach the target location. But the maze walls were transparent, so the target location could be seen. The octopus would have to guide an arm through the maze with its eyes.

It took a long while for the octopuses to learn to do this, but in the end, nearly all the animals tested succeeded. The eyes can guide the arms. At the same time, the paper also noted that when octopuses are doing well with this task, the arm that is finding the food appears to do its own local exploration as it goes, crawling and feeling around. So it seems that two forms of control are operating in tandem: there is central control of the arm's overall path, via the eyes, combined with a fine-tuning of the search by the arm itself.

Common Ground

Despite their many differences, cephalopods bear some striking similarities to vertebrates. For instance, vertebrates and cephalopods separately evolved "camera" eyes, with a lens that focuses an image on a retina. The capacity for learning of several kinds is also seen on both sides. Learning by attending to reward and punishment, by tracking what works and what does not work, seems to have been invented independently several times in evolution. If, on the other hand, it was present in the human/octopus common ancestor, it was greatly elaborated down each of the two lines.

There are also more subtle psychological similarities. Research indicates that octopuses, like us, seem to have a distinct short- and long-term memory. They seem to have something like sleep. And a 2012 study led by Jean G. Boal of Millersville University in Pennsylvania discovered that cuttlefish appear to have a form of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, similar to the sleep in which we dream. (It is still unclear whether octopuses share this REM-like sleep.) Other similarities are even more abstract, such as recognizing individual humans. This ability makes sense if an animal is social or monogamous, but octopuses are not monogamous, have haphazard sex lives and do not seem to be very social.

Even so, there is a lesson here about the ways that smart animals handle the stuff of their world. They carve it up into objects that can be remembered and identified despite changes in how those objects present themselves. This, too, is a striking feature of the octopus mind-striking in its familiarity and similarity to how we two-legged types make sense of our world.

Embodied Wisdom?

The octopus is sometimes said to be a good illustration of the importance of a theoretical movement in psychology known as embodied cognition. One of its central ideas is that our body, rather than our brain, is responsible for some of the "smartness" with which we handle the world. The joints and angles of our limbs, for example, make motions such as walking naturally arise. Knowing how to walk is partly a matter of having the right body.

But the doctrines of the embodied cognition movement do not really fit well with the strangeness of the octopus's way of being. Defenders of embodied cognition often say that the body's shape and organization encode information. But that requires that there be a shape to the body. An octopus can stand tall on its arms, squeeze through a hole little bigger than one of its eyes, become a streamlined missile or fold itself to fit into a jar.

Further, in an octopus, it is not clear where the brain itself begins and ends. The octopus is suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by the brain or nervous system. The usual debate is between those who see the brain as an all-powerful CEO and those who emphasize the intelligence stored in the body itself. But the octopus lives outside both the usual pictures.

It has a body-but one that is protean, all possibility; it has none of the costs and gains of a constraining and action-guiding body. The octopus lives outside the usual body/brain divide. - P.G.-S.

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Adapted from Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (U.S.), HarperCollins (U.K.) Someone is watching you, intently, but you can't see them. Then you notice, drawn somehow by their eyes.

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Why aren't elephants the smartest animals since they have the most neurons? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Fabian van den Berg, Neuropsychologist, on Quora: Why aren't elephants the smartest animals since they have the most neurons? Because Minecraft
We often hear 'bigger is better' which might be true for pay-checks but not for other things. I'm of course talking about brains, what else? Nature has an astounding diversity of life, each with a unique brain. Some of those brains grow to be massive organs, like that of the African Elephant with a 5kg brain (11lbs) and 257 billion neurons. Some brains stay tiny, like that of roundworms which comes in at only a fraction of a gram with about 300 neurons in total. Humans rank in between, with a 1.4kg (3lbs) brain and give or take 86 billion neurons.

That begs the question, if humans are outranked by animals such as elephants, why are we the self-proclaimed smartest creature on earth? How is it that an elephant with almost 3 times the number of neurons isn't laughing at our struggle with quantum mechanics?

Like a late night news-report, the reason might surprise you. To put it bluntly, humans aren't all that special. Like mentioned above, we don't have the biggest brain with the most neurons. Nor do we have the brain with the biggest surface area; dolphins beat us there with their amazingly complex brain folds. We get a bit closer if we take body size into account, but we'd lose from a marmoset (a sort of small monkey which honestly isn't all that bright). A new measure was developed called the 'encephalisation quotient'(EQ), which takes into account that the relationship between brain and body size isn't linear. It's a whole formula, but it gave us what we needed for our ego, we were on top! Based on our size we have a brain that is 7 times larger than it should be. Sounds great for us, but the measure failed a bit for other animals. The rhesus monkey should be smarter than a gorilla if we were to believe their EQ, which isn't the case. That puts us back to square one.

Humans don't stand out that much in general, except when it comes to intelligence. Absolute brain size isn't what makes us smart, neither is surface area, EQ, or neuron density. Then why is it that an elephant, with a huge brain and more neurons, isn't as smart or even smarter than a human? This is where neuroscience and biology get a bit tricky, an example might help.

Consider the fastest supercomputer in the world. At the time of writing, that is the Summit made by IBM. It has an impressive 9.216 CPUs, 27.648 GPUs and can make 200 quadrillion calculations per second. For comparison, it would take every person on earth working together, doing 1 calculation per second for almost a year to do what this machine can do in 1 second. It is set to model the universe, explore cancer, and figure out genetics on a scale we cannot imagine. But can it run Minecraft? No it cannot. Yet my old i7 quad-core laptop can run Minecraft just fine. Weird isn't it, an immense computer with more memory and processing power than fits in my apartment can't run a simple game that my rickety laptop can? So much for "super" computers.

