Imagined Scenes Research Articles

Representations of imaginary scenes and their properties in cortical alpha activity

Imagining natural scenes enables us to engage with a myriad of simulated environments. How do our brains generate such complex mental images? Recent research suggests that cortical alpha activity carries information about individual objects during visual imagery. However, it remains unclear if more complex imagined contents such as natural scenes are similarly represented in alpha activity. Here, we answer this question by decoding the contents of imagined scenes from rhythmic cortical activity patterns. In an EEG experiment, participants imagined natural scenes based on detailed written descriptions, which conveyed four complementary scene properties: openness, naturalness, clutter level and brightness. By conducting classification analyses on EEG power patterns across neural frequencies, we were able to decode both individual imagined scenes as well as their properties from the alpha band, showing that also the contents of complex visual images are represented in alpha rhythms. A cross-classification analysis between alpha power patterns during the imagery task and during a perception task, in which participants were presented images of the described scenes, showed that scene representations in the alpha band are partly shared between imagery and late stages of perception. This suggests that alpha activity mediates the top-down re-activation of scene-related visual contents during imagery.

The Role of Implicit Memory in the Development and Recovery from Trauma-Related Disorders.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is a chronic condition that occurs following a traumatic experience. Information processing models of PTSD focus on integrating situationally triggered sensory-emotional memories with consciously accessible autobiographical memories. Review of the nature of implicit memory supports the view that sensory-emotional memories are implicit in nature. Dissociation was also found to be associated with the development and severity of PTSD, as well as deficits in autobiographical memory. Moreover, disorganized attachment (DA) was associated with greater degrees of dissociation and PTSD, and like the defining neural activation in PTSD, was found to be associated with basal ganglia activity. In addition, subcortical neuroception of safety promotes a neurophysiological substrate supportive of social engagement and inhibition of fear-based responses. Furthermore, activation of representations of co-created imagined scenes of safety and secure attachment are associated with increases in this neurophysiological substrate. Repeated priming of secure attachment imagery was associated with modification of internal working models of DA along with reductions in dissociation and recovery from complex PTSD. In conclusion, it is posited that adequate recovery from extensive trauma experiences requires more than conscious elaboration of traumatic autobiographical memories and that the application of implicit nonconscious memory modification strategies will facilitate more optimal recovery.

Evidence for reinstating diverse episodic contexts in retrieval-based learning

ABSTRACT The episodic context account suggests that retrieval practice effects depend on reinstating the encoding context during retrieval practice and during subsequent recall attempts. Support for the proposed role of reinstating context has primarily depended on investigations highlighting the salience of temporal context. We examined whether reinstating real and imagined environmental encoding contexts, in addition to temporal context, may underlie retrieval-based learning. In experiments 1-3, participants studied lists of words presented along with environmental scenes or imagined scenes and then, during a second presentation of the words by themselves, either restudied the words or performed a context retrieval task. Free recall of the words was enhanced in all of the context retrieval conditions relative to restudy and the organisation of free recall depended on the type of context retrieved. These findings extend support for the episodic context account by showing that the reinstatement of diverse encoding contexts may underlie retrieval-based learning.

Phenomenological, Epistemological, and Integrative Perspectives on the Case of "Sean"

This article presents my response to commentaries on my case of (Garrett, 2020) by Louis Sass and Jamie Walkup (2020), and by Paul Wachtel (2020). In my response to the Sass and Walkup commentary, I underscore what I consider their very astute observation that Sean seems to be aware that he himself can place Megan in a mental space where he relates to her, in which case she is an object of his subjectivity closely allied with his imagination, while he does not have the same experience of placing the CoF in an imagined scene because they are expressions of his own subjectivity rather than being objects of his subjectivity. Elsewhere in their commentary Sass and Walkup argue that delusions are not simply mistaken truth statements about the world (a view I share), which they believe might not be expected to respond to CBT techniques that examine beliefs. However, I think their emphasis of this point may have led them to a less than fully accurate account of my approach to and use of CBT, which I attempt to correct in my response. I also show why I believe some the Sean’s awareness of his situation was a hard-won result of his treatment rather than a precursor to his psychotherapy. And I respond to their speculation that Sean might more properly be diagnosed as having a delusional disorder, a sentiment I do not share. I also question the validity of the diagnosis of schizophrenia and say why I prefer the more open-ended descriptor psychosis. Wachtel's commentary reflects the observations of an experienced clinician thinking about psychotherapy process. He understands what I am trying to do, and at times articulates the clinical process with Sean with greater clarity and in a wider context than would occur to me in my own words. His observations allow me to expand upon several points here. Specifically, (a) I acknowledge the lack of more information about Sean’s family as an important limitation in the therapy; (b) I expand my description of the way in which I try to listen to patients and conduct psychotherapy; (c) I underscore Wachtel's observation that the primary conflict that appears in psychotic symptoms may be Oedipal (although this is not always so); (d) I agree with and elaborate Wachtel’s idea that the past is not discovered in psychotherapy like a woolly mammoth unearthed in frozen tundra, but rather the past speaks through a living host that shapes its voice; and (e) I describe in more detail how the therapy process allowed me to over time to find a common language in the phrases guilt loop and guilt work in a way that advanced the therapy.

