Although the mechanics of how the eye works are well understood, debate still exists as to how the complex machinery of the brain interprets neural impulses...

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of events (...) described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision. This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind. (shrink)

The cortical visual mechanisms involved in processing spatial relationships remain subject to debate. According to one current view, the ''dorsal stream'' of visual areas, emanating from primary visual cortex and culminating in the posterior parietal cortex, mediates this aspect of visual processing. More recently, others have argued that while the dorsal stream provides egocentric coding of visual location for motor control, the separate ''ventral'' stream is needed for allocentric spatial coding. We have assessed the visual form agnosic patient DF, whose (...) lesion mainly affects the ventral stream, on a prehension task requiring allocentric spatial coding. She was presented with transparent circular disks. Each disk had circular holes cut in it. DF was asked to reach out and grasp the disk by placing her fingers through the holes. The disks either had three holes (for forefinger, middle finger, and thumb) or two holes (for forefinger and thumb). The distance between the forefinger and thumb holes, and the orientation of the line formed by them, were independently varied. DF was quite unable to adjust her grip aperture or her hand orientation in the three-hole task. Although she was able to orient her hand appropriately for the two-hole disks, she still remained unable to adjust her grip aperture to the distance between the holes. These findings are consistent with the idea that allocentric processing of spatial information requires a functioning ventral stream, even when the information is being used to guide a motor response. (shrink)

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst conservative politicians and journalists, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Like the hole in the ozone layer as described by Bruno Latour, global warming is a ‘hybrid’ natural-social-discursive phenomenon. And science fiction seems to occupy a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. This paper takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom dubs ‘cli-fi’. (...) It seeks to describe how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It argues against the view that ‘catastrophic’ SF is best understood as a variant of the kind of ‘apocalyptic’ fiction inspired by the Christian Book of Revelation, or Apokalypsis, on the grounds that this tends to downplay the historical novelty of SF as a genre defined primarily in relation to modern science and technology. And it examines the narrative strategies pursued in both print and audio-visual SF texts that deal with anthropogenic climate change. (shrink)

It is our contention that the concept of planning in Glover's model is too broadly defined, encompassing both action/goal selection and the programming of the constituent movements required to acquire the goal. We argue that this monolithic view of planning is untenable on neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and behavioural grounds. The evidence demands instead that a distinction be made between action planning and the specification of the initial kinematic parameters, with the former depending on processing in the ventral stream and the latter (...) on processing in the dorsal stream. (shrink)

Little is known about distance processing in patients with posterior brain damage. Although many investigators have claimed that distance estimates are normal or abnormal in some of these patients, many of these observations were made informally and the examiners often asked for relative, and not absolute, distance estimates. The present investigation served two purposes. First, we wanted to contrast the use of distance information in peripersonal space for perceptual report as opposed to visuomotor control in our visual form agnosic patient, (...) DF. Second, we wanted to see to what extent her abilities to process distance cues were dependent on binocular vision, in light of Milner et al.'s (1991) observations of preserved stereopsis in DF, and Dijkerman et al.'s (1996) and Marotta et al.'s (1997) observations that her visual guidance of grasping may be particularly dependent on binocular vision of the target. We hypothesized that DF's visuomotor responses would show normal sensitivity to target distance, while her perceptual estimates would not. In the first experiment, we required DF and two age- and sex-matched control subjects to reach out and grasp black cubes placed at varying distances, or to estimate the distance of the cubes from the hand starting position without making a reaching movement. In the second experiment, we required DF and two age-matched control subjects to point as rapidly and accurately as possible to small LED targets which differed in spatial location, under binocular and monocular conditions. The results showed that, relative to the control subjects, DF's grasping movements produced normal peak velocity-distance scaling-when she reached for blocks which varied in depth or pointed to LED targets which were presented at different distances in depth. In contrast, in the cube experiment, her verbal estimates of object distance were poorly scaled, although they improved slightly under the binocular conditions. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of processing streams in extrastriate visual cortex and the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial processing. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