The truth is, the thing isn't designed to run Minecraft. It's made to run those complex astronomical and biological models, while my laptop is designed to run games and various other tasks useful to me. I'm sure with some fiddling you can get any game running on those systems, but you'd definitely get in trouble for that. When comparing brains, the absolute neuron count isn't the only thing we need to look at. Just like absolute processing power isn't the only thing you look for when you need to play Minecraft. What's in a machine, how it's connected, how it interfaces, all change depending on a computer's purpose.

Human brains and Elephant brain are different in more ways than one. Different parts have different concentrations of neurons for example. Despite having three times as many neurons, elephants only have a third as many neurons in their cerebral cortex. The cortex just so happens to be the part of the brain we associate with a lot of "higher cognitive functions" and intelligence. All those elephant brain cells are concentrated in other areas, like the cerebellum which is used for movements (that trunk does look very capable).

The way the brain is put together is another factor. We estimate that Neanderthals had bigger brains than us; they had the capacity for a 1600cm3 brain. When researchers recently grew some Neanderthal brain-matter, we saw that they were very different from our own. Human mini-brains were nice, smooth spheres, whereas Neanderthal brains were more like popcorn. The consequences are still not clear, but it does bring us to this point: brains are complicated. Brains aren't homogenous masses of neurons and support cells. Brains have structure to them, neurons form columns and layers, have specific pathways to send and receive specific information. The way neurons are structured and connected affects what and how they process information. Different animals have different needs, different senses, and different bodies. Brains are formed to deal with all of that. An elephant needs to control its trunk to get food, not solve math problems to get good grades.

As mentioned in the beginning, nature has an astounding diversity of life and brains. Those brains have been sculpted by evolution over millions of years, and evolution doesn't care about intelligence as much as we do. Evolution is a process without goals; instead it takes more of a "good enough" approach. An organism has to function within its environment. For our elephant, an elephant brain is absolutely perfect for doing elephant things, it's the pinnacle of elephantness.

Humans had different survival tactics and evolutionary challenges. We didn't have claws and weren't very big and strong, instead we were smart and social. In evolutionary terms we bet everything on our brain, which is reflected by our cerebral cortex. Unlike other measurements, our cerebral cortex usually comes out on top compared to other animals. Even when compared to other primates, our cortex is astounding (more so in organization than size). It does require a lot of fuel, making it very reasonable to assume we beat other primates in the intelligence game because we started cooking. But that's a story for another day.

Intelligence is an elusive concept; we don't really know for sure what makes one species smarter than another. It'll be a while before we have definitive answers, but we do know it has to do with a lot of factors. Brain size, number of neurons, number of connections, different structures, densities, how they are connected, they all play a role. No single measure can explain why some animals are smarter than others, let alone why some humans are smarter than others.

An elephant is not as intelligent as a human, because an elephant brain is formed and wired to do elephant things. Just like a supercomputer isn't made to play Minecraft, but rather focuses on simulating supernovae. Human brains do human things instead of elephant things; in fact we make terrible elephants.

It's not the size of the brain that matters; it's how you use it.

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Elephants Have The Most Neurons. Why Aren't They The Smartest Animals?

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Why aren't elephants the smartest animals since they have the most neurons? This question was originally answered on Quora by Fabian van den Berg.

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Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, which are produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions such as potassium and sodium. In a surprising new finding, MIT neuroscientists have shown that human neurons have a much smaller number of these channels than expected, compared to the neurons of other mammals.

The researchers hypothesize that this reduction in channel density may have helped the human brain evolve to operate more efficiently, allowing it to divert resources to other energy-intensive processes that are required to perform complex cognitive tasks.

"If the brain can save energy by reducing the density of ion channels, it can spend that energy on other neuronal or circuit processes," says Mark Harnett, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

Harnett and his colleagues analyzed neurons from 10 different mammals, the most extensive electrophysiological study of its kind, and identified a "building plan" that holds true for every species they looked at - except for humans. They found that as the size of neurons increases, the density of channels found in the neurons also increases.

However, human neurons proved to be a striking exception to this rule.

"Previous comparative studies established that the human brain is built like other mammalian brains, so we were surprised to find strong evidence that human neurons are special," says former MIT graduate student Lou Beaulieu-Laroche.

Beaulieu-Laroche is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature.

A building plan

Neurons in the mammalian brain can receive electrical signals from thousands of other cells, and that input determines whether or not they will fire an electrical impulse called an action potential. In 2018, Harnett and Beaulieu-Laroche discovered that human and rat neurons differ in some of their electrical properties, primarily in parts of the neuron called dendrites - tree-like antennas that receive and process input from other cells.

One of the findings from that study was that human neurons had a lower density of ion channels than neurons in the rat brain. The researchers were surprised by this observation, as ion channel density was generally assumed to be constant across species. In their new study, Harnett and Beaulieu-Laroche decided to compare neurons from several different mammalian species to see if they could find any patterns that governed the expression of ion channels. They studied two types of voltage-gated potassium channels and the HCN channel, which conducts both potassium and sodium, in layer 5 pyramidal neurons, a type of excitatory neurons found in the brain's cortex.

They were able to obtain brain tissue from 10 mammalian species: Etruscan shrews (one of the smallest known mammals), gerbils, mice, rats, Guinea pigs, ferrets, rabbits, marmosets, and macaques, as well as human tissue removed from patients with epilepsy during brain surgery. This variety allowed the researchers to cover a range of cortical thicknesses and neuron sizes across the mammalian kingdom.

The researchers found that in nearly every mammalian species they looked at, the density of ion channels increased as the size of the neurons went up. The one exception to this pattern was in human neurons, which had a much lower density of ion channels than expected.

The increase in channel density across species was surprising, Harnett says, because the more channels there are, the more energy is required to pump ions in and out of the cell. However, it started to make sense once the researchers began thinking about the number of channels in the overall volume of the cortex, he says.