The Plateau by Maggie Paxson

Reviewed by: The Plateau by Maggie Paxson Patrick Henry Paxson, Maggie. The Plateau. Riverhead, 2019. ISBN 978-1-59463-475-8. Pp. 358. Paxson's book studies the Vivarais-Lignon plateau where thousands of Jews were hidden during the Shoah. It focuses on one of the rescuers, Daniel Trocmé, who was related to the author. It follows him to the village where he took charge of two homes, for children (Les Grillons) and young adults (La Maison des Roches), and after his arrest, to Majdanek, the extermination camp where he died in 1944. As the book follows Trocmé, it also studies the rescue work being done on the plateau today, where refugees fleeing war and persecution from Yemen, Kosovo, Chechnya, Syria, and several African countries are welcomed just as the people living on the plateau during the Nazi plague welcomed the Jews who came looking for a safe place to hide. Paxson [End Page 228] is interested in collective memory and she follows these two time periods in some depth. She also explains that people living on this plateau hid victims of the religious wars during the sixteenth century and once again Catholic priests during the Revolution. How did this happen? The inhabitants were able to see other human beings as human beings, not as Jews or African refugees. They were individual human beings first. Nothing external to their fundamental humanity made them more or less worthy of welcome and rescue. This came through when Pastor André Trocmé, Daniel's cousin, was asked by Vichy officials to turn over the list of Jews hiding in the area. He replied: "We don't know Jews. We only know men" (311). Paxson's book is beautifully written, often poetic. Even though it contains many imagined scenes, it never violates the history it portrays. She follows Daniel to the place where he died, and we find her, late in the book, looking for a stone to leave in his memory and a place to leave it. Many readers will have to hold back their tears at the end of the book when Maggie places a clay-colored stone where two branches meet in the carob tree planted in Daniel's honor in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. When Daniel wrote to his parents to explain to them why he had decided to go to the plateau to do this rescue work rather than complete his doctorate as they would have preferred, he said that the work he was going to do would be "part of the reconstruction of the world" (318). Paxson shows subtly but clearly that, both then and now, reconstruction of the world is made possible and begins with children. Perhaps this is why Saint-Exupéry (whose plane disappeared three months after Daniel died) seems so omnipresent in this study where he is mentioned only on a couple of occasions. Trocmé, the people on the plateau, and Paxson herself epitomize two truths that are central to Le petit prince: "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur" and "L'essentiel est invisible aux yeux." Patrick Henry Whitman College (WA), emeritus Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Reviewed by: Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips Joel Lidov Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips (eds.). Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 315. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880582-3. The editors invite us to consider how we can appreciate the "literary" character of archaic Greek poetry. They open with a quote from Bowra that expresses his enthusiasm for the pleasure given by Sappho's artistry, emotional and imaginative power, and her exceptional character, and they suggest that, however out-of-date, it points our attention to the ways in which poetry fascinates, engages, challenges, and changes us when we experience it as audiences or readers. They urge such an appreciation as a complement to what they consider the now dominant "anthropological paradigm" (3; it includes the "New Historicism"), which focuses on the social function of performance and which they and other contributors associate especially with Bruno Gentili. Some contributors place themselves more in opposition to what Mark Payne defines as the paradigm's "characteristic hermeneutic position . . . the assumption that the discursive ambitions of Greek lyric poetry were so radically constrained by their original performance context that valid interpretation consists solely in relating them to that context" (257). The apologetics for different methods can seem excessive or unnecessary, but I found particularly valuable Anna Uhlig's extended critique (chapter 3). She starts from an analysis of the confusion of context and content in interpretations of Alcaeus's maritime poem as metaphors for the symposium, and then demonstrates the weaknesses of the scholarly justification and of the historicist argument in the allegorical mode central to Gentili's thesis. All eleven contributors respond to the editors' call for an investigation of the audience's encounter with lyric—the "event" of the title—with distinctive theses and emphases, and they select a variety of proof texts for illustration. Two overlapping procedures are recurrent. One looks at the internal dynamics of a poem: the relation among its parts rather than between the poem and its context, and the ways it draws the audience's attention to its status as a constructed object. The other rebuts a corollary of the performance paradigm, that a reperformance of a written text requires an interpretation different from the original. I will mention here the chapters I found most broadly useful. The first section of the book, "Occasionality," emphasizes the problem of context. Uhlig supplements her critique of previous theory with a "superficial" reading in which Alcaeus's attention to detail in imagined scenes creates a compelling "maritime aesthetics." The sea's mobility and the poems' lack of specific geographical position provide, by contrast and similarity, a means of expressing various experiences of terrestrial life. Gregory Hutchinson takes on the question of a poem's "setting," the internal placement often used as an index of its context. He demonstrates how writers in fact alter the setting within the poem as an expressive device, and illustrates this with insightful readings of Alcaeus and Horace. Somewhat oddly, he takes his readings as a prompt to propose that we [End Page 223] look for those "underlying features and forms" (132) that make literary analysis possible as if this were a new thing. The second section, "Conceptual Contexts," looks to implicit literary history. Henry Spelman's study, one rich in implications for the history of texts, takes on the core problem of reperformance. Starting with the poet's self-presentation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, he demonstrates how it illustrates the way in which a lyric, even one which must have had an original presentation, presents itself as an instance in a tradition of performances, making the distinction between an original and later readings moot. Tom Phillips, in a dense reading, takes up the opening description of the terror of a past eclipse as if it were present in Paean 9, and the shift to a mythic narrative and prayer. He teases apart the multiple voices inherent in the poetic language that alert the audience to the paean's artistic expansion of the tradition of eclipse poems and to its own...