ABSTRACT According to Lyman Tower Sargent, utopias are repositories for individual and collective hopes and fears, which sometimes unleash energies that can achieve at least part of what is hoped for. The Australian green bans movement of 1971–75 can be understood as a utopian project in this sense. During this period, the construction workers organized in the New South Wales branch of a labor union, known as the Builders Labourers' Federation, refused to work on ecologically or socially harmful projects and (...) publicly argued for their collective right to socially responsible labor. Coining the term “green bans” to describe environmentally motivated withdrawals of labor, they halted projects worth five billion Australian dollars at 1970s prices. When enthusiastic resident action groups mobilized in support of these bans, the union grew into the core of a more general social movement. The success of the green bans movement suggests that the power of subversive imagining can be especially effective if coupled with the power of workers at the point of production. The movement's basic premise—that workers, acting in the general public interest, should decide what can be built and where—represented a direct challenge to the dominant power relations. Ultimately, such impossible demands could not be conceded either by the employers or by the state. But the practical effects of this utopianism nonetheless secured substantial environmental improvements, which brought the green bans activists significantly closer to their dreams. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956) were prolific Australian authors who co-wrote, under the pseudonym "M. Barnard Eldershaw," five novels and four works of nonfiction published between 1929 and 1947. Their final collaboration, a future fiction entitled Tomorrow and Tomorrow, first appeared in Melbourne in 1947 and was reissued by the London feminist publisher Virago in 1983. Lyman Tower Sargent's bibliography of Australian utopian fiction describes the novel thus: "Dystopia. Public opinion sampling used to limit liberty." This is a (...) reasonable enough shorthand description of the novel's frame narrative, set in the "Tenth Commune" located somewhere in what is now the Riverina district on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, at some time in the twenty-fourth century. This article will argue, however, that the Tenth Commune is closer to a flawed eutopia than an outright dystopia; and that the novel's truly dystopian content lies in its core narrative, Knarf's novelistic account of mid-twentieth century Australia, which culminates in a quasi-apocalyptic destruction by fire of the city of Sydney. The extraordinary violence of this account will be contrasted to the essentially nonviolent character of the Tenth Commune and both will be situated in relation to Barnard's growing involvement in the pacifist Peace Pledge Union. (shrink)

Comparative Neurospychology is a collection of state-of-the-art essays by some of the world's leading neuropsychologists. Taking as their starting point the assumption that the human brain shares many of its most important functional systems with its primate relatives, the authors take acomparative evolutionary approach to understanding human cognition and brain function. A wide range of subject areas are covered, including memory, visual and somatosensory perception, motor control, attention, cross-modality integration, interhemispheric transmission, and behaviouralintelligence.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a declared eco-socialist and arguably the most distinguished acolyte of Fredric Jameson, America's leading Marxist literary critic. Robinson's Mars trilogy develops a detailed account of three political revolutions. Robinson explains that this was a deliberate choice on his part, because he felt that in his first utopian novel, Pacific Edge, he “dodged the necessity of revolution.” He describes Antarctica and The Years of Rice and Salt as his next utopian novels, but these, too, dodge the “necessity (...) of revolution,” the first by substituting science for politics, the second by projecting an alternative history into an alternative future. In the Science in the Capital trilogy, politics becomes paramount, and it continues to be so in his more recent fiction. This article will explore how Robinson negotiates the transition to utopia in his later work, from Forty Signs of Rain through to New York 2140 and Red Moon. (shrink)

The article begins with a sociologically triumphalist critique of philosophical aesthetics, grounded in the work of Ernest Gellner and Emile Durkheim. It proceeds to note the practical failure of this kind of sociology to become institutionalized within the wider discipline. It explores a number of possible explanations for this failure, but finally suggests that a normalized sociology of art requires a normalized conception of art itself, such as that tentatively advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The article also has (...) an autobiographical subtext. (shrink)

Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, first published by Yale University Press in 1979, has been the single most influential work in the history of academic science-fiction studies. As Veronica Hollinger observed: “Metamorphoses is the significant forerunner of all the major examinations of the genre”. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint make more or less the same point: “Disagreeing with him [Suvin] is a considerable part of SF scholarship—he... set... the terms by which SF has subsequently been studied”. Perhaps not quite (...) so significant for utopian studies, Metamorphoses was nonetheless a crucially important text here too. For the fundamental novelty of its argument lies in the... (shrink)

This paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial (...) in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism. (shrink)