In the tiny brain of the Etruscan shrew, which is packed with very small neurons, there are more neurons in a given volume of tissue than in the same volume of tissue from the rabbit brain, which has much larger neurons. But because the rabbit neurons have a higher density of ion channels, the density of channels in a given volume of tissue is the same in both species, or any of the nonhuman species the researchers analyzed.

"This building plan is consistent across nine different mammalian species," Harnett says. "What it looks like the cortex is trying to do is keep the numbers of ion channels per unit volume the same across all the species. This means that for a given volume of cortex, the energetic cost is the same, at least for ion channels."

Energy efficiency

The human brain represents a striking deviation from this building plan, however. Instead of increased density of ion channels, the researchers found a dramatic decrease in the expected density of ion channels for a given volume of brain tissue.

The researchers believe this lower density may have evolved as a way to expend less energy on pumping ions, which allows the brain to use that energy for something else, like creating more complicated synaptic connections between neurons or firing action potentials at a higher rate.

"We think that humans have evolved out of this building plan that was previously restricting the size of cortex, and they figured out a way to become more energetically efficient, so you spend less ATP per volume compared to other species," Harnett says.

He now hopes to study where that extra energy might be going, and whether there are specific gene mutations that help neurons of the human cortex achieve this high efficiency. The researchers are also interested in exploring whether primate species that are more closely related to humans show similar decreases in ion channel density.

Reference: Beaulieu-Laroche L, Brown NJ, Hansen M, et al. Allometric rules for mammalian cortical layer 5 neuron biophysics. Nature. 2021:1-5. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04072-3
This article has been republished from the following materials . Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Fundamental Difference Between Human and Animal Neurons Discovered

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Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions. Neuroscientists have now shown that human neurons have a much smaller number of these channels in comparison to the neurons of other mammals.

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Mirror Neurons: Causing Change Within Others | Shelly Richardson | TEDxGullLake

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[V.S. RAMACHANDRAN:] The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution-which I speculate on in this essay-is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

There are many puzzling questions about the evolution of the human mind and brain:

1) The hominid brain reached almost its present size, and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity, about 250,000 years ago. Yet, many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art, music and perhaps even language-that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones? I shall call this "Wallace's problem," after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who first proposed it.

2) Crude "Oldawan" tools-made by just a few blows to a core stone to create an irregular edge-emerged 2.4 million ago and were probably made by Homo habilis, whose brain size was halfway (700cc) between modern humans (1300) and chimps (400). After another million years of evolutionary stasis, aesthetically pleasing "symmetrical" tools began to appear associated with a standardization of production technique and artifact form. These required switching from a hard hammer to a soft (wooden?) hammer while the tool was being made in order to ensure a smooth, rather than jagged, irregular edge. And lastly, the invention of stereotyped "assembly line" tools (sophisticated symmetrical bifacial tools) that were hafted to a handle, took place only 200,000 years ago. Why was the evolution of the human mind "punctuated" by these relatively sudden upheavals of technological change?

3) Why the sudden explosion (often called the "great leap") in technological sophistication, widespread cave art, clothes, stereotyped dwellings, etc., around 40,000 years ago, even though the brain had achieved its present "modern" size almost a million years earlier?

4) Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was already in place?

5) Humans are often called the "Machiavellian Primate" referring to our ability to "read minds" in order to predict other people's behavior and outsmart them. Why are apes and humans so good at reading other individuals' intentions? Do higher primates have a specialized brain center or module for generating a "theory of other minds" as proposed by Nick Humphrey and Simon Baron-Cohen? If so, where is this circuit and how and when did it evolve?

The solution to many of these riddles comes from an unlikely source: the study of single neurons in the brains of monkeys. I suggest that the questions become less puzzling when you consider Giaccamo Rizzollati's recent discovery of "mirror neurons" in the ventral premotor area of monkeys. This cluster of neurons, I argue, holds the key to understanding many enigmatic aspects of human evolution. Rizzollati and Arbib have already pointed out the relevance of their discovery to language evolution. But I believe the significance of their findings for understanding other equally important aspects of human evolution has been largely overlooked. This, in my view, is the most important unreported "story" in the last decade.

THE EMERGENCE OF LANGUAGE

Unlike many other human traits such as humor, art, dancing or music, the survival value of language is obvious-it helps us communicate our thoughts and intentions. But the question of how such an extraordinary ability might have actually evolved has puzzled biologists, psychologists and philosophers at least since the time of Charles Darwin. The problem is that the human vocal apparatus is vastly more sophisticated than that of any ape, but without the correspondingly sophisticated language areas in the brain, the vocal equipment alone would be useless. So how did these two mechanisms with so many sophisticated interlocking parts evolve in tandem? Following Darwin's lead, I suggest that our vocal equipment and our remarkable ability to modulate voice evolved mainly for producing emotional calls and musical sounds during courtship ("croonin a toon"). Once that evolved then the brain-especially the left hemisphere-could evolve language.

But a bigger puzzle remains. Is language mediated by a sophisticated and highly specialized "language organ" that is unique to humans and emerged completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or was there a more primitive gestural communication system already in place that provided a scaffolding for the emergence of vocal language?

Rizzolatti's discovery can help us solve this age-old puzzle. He recorded from the ventral premotor area of the frontal lobes of monkeys and found that certain cells will fire when a monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, grasping, picking up and putting a peanut in the mouth, etc., different neurons fire in response to different actions. One might be tempted to think that these are motor "command" neurons, making muscles do certain things; however, the astonishing truth is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action, e.g., tasting a peanut! With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: "mind reading" empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds." (I suggest, also, that a loss of these mirror neurons may explain autism-a cruel disease that afflicts children. Without these neurons, the child can no longer understand or empathize with other people emotionally and therefore completely withdraws from the world socially.)

Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others, thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene-based evolution. Moreover, as Rizzolati has noted, these neurons may also enable you to mime-and possibly understand-the lip and tongue movements of others which, in turn, could provide the opportunity for language to evolve. (This is why, when you stick your tongue out at a new born baby it will reciprocate! How ironic and poignant that this little gesture encapsulates a half a million years of primate brain evolution.) Once you have these two abilities in place-the ability to read someone's intentions and the ability to mime their vocalizations-then you have set in motion the evolution of language. You need no longer speak of a unique language organ and the problem doesn't seem quite so mysterious any more.

(Another important piece of the puzzle is Rizzolatti's observation that the ventral premotor area may be a homologue of the "Broca's area"-a brain center associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language in humans.)

These arguments do not in any way negate the idea that there are specialized brain areas for language in humans. We are dealing, here, with the question of how such areas may have evolved, not whether they exist or not.

Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys, but how do we know they exist in the human brain? To find out, we studied patients with a strange disorder called anosognosia. Most patients with a right hemisphere stroke have complete paralysis of the left side of their body and will complain about it, as expected. But about 5% of them will vehemently deny their paralysis even though they are mentally otherwise lucid and intelligent. This is the so-called "denial" syndrome or anosognosia. To our amazement, we found that some of these patients not only denied their own paralysis, but also denied the paralysis of another patient whose inability to move his arm was clearly visible to them and to others. Denying one's paralysis is odd enough, but why would a patient deny another patient's paralysis? We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this.

The second piece of evidence comes from studying brain waves (EEG) in humans. When people move their hands, a brain wave called the MU wave gets blocked and disappears completely. Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda, and I suggested at the Society for Neurosciences in 1998 that this suppression was caused by Rizzolati's mirror neuron system. Consistent with this theory, we found that such a suppression also occurs when a person watches someone else moving his hand, but not if he watches a similar movement by an inanimate object. (We predict that children with autism should show suppression if they move their own hands, but not if they watch someone else. Our lab now has preliminary hints from one highly functioning autistic child that this might be true (Social Neuroscience Abstracts 2000).

THE BIG BANG OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

The hominid brain grew at an accelerating pace until it reached its present size of 1500cc about 200,000 years ago. Yet, uniquely human abilities such the invention of highly sophisticated "standardized" multi-part tools, tailored clothes, art, religious belief and perhaps even language are thought to have emerged quite rapidly around 40,000 years ago-a sudden explosion of human mental abilities and culture that is sometimes called the "big bang." If the brain reached its full human potential-or at least size-200,000 years ago why did it remain idle for 150,000 years? Most scholars are convinced that the big bang occurred because of some unknown genetic change in brain structure. For instance, the archeologist Steve Mithen has just written a book in which he claims that before the big bang there were three different brain modules in the human brain that were specialized for "social or Machiavellian intelligence," for "mechanical intelligence" or tool use, and for "natural history" (a propensity to classify). These three modules remained isolated from each other, but around 50,000 years ago some genetic change in the brain suddenly allowed them to communicate with each other, resulting in the enormous flexibility and versatility of human consciousness.

I disagree with Mithen's ingenious suggestion and offer a very different solution to the problem. (This is not incompatible with Mithen's view, but it's a different idea). I suggest that the so-called big bang occurred because certain critical environmental triggers acted on a brain that had already become big for some other reason and was therefore "pre-adapted" for those cultural innovations that make us uniquely human (one of the key pre-adaptations being mirror neurons). Inventions like tool use, art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented "accidentally" in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain's amazing capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neurons. Perhaps ANY major "innovation" happens because of a fortuitous coincidence of environmental circumstances-usually at a single place and time. But given our species' remarkable propensity for miming, such an invention would tend to spread very quickly through the population-once it emerged.

Mirror neurons obviously cannot be the only answer to all these riddles of evolution. After all, rhesus monkeys and apes have them, yet they lack the cultural sophistication of humans (although it has recently been shown that chimps at least DO have the rudiments of culture, even in the wild). I would argue, though, that mirror neurons are necessary but not sufficient: their emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive step. The reason is that once you have a certain minimum amount of "imitation learning" and "culture" in place, this culture can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make us human. And once this starts happening, you have set in motion the auto-catalytic process that culminated in modern human consciousness.

A second problem with my suggestion is that it doesn't explain why the many human innovations that constitute the big bang occurred during a relatively short period. If it's simply a matter of chance discoveries spreading rapidly, why would all of them have occurred at the same time? There are three answers to this objection. First, the evidence that it all took place at the same time is tenuous. The invention of music, shelters, hafted tools, tailored clothing, writing, speech, etc., may have been spread out between 100K and 5k and the so-called great leap may be a sampling artifact of archeological excavation. Second, any given innovation (e.g., speech or writing or tools) may have served as a catalyst for the others and may have therefore accelerated the pace of culture as a whole. And third, there may indeed have been a genetic change, but it may not have been an increase in the ability to innovate (nor a breakdown of barriers between modules as suggested by Mithen), but rather an increase in the sophistication of the mirror neuron system and therefore in "learnability." The resulting increase in ability to imitate and learn (and teach) would then explain the explosion of cultural change that we call the "great leap forward" or the "big bang" in human evolution. This argument implies that the whole "nature-nurture debate" is largely meaningless as far as humans are concerned. Without the genetically specified learnability that characterizes the human brain, Homo sapiens wouldn't deserve the title "sapiens" (wise), but without being immersed in a culture that can take advantage of this learnability, the title would be equally inappropriate. In this sense, human culture and human brains have co-evolved into obligatory mutual parasites-without either, the result would not be a human being (no more than you can have a cell without its parasitic mitochondria).

