Archive for May 1st, 2009

One of my favorite blogs, Cognitive Daily, is launching a new feature, Cognitive Monthly, which features a long single-subject article. They’re hoping you’ll like the article enough to contribute a small fee.

The first month’s entry is about a subject that relates peripherally to something I discuss briefly in Traffic; i.e., the relationship between the way we see the world and how that world is captured in film (and by the way there’s another great NYAS event forthcoming this week that deals with that very topic). The piece is titled “The Illusion of Theater” and it, in their words, “covers the remarkable science behind what theatrical professionals seem, to laypeople, to do intuitively: create an environment that encourages us to believe that what we see on stage is a true representation of reality.”

In any case, here’s a sample of what the kind of stuff you’ll find in the piece:

How exactly does the music affect perception of a scene? In 2000, Marilyn Boltz conducted an extensive study to try to answer that question. Boltz wanted to know whether music alone could change the way viewers thought about a scene in a film, and furthermore, whether it could actually affect viewers’ memory later on. She showed viewers three ambiguous scenes, from Cat People, Vertigo, and the TV show The Hitchhiker, and played either “positive,” “negative,” or no music to accompany the scenes.

Viewers who instead saw a version with negative music (from Rubycon by Tangerine Dream — of Risky Business fame) thought McDowell would “harm,” “kill,” or “do supernatural harm” to Kinski. The results were similar for scenes from Vertigo and The Hitchhiker. So music matters, whether we’re watching a bad ’80s HBO series or a Hitchcock classic—or a play by the son of a tenant farmer
in central England.

A new piece in Science by John D. Lee, “Can Technology Get Your Eyes Back on the Road,” had a number of interesting things about it but I particularly liked this fact about the “above-average driver” effect:

“Another survey found this superiority bias persisted even with expect police drivers when they rated their ability relative to that of their peers.”

It could be, of course, that we just have trouble thinking in terms of groups.

I’m not sure how I’ve missed Seen Reading for this long, but the idea immediately captivated me. The blog’s author observes someone reading something on Toronto public transportation, notes the page number, then chooses a passage from that page and adds her own small fictional hypothesis. A typical example is here (and no, she hasn’t spotted anyone reading Traffic — yet).

The New York City subways are typically awash in outward-facing jackets, and I’ve often thought there should be a special MTA Bestseller list (a lot of people will be reading The Secret with the proposed fare hikes) — heavy, I think, on Salinger, Foer, Lethem, etc.

I’ve often wondered about the role of signaling that these book jackets send; are they all always “honest signals”? I am thinking of a recent anecdote relayed by the novelist Nicholson Baker in the New York Times. “Years ago, he walked into a temporary job with a copy of “Ulysses.” “I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading ‘Ulysses.’ ” And what will happen to that signaling (pretentious perhaps, but also useful) once the individual book is subsumed under the faceless silicon hegemony of the Kindle — which itself is a kind of signal. How many subway romances have been struck up because someone fell for someone reading a certain novel — say The Crying of Lot 49? With Kindle you might take them for a Pynchonite, only to find they’re reading James Patterson.

In driving, of course, literary signifiers are usually lacking, unless someone happens to have some Conrad or Koontz up on the dashboard. There are often audio signifiers (of a certain sort, no one’s ever cranking NPR up and down the block), of course, not to mention things like car make and model, a gun rack in the back or other accessories. My favorite example is something I saw in the little retail section of my local car wash: A fake GPS antenna. You may not have the fancy nav system, but this little shark-fin shaped piece of plastic will convince the world you’re never lost.

“Cash for clunkers” is a potentially bad idea, for a number of reasons that have been explored elsewhere.

But as long as one is seeking stimulus, and ostensibly green benefits, why not extend the program to bikes? The ETA (the other ETA!) has a petition here.

I’m looking to upgrade my old Gary Fisher and wouldn’t mind some tax joy.