A House That Once Was by J. Fogliano

Fogliano, Julie. A House That Once Was. Illustrated by Lane Smith, Roaring Brook Press, 2018. 
 This is a picture book that remarks upon the curiosity and imagination of childhood exploration. The setting is an abandoned house in a forest that is found by two adventuring children. Although there is no dialogue between the characters, the narrator guides the reader through the possibilities of a house that was once a home. Who once lived in this lost and lonely house?
 The writing is done in free verse and could easily be read as a poem independent of the images. However, the illustrations extend the meaning of the text and give further imaginative options of the people who may have lived in the house. The stealthy reader will find many clues into the lives of the past homeowners. 
 Lane Smith’s illustrations have been done in two different media as a way to differentiate between current day and imagined past moments in time. The current day images are created with India ink drawings on colourful blotted backgrounds giving the scenes a washed, muted feeling. In contrast, the artwork in the imagined scenes are done in a mixed media with oil painting and paper collage elements.
 The reader may experience a mixture of feelings while experiencing this book. One may feel despondent for the old house lost in the forest with a story to tell, a house that has been abandoned and forgotten. However, the reader may become encouraged to grow their own imagination and bloom a narration of what could have been. This book would be a lovely addition to any home, school, or public library and would be a joy to share with elementary aged children in order to encourage conversation and imagination. 
 Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Lisa Olson
 Lisa is a University of Alberta undergraduate student completing her Elementary Education program and a graduate of the Athabasca University Bachelor of Arts program. She loves to dive into a good book and binge read until it is complete.

Music enhances activity in the hypothalamus, brainstem, and anterior cerebellum during script-driven imagery of affective scenes