THE SECOND BIG BANG

My suggestion that these neurons provided the initial impetus for "runaway" brain/ culture co-evolution in humans isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds. Imagine a martian anthropologist was studying human evolution a million years from now. He would be puzzled (like Wallace was) by the relatively sudden emergence of certain mental traits like sophisticated tool use, use of fire, art and "culture," and would try to correlate them (as many anthropologists now do) with purported changes in brain size and anatomy caused by mutations. But unlike them, he would also be puzzled by the enormous upheavals and changes that occurred after (say) the 19th century-what we call the scientific/industrial revolution. This revolution is, in many ways, much more dramatic (e.g., the sudden emergence of nuclear power, automobiles, air travel, and space travel) than the "great leap forward" that happened 40,000 years ago!

He might be tempted to argue that there must have been a genetic change and corresponding change in brain anatomy and behavior to account for this second leap forward (just as many anthropologists today seek a genetic explanation for the first one). Yet we know that present one occurred exclusively because of fortuitous environmental circumstances, because Galileo invented the "experimental method," that, together with royal patronage and the invention of the printing press, kicked off the scientific revolution. His experiments and the earlier invention of a sophisticated new language called mathematics in India in the first millennium AD (based on place value notation, zero and the decimal system) set the stage for Newtonian mechanics and calculus. "The rest is history," as we say.

Now the thing to bear in mind is that none of this need have happened. It certainly did not happen because of a genetic change in human brains during the renaissance. It happened at least partly because of imitation learning and rapid "cultural" transmission of knowledge. (Indeed, one could almost argue that there was a greater behavioral/cognitive difference between pre-18th century and post-20th century humans than between Homo erectus and archaic Homo sapiens. Unless he knew better, our Martian ethologist may conclude that there was a bigger genetic difference between the first two groups than the latter two species!)

Based on this analogy, I suggest further that even the first great leap forward was made possible largely by imitation and emulation. Wallace's question was perfectly sensible; it is very puzzling how a set of extraordinary abilities seemed to emerge "out of the blue." But his solution was wrong...the apparently sudden emergence of things like art or sophisticated tools was not because of God or "divine intervention." I would argue instead that just as a single invention (or two) by Galileo and Gutenberg quickly spread and transformed the surface of the globe (although there was no preceding genetic change), inventions like fire, tailored clothes, "symmetrical tools," and art, etc., may have fortuitously emerged in a single place and then spread very quickly. Such inventions may have been made by earlier hominids too (even chimps and orangs are remarkably inventive...who knows how inventive Homo erectus or Neandertals were), but early hominids simply may not have had an advanced enough mirror neuron system to allow a rapid transmission and dissemination of ideas. So the ideas quickly drop out of the "meme pool." This system of cells, once it became sophisticated enough to be harnessed for "training" in tool use and for reading other hominids minds, may have played the same pivotal role in the emergence of human consciousness (and replacement of Neandertals by Homo sapiens) as the asteroid impact did in the triumph of mammals over reptiles.

So it makes no more sense to ask "Why did sophisticated tool use and art emerge only 40,000 years ago even though the brain had all the required latent ability 100,000 years earlier?"-than to ask "Why did space travel occur only a few decades ago, even though our brains were preadapted for space travel at least as far back Cro Magnons?" The question ignores the important role of contingency or plain old luck in human evolutionary history.

Thus, I regard Rizzolati's discovery-and my purely speculative conjectures on their key role in our evolution-as the most important unreported story of the last decade.

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Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind the Great Leap Forward in Human Evolution | Edge.org

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MIRROR NEURONS AND IMITATION LEARNING AS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND “THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD” IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

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In this collective volume the origins, neurosocial support, and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity are examined with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. Entailing a paradigmatic revolution in the intersection of developmental, social and neural sciences, two radical turnabouts are entailed. First, no longer can be upheld as valid Cartesian and Leibnizian assumptions about monadic subjects with disembodied minds without windows to each other except as mediated by culture. Supported by a mirror system, specified in this volume by some of the discoverers, modes of participant perception have now been identified which entail embodied simulation and co-movements with others in felt immediacy. Second, no longer can be retained the Piagetian attribution of infant egocentricity. Pioneers who have broken new research grounds in the study of newborns, protoconversation, and early speech perception document in the present volume infant capacity for interpersonal communion, empathic identification, and learning by altercentric participation. Pertinent new findings and results are presented on these topics:

(i) Origins and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy
(ii) Neurosocial support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity, participant perception, and simulation of mind
(iii) From preverbal sharing and early speech perception to meaning acquisition and verbal intersubjectivity
(iv) New windows on other-centred movements and moments of meeting in therapy and intervention. (Series B)

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In this collective volume the origins, neurosocial support, and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity are examined with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. (Series B)

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Dear Nefeli

We came to the conclusion to continue your research on brain, body (neurology) and your work. Especially your experiments on making work in which you combine objects, body and patterns of neurons. In this essay you can write about your experiments and also what you know concerning how neurons work, how they relate to body and feeling. Also check things about the mirror neurons (post 1):

https://benjamins.com/catalog/aicr.68

https://www.edge.org/conversation/mirror-neurons-and-imitation-learning-as-the-driving-force-behind-the-great-leap-forward-in-human-evolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Th0aOoX4EM

And check things how neurons work in other animals:

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/fundamental-difference-between-human-and-animal-neurons-discovered-355844

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/09/12/elephants-have-the-most-neurons-why-arent-they-the-smartest-animals/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/

Best regards,

Hille

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With her film installation ALMOST THERE Tara Fallaux investigates the interaction between 2- and 3dimensional realms, merging a cinematic analogue special effect from early 1900 theatre and visuals inspired by early cinema in newly created backgrounds. In her experiment the old optical illusion is transported to the present, using photography, film, photo backgrounds and a mirror.

Artist statement :
The purpose of the installation is twofold, both personal and socio-political.

