(So I'm posting the response to Academic Front Part I here, because I tried to comment in the appropriate location, but it never appeared. Am I really that dumb...?)The reason cases of alzhiemer’s and amenesia cases are so often cited is because they are
dramatic cases that easily illustrate the notion of the extended mind. If their “extended self” is lost or damaged, a greater part of their ‘self’ (whatever that is) will be lost because to a much greater extent than healthy minds, they rely on external cog-tools.
But you don’t need to have a damaged mind to extend cognitive processes into the environment. You are right to point out that technologies like digital cameras and computers confer a very selective and malleable notion of the mind, and because of that fact, it could be argued that these technologies aren’t like the mind at all. On the other hand, our biological minds are just as open to sabotage (by self or others), suggestion, or selective memory. For instance, if I’m at a pub eyeing some hottie, I may think that they are returning the flirtatious looks but only because I want them to be; however, in reality nothing of the sort is going on. I see what I want to see. Another major fallibility of the bio-mind is that its attentional focus and perception can be very limited. An awesome (and entertaining) experiment has the subjects watch a game of scratch basketball and count the number of passes made. During the game a person in a gorilla suit walks through the game and does a little dance—half the subjects don’t report seeing the gorilla! However, surely if you saw a still photo of the basketball game, you’d pick right up on the gorilla in the midst (ba dum CHING!).
I recently went to a cool talk given by Mike Wheeler, in which he said (bio) memory isn’t post-perceptual
recall but post-perceptual
reconstruction; memory is a constructive process. I like that idea. On that line of thinking, a photo or a mental picture or a smell or any stimulus—internal or external—can trigger the reconstruction of a memory. It’s really just a question of whether we use our perceptual modalities (like sight, hearing, touch, etc.) that connect us with the outside world or whether we use internal (mentalistic) strategies to conjure up in image or thought.
Thanks for your comments, Friend.
Gorilla video (although I’ve spoiled the fun for you readers, you can try it out on friends): http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html
Other fun perception videos:http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html