Music is frequently used to establish atmosphere and to enhance/alter emotion in dramas and films. During music listening, visual imagery is a common mechanism underlying emotion induction. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study examined the neural substrates of the emotional processing of music and imagined scene. A factorial design was used with factors emotion valence (positive; negative) and music (withoutMUSIC: script-driven imagery of emotional scenes; withMUSIC: script-driven imagery of emotional scenes and simultaneously listening to affectively congruent music). The baseline condition was imagery of neutral scenes in the absence of music. Eleven females and five males participated in this fMRI study. Behavioural data revealed that during scene imagery, participants’ subjective emotions were significantly intensified by music. The contrasts of positive and negative withoutMUSIC conditions minus the baseline (imagery of neutral scenes) showed no significant activation. When comparing the withMUSIC to withoutMUSIC conditions, activity in a number of emotion-related regions was observed, including the temporal pole (TP), amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, anterior ventral tegmental area (VTA), locus coeruleus, and anterior cerebellum. We hypothesized that the TP may integrate music and the imagined scene to extract socioemotional significance, initiating the subcortical structures to generate subjective feelings and bodily responses. For the withMUSIC conditions, negative emotions were associated with enhanced activation in the posterior VTA compared to positive emotions. Our findings replicated and extended previous research which suggests that different subregions of the VTA are sensitive to rewarding and aversive stimuli. Taken together, this study suggests that emotional music embedded in an imagined scenario is a salient social signal that prompts preparation of approach/avoidance behaviours and emotional responses in listeners.

Neural responses to heartbeats distinguish self from other during imagination

Imagination is an internally-generated process, where one can make oneself or other people appear as protagonists of a scene. How does the brain tag the protagonist of an imagined scene as being oneself or someone else? Crucially, during imagination, neither external stimuli nor motor feedback are available to disentangle imagining oneself from imagining someone else. Here, we test the hypothesis that an internal mechanism based on the neural monitoring of heartbeats could distinguish between self and other. 23 participants imagined themselves (from a first-person perspective) or a friend (from a third-person perspective) in various scenarios, while their brain activity was recorded with magnetoencephalography and their cardiac activity was simultaneously monitored. We measured heartbeat-evoked responses, i.e. transients of neural activity occurring in response to each heartbeat, during imagination. The amplitude of heartbeat-evoked responses differed between imagining oneself and imagining a friend, in the precuneus and posterior cingulate regions bilaterally. Effect size was modulated by the daydreaming frequency scores of participants but not by their interoceptive abilities. These results could not be accounted for by other characteristics of imagination (e.g., the ability to adopt the perspective, valence or arousal), nor by cardiac parameters (e.g., heart rate) or arousal levels (e.g. arousal ratings, pupil diameter). Heartbeat-evoked responses thus appear as a neural marker distinguishing self from other during imagination.

The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge

Reviewed by: The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge Julia McCord Chavez (bio) Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), pp. v + 331, $85.00 hardcover. The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier, by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, provides illuminating new answers to a foundational question for Victorian periodical studies: “How does the form of the illustrated Victorian serial novel invite readers to read?” (2). Drawing upon an impressive range of archival research and invoking an eclectic set of case studies that range from canonical works such as David Copperfield (May 1849–November 1850) and The Small House at Allington (September 1862–April 1864) to lesser-examined works such as The Tower of London (January–December 1840), Griffith Gaunt (December 1865–November 1866), and Peter Ibbetson (June–December 1891), Leighton and Surridge convincingly argue that images and letterpress in Victorian serial fiction most often function as coequal modes of representation that “impel reflective and complex reading strategies” (50). Anchoring their analysis in narratology, the theory of how fiction is narrated, Leighton and Surridge demonstrate that illustration does more than simply picture a novel’s text; instead, images add complexity and “thicken” serial plots by infusing Victorian novels with a second source of narrative influence (19). Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of The Plot Thickens, and this is reflected in an astute methodology that embraces historical, materialist, and formalist approaches to the illustrated Victorian serial. The introductory chapter, “Material Matters,” provides a detailed history of the developing technologies of book illustration (from steel etchings and engravings [End Page 806] to wood engravings to photomechanical reproduction); an overview of the Victorian literary marketplace informed by the work of Robert L. Patten, Brian Maidment, Julia Thomas, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Catherine Golden, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, and others; and a new theoretical lens for reading serial illustration. The innovative application of narratology to images as well as letterpress is a significant contribution to the field of periodical studies because it provides a precise vocabulary for describing verbal-visual relationships. As Leighton and Surridge point out, “Narratological terms—such as prolepsis, analepsis, mimesis, diegesis, iteration, repetition, and extradiegesis—can help us to identify and understand these complex relationships between visual and verbal plots” (20). The remaining chapters of the book, grouped by genre, apply narratological analysis to representative texts from the birth of the format in the 1830s through the waning of the serial novel during the fin de siècle. The first chapter focuses on the genre of autobiography through two case studies: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, illustrated by Hablot K. Browne, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phyllis (November 1863–February 1864), illustrated by George Du Maurier. Analyzing the representation of reading and the presence of word pictures within these illustrated serials, Leighton and Surridge argue that “the technology of the illustrated book became a potent metaphor for inner life, memory, and self making” (53). Historical serial fiction is the focus of chapter two, which examines The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth with illustrations by George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray’s self-illustrated Vanity Fair (January 1847–July 1848), and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Looking specifically at the two dominant modes of visual historical representation—metaphorical and metonymic—the authors argue that the illustrations in each example interact with the letterpress to produce a distinctive theorization of historical change. The Tower of London uses metonymic wood engravings, for example, to inspire readers to preserve national monuments. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, “deploys verbal and visual sign systems to play ironically with both imagined scenes and metonymic representations of the past” (95). Even two different illustrated versions of the same novel, in the case of A Tale of Two Cities, provide contrasting visions of history. The American version in Harper’s Weekly (May 7–December 3, 1859), illustrated by John McLenan, uses “matching mimesis” to create for readers “an illusion of immediacy and immersion in history” (95). In contrast...