'After the sudden self chosen death of a close friend my life felt literary up side down. She could no longer see a way out of the tangled webs of her dark thoughts. Life was weighing her down. This devastating incident got me thinking philosophically and artistically about notions of escapism and weightlessness. Longing for freedom without weight. But at the same time being stuck in a limbo.'

Looking at social developments one sees that more and more young people suffer depression. Contributing to this problem are the overwhelming possibilities of 'perfect' choices, performance-stress, even as the younger generation also struggles with urbane problems of stress at work, lack of housing, lack of direction, and of a sense of belonging. And government support to tackle mental health issues dwindles.

In this digital age of fake-news, trolls, mockumentaries and doctored visuals, the need for transparency is a matter of mental and political sanity. Without explicitly addressing the manipulative digital world ALMOST THERE presents both the wonder of the illusion, a special effect, and the exposure of its construction. By doing so the spectator is seduced as well as sobered by the transparency of its workings.

The near impossibility of escape has fed the age-old hope of salvation from worldly heaviness through magic. The allure of the supernatural, the enchanting, the inexplicable is seen in dreams of levitation, flying, floating. Freed from earthly constrictions.

For the accompanying soundscape Tara collaborated with musician Sterre Konijn. They decided to work with the theme of air and references to the early cinema era. Sterre composed a soundtrack mainly using her own voice and whispers together with the sound of the Theremin. The Theremin, invented in 1920, is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer. It is played in the air. It is the only instrument in the world that can be played without needing to be touched. The magnetic field is changed by the varying distances between the two hands.

Made possible by AFK

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Artist statement :The purpose of the installation is twofold, both personal and socio-political. 'After the sudden self chosen death of a close friend my life felt literary up side down. She could no longer see a way out of the tangled webs of her dark thoughts. Life was weighing her down.

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I am thinking of making a variety of videos and try different methods of editing them. See the outcome and if each video has a different erent effect to the viewer.

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Through this process, I want to connect with myself, with my body and energy. I want to learn how to edit in a way that gives the viewer something to feel. Research how other artists started with their performances and how they began, what was their process. Experiment with my body in front of the camera and see how I move, how I show with my movements how I feel.

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through my paintings i always experiment with how can a human body explain the energy and the feelings that come from my painting. I never plan what i want to show concerning the feelings and energy, i just paint what makes me feel more relieved and then see how people feel about it. Most of the times my paintings show loneliness, passion, freedom, connection.

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the painting that inspired me for my performance videos

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#ProcessEssay #HannahDeVries

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#Process #ProcessEssay

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Dear Nefeli,

You told me you have been doing a lot of editing of videos this year. In this case, it was not for an art commission but for a vacation job (weddings and so on). You told me how you were attracted by how you can edit videos/a sequence of photos in such a way that it creates an emotional narrative. This experience is one of the reasons that you want (next to your paintings) to experiment with the photo camera and video camera. You want to do research on the editing process, and how you can edit recordings of your own moving body in such a way that it leads to an emotional/dramatized tension (maybe you could follow a narrative line from conflict, to climax (building up tension) and resolution). You said that you may also want to record the audience who are looking at your work. You want to experiment, just to research what kind of effects the editing process will lead to. How to build up tension by a kind of choreography of your body movement. On the basis of this interest, we came to the conclusion to write a process essay. See post 1 about what an explanatory-process-essay and see post 2 the explanatory-process-essay by Hannah of last year. So an essay in which you document your experiments in relation to the outcomes of this process, what worked and what worked not and why. Make notes and take pictures of your progress. Make especially notes when you are ready done making, when there is time to reflect on an experiment, you could also take the suggestions of the practical teachers into account in your process essay (write them down and include them in your process essay and reflect on it and react on it).

Best regards,

Hille

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Three Minute Theory: What is Intra-Action?

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On Touching-the Inhuman That Therefore I Am

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This essay explores the act of touching as it takes place in physical matter, in theorizing, and in the productive spaces where the two are indistinguishable. First, the author considers how feminist theory goes about touching science and unpacks touch as an act that reveals the self within the other and the other within the self.

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by studying all these artists i learned that you can change, see and feel the energy with art

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If someone is touching my shoulder as i am drawing am i going to feel there energy? Is there energy going to be transferred into my body and my painting? I guess also it depends of who is touching me

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Can you buy an artwork that is that expensive because of the energy that really is there?  Can you feel it?
Or do you buy it because of the background story of it?

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To be fair, the artist might disagree on conceptual grounds. For Garau, the artwork, titled lo sono (which translates to “I am”), finds form in its own nothingness. “The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight,” he told the Spanish news outlet Diario AS. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”

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Can people understand through your work how you feel? Because we are all different we don’t have the same energy or mind, can they feel something that I don’t feel through someone else’s artwork?

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From the department of "They sold for ?!" comes today's story, about an Italian artist who, for the cool price of €15,000 ($18,300), recently auctioned an artwork that is... well, nothing.

Last month, the 67-year-old artist Salvatore Garau sold an "immaterial sculpture"-which is to say that it doesn't exist.

To be fair, the artist might disagree on conceptual grounds. For Garau, the artwork, titled (which translates to "I am"), finds form in its own nothingness. "The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight," he told the Spanish news outlet Diario AS . "Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us."

went up for sale in May at the Italian auction house Art-Rite. The pre-sale estimate valued the piece between €6,000-9,000, according to , but competing bidders pushed the price tag to €15,000.

The lucky buyer went home with a certificate of authenticity and a set of instructions: the work, per Garau, must be exhibited in a private house in a roughly five-by-five-foot space free of obstruction.

"When I decide to 'exhibit' an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms," the artist went on.

If you thought that was artsy claptrap, he goes on to draw a rather lofty comparison to the work: "After all, don't we shape a God we've never seen?" he added.

The artist didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

isn't the only artwork of its kind in Garau's oeuvre. In February of this year, at the Piazza Della Scala in Milan, the artist exhibited , a similarly invisible sculpture demarcated by a square of tape on a cobble-stoned walkway. Meanwhile, this week, he installed BUDDHA IN CONTEMPLATION A FRODITE CRIES in front of the New York City stock exchange. The effort, evidenced by an empty white circle, was supported by the Italian Cultural Institute.

"You don't see it but it exists; it is made of air and spirit," he explained in a video documenting the Milan piece. "It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination, a power that anyone has, even those who don't believe they have it."

Indeed, many people on the internet seem to be having trouble tapping into that power. "So you really just taped a square and called that a sculpture?" reads the most-liked comment on the .

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an 'Invisible Sculpture' for $18,300. It's Made Literally of Nothing | Artnet News

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From the department of "They sold for ?!" comes today's story, about an Italian artist who, for the cool price of €15,000 ($18,300), recently auctioned an artwork that is... well, nothing. Last month, the 67-year-old artist Salvatore Garau sold an "immaterial sculpture"-which is to say that it doesn't exist.

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Our energy depends on the space that we are in, from our thoughts, how our day was, what music are we listening to and so many things that we don’t even consider that affect our work.

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#NamJunePaik#TVBuddha#1974#Parallelism

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One of Nam June Paik's most iconic works, TV Buddha expresses the contrasts and parallels between East and West and between technology and spirituality in a very simple and direct way. A CCTV camera films a Buddha statue, which Paik bought from an antique store. Its static, silent image appears live on a round TV set, inspired by popular sci-fi imagery. Here the Buddha is both the viewer and the viewed image, mirroring our own experience as mass media consumers.

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One of Nam June Paik's most iconic works, TV Buddha expresses the contrasts and parallels between East and West and between technology and spirituality in a very simple and direct way. A CCTV camera films a Buddha statue, which Paik bought from an antique store.

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AnilSeth#Brain#Consiousness#CreatingReality#Perception

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Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | TED Talk

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Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.” Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

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Seated silently at a wooden table across from an empty chair, she waited as people took turns sitting in the chair and locking eyes with her. Over the course of nearly three months, for eight hours a day, she met the gaze of 1,000 strangers, many of whom were moved to tears.

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#MarinaAbramovic#TheArtistIsPresent#2010

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Since the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has been pushing past perceived limits of the body and mind, and exploring the complex relationship between artist and audience, through performances that challenge both herself and, in many instances, participants emotionally, intellectually, and physically. The concepts inspiring her works are key, as is the use of her own body to convey her ideas. She has been making art since childhood, and realized early on that it did not have to be produced in a studio, or even take a concrete form. "I understood that...I could make art with everything...and the most important [thing] is the concept," she relates. "And this was the beginning of my performance art. And the first time I put my body in front of [an] audience, I understood: this is my media." ¹

In 2010 at MoMA, Abramović engaged in an extended performance called, The Artist Is Present. The work was inspired by her belief that stretching the length of a performance beyond expectations serves to alter our perception of time and foster a deeper engagement in the experience. Seated silently at a wooden table across from an empty chair, she waited as people took turns sitting in the chair and locking eyes with her. Over the course of nearly three months, for eight hours a day, she met the gaze of 1,000 strangers, many of whom were moved to tears.

"Nobody could imagine...that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me," Abramović explained. In fact, the chair was always occupied, and there were continuous lines of people waiting to sit in it. "It was [a] complete surprise...this enormous need of humans to actually have contact." ²

On Being Present with the Artist
One visitor described sitting with Marina Abramović as "a transforming experience-it's luminous, it's uplifting, it has many layers, but it always comes back to being present, breathing, maintaining eye contact. It's an amazing journey to be able to experience and participate in the piece." ³ He was so taken with it, in fact, that he returned to sit with the artist 21 times!

To the Extreme
Marina Abramović is known for going to great extremes of pain, discomfort, vulnerability, and exposure in her performances. For her, reaching the edges of tolerability is a way to test and discover the strength of the body and mind: "I'm interested in how far you can push the energy of the human body, how far you can go, and then see that, actually, our energy is almost limitless. It's not about the body, it's about the mind, [which] pushes you to the extremes that you never could imagine." ⁴

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MoMA | Marina Abramović. The Artist Is Present. 2010

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#MarinaAbramovic

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#Meta-Referential#ThirdEyePerspective#Parallelism#InsideOutside

The paintings also reflect spaces of quietness and stillness that hold a poetic element, inviting us to meditate and create our own narrative. I’m interested in the meta-referential aspect of the paintings and the parallelism created by the scene represented and the moment the viewer faces it, realizing they have become part of the work and that they’re probably being observed by an audience: ‘If we discover how we see paintings we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are learning’ (John Berger).

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I make contemporary figurative paintings that explore certain codes of behaviour inside the museum in a playful manner. When visiting exhibitions I become a voyeur looking for interesting scenes that catch my attention and taking photos of people without them noticing. I later use these photos as source material for my paintings, which make reference at how we're looking and interacting with the world around us, touching upon themes such as the way we look at art through modern technology.

The paintings also reflect spaces of quietness and stillness that hold a poetic element, inviting us to meditate and create our own narrative. I'm interested in the meta-referential aspect of the paintings and the parallelism created by the scene represented and the moment the viewer faces it, realizing they have become part of the work and that they're probably being observed by an audience: ' If we discover how we see paintings we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are learning' (John Berger).

How did you first get interested in your medium, and what draws you to it specifically?

I've been using oil paint for the last two and a half years. I was drawn to it because it's a very flexible medium and you can work in many different ways with it, like building up layers, working wet on wet, and glazes. Sometimes unexpected things happen and I like the playfulness of it. I was interested in the new possibilities that it could bring to my work.

How has your style and practice changed over the years?

At the beginning of my University years I was influenced by the Impressionists, and color was essential to my work. However, by the end of my degree I was experimenting with materials and doing more abstract work. After that I started working on portraiture, which eventually evolved into realistic paintings. What was important to me was to find a subject matter that interested me in order to explore in depth. I decided to look inside the art world having always taken photographs during my visits to museums.

Can you walk us through your process? Do you begin with a sketch, or do you just jump in? How long do you spend on one work? How do you know when it is finished?

The process starts during my visits to museums where I observe people looking at art and I take photographs. Later in the studio I go through the photos and select the ones that strike me and that immediately tell me something. I also look for interesting compositions and unique moments. Once a photo is selected I then draw the outline into the canvas. I finally build up the painting with layers. I start out with washes to work out tones and then I build up the detail with layers.

Prefer to work with music or in silence?

I definitely need music to work. The silence of the studio can be very overwhelming and music helps me get started. The key is to find music that suits my mood since it's not always the same. Sometimes I need the tranquility of classical music, other times I'm happy working with soul, rock, dance or Latin music.

What are some of your favorite experiences as an artist?

I enjoy many of my experiences as an artist, from coming up with an idea, to making the work and the sense of accomplishment when the painting is finished. I also love the interaction with the viewer during exhibitions. I've had fascinating conversations regarding people's reactions and connections to my work, especially with my latest series of people looking at art.

One painting that has brought many conversations has been 'It's Tough to be a Celebrity' which shows a group of visitors in front of the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck at the National Gallery. One woman told me how she started collecting convex mirrors after seeing this painting. Another told me about a book in Russian inspired by this painting that told about the magical powers of the painting. Also a group of National Gallery tour guides were amused at seeing their daily lives at the museum and we discussed how frustrating it was that people are not longer looking at the paintings but are looking at the paintings from the screen of their mobiles.

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Inside the Studio: Elena García de la Fuente explores human behavior through figurative paintings

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Inspired by behavior in museum spaces, Elena creates contemporary paintings ...

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#ElenaGarcía#FigurativePainting

Elena García de la Fuente explores human behavior through figurative paintings.

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#Quietness#Stillness#Silence

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Elena Garcia de la Fuente: Unique contemporary painting, London.

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London based artist Elena reinterprets reality creating new spaces for reflexion. Mediums: oils, acrylics and gouache. Wimbledon Art Studios.

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Cultuurmakers: Nick Verstand | Uit in Amsterdam

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Nick Verstand is a contemporary artist exploring human behavior and perception through spatial audiovisual compositions.

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#NickVerstand#Aura

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Studio Nick Verstand has created an immersive audiovisual installation that reinterprets people's emotions as pulsing light compositions.

During this year's Dutch Design Week, visitors to the Aura installation were equipped with multiple biosensors that register brainwaves, heart-rate variability, and galvanic skin response.

As they sat or laid down on cushions on the floor, a musical composition played out in the background, triggering emotional responses.

The visitors' emotional "data" was then analysed and metamorphosed into different forms, colours and intensities of light that were beamed down onto them from above.

Surrounding the visitors like a curtain, the light made each person's emotional responses visible to others.

Artist Nick Verstand, who is known for creating large-scale immersive art installations, developed the scientific system in collaboration with the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research.

His intention was to further explore light as a medium - an idea that was pioneered by artists such as James Turrell, Anthony McCall and Olafur Eliasson.

"Aura is an audiovisual installation that materialises emotions into a perceptible, physical form," he explained.

"It explores how this perceptual process influences the understanding of ourselves and of each other. The installation symbolises the materialisation of internal metaphysical space into external physical space," he continued.

Aura was showcased during last month's Dutch Design Week, from 21 to 29 October 2017 in Eindhoven, as part of an exhibition called We Know How You Feel.

Curated by VPRO Medialab, the exhibition explored how wearable technology can play a role in making and consuming of media.

Other installations at Dutch Design Week included a motor-operated needle that scratched away at a block of carbon every time someone posted a suicidal tweet, and a thermochromic tapestry that changes colour in response to Wi-Fi signals.

Photography is by Hanneke Wetzers and Noortje Knulst.

Flynn Talbot transforms V&A's former textile room into colourful hall of light

Project credits:
Custom laser software: Naivi
Music: Salvador Breed

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Audiovisual installation transforms emotions into beams of light

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Studio Nick Verstand has created an immersive audiovisual installation that reinterprets people's emotions as pulsing light compositions. During this year's Dutch Design Week, visitors to the Aura installation were equipped with multiple biosensors that register brainwaves, heart-rate variability, and galvanic skin response.

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The law of attraction is about to expand far beyond what you can imagine. More joy, abundance, and blessings - every single day of the year.

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#Universe#Cosmos#Frequency

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#Consciousness#Awareness

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#Yoga#Spirituality#Body#Excercises

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Sadhguru On How to Manifest What You Really Want

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#Conciousness#Energy#Entanglement

By Aimee Falchuk

We often complicate the word energy by trying to define it in scientific or mystical terms. All we need to understand energy is to get quiet and feel into ourselves or our surroundings.

Certain situations or people can deplete our energy. Alternatively, in places where we don’t feel we are enough, we may cling onto others using their fuel source as our own. Even boundaries are a matter of energy: We may bind our energy when we want to create separation and let our energy flow openly when we want to come close.

One of the first things we learn in school is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed—but that it can be altered. Energy can be sped up or slowed down. It can exist in a closed system in which the energy is held or bound, or it can exist in an open system in which the energy flows.

Energy in itself is a neutral force. It is consciousness that directs its movement. If we think of this in terms of the energy and consciousness of the human experience we may see that the more conscious we are, the more we direct our energy towards creation, connection, and evolution. The less conscious we are, the more our energy is used towards separation, stagnation, or even destruction.