In the mind's eye: The late positive potential to negative and neutral mental imagery and intolerance of uncertainty.

There are many advantages to human beings' ability to generate and sustain mental imagery in the absence of exteroceptive stimuli; however, this ability may also underlie emotional disorders characterized by worry, rumination, or excessive concern about the future. For instance, fear-based disorders may be characterized by heightened ERPs to negative imagery. On the other hand, distress disorders may be characterized by attempts to avoid engaging with negative mental imagery, and therefore reduced electrocortical response. Prior ERP work has used negative and neutral pictorial stimuli to establish the parameters of response in healthy individuals, before taking these paradigms to clinical samples to assess aberrant emotion processing. Yet despite its clinical relevance, no study to date has elicited a late positive potential (LPP), a robust measure of emotion processing, to standardized negative imagined scenes. Here, participants listened to audio descriptions of negative and neutral scenes, and were asked to imagine these scenes as vividly as possible. Results showed that negative imagined scenes elicited an increased LPP, lasting approximately 10 s after audio description offset, as well as heightened ratings of arousal and unpleasantness. Moreover, participants with greater self-reported cognitive concerns about uncertain future events (higher prospective intolerance of uncertainty) showed reduced emotional modulation of the LPP. These data provide the first evidence of sustained electrocortical processing of standardized negative imagery elicited in the absence of salient visual cues, and suggest that cognitive risk for anxiety in an unselected sample may be represented phenotypically by blunted LPPs to negative imagery.

Sound, Space and Bodies: Building Relations in the Work of Invisible Flock and Atelier Bildraum

In this article, I discuss sounds potential to construct fictional spaces and build relations between bodies using two performance installations as case studies. The first is Invisible Flock’s 105+dB, a site-specific sound work which transports crowd recordings of a soccer match to alternative geographical locations. The second is Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum, an installation performance using live photography, architectural models and ambient sound. By writing through these two works, I question how sound builds relations between bodies and across space as well as questioning the role of site within sound installation works.

Medial Prefrontal-Medial Temporal Theta Phase Coupling in Dynamic Spatial Imagery.

Hippocampal-medial prefrontal interactions are thought to play a crucial role in mental simulation. Notably, the frontal midline/medial pFC (mPFC) theta rhythm in humans has been linked to introspective thought and working memory. In parallel, theta rhythms have been proposed to coordinate processing in the medial temporal cortex, retrosplenial cortex (RSc), and parietal cortex during the movement of viewpoint in imagery, extending their association with physical movement in rodent models. Here, we used noninvasive whole-head MEG to investigate theta oscillatory power and phase-locking during the 18-sec postencoding delay period of a spatial working memory task, in which participants imagined previously learned object sequences either on a blank background (object maintenance), from a first-person viewpoint in a scene (static imagery), or moving along a path past the objects (dynamic imagery). We found increases in 4- to 7-Hz theta power in mPFC when comparing the delay period with a preencoding baseline. We then examined whether the mPFC theta rhythm was phase-coupled with ongoing theta oscillations elsewhere in the brain. The same mPFC region showed significantly higher theta phase coupling with the posterior medial temporal lobe/RSc for dynamic imagery versus either object maintenance or static imagery. mPFC theta phase coupling was not observed with any other brain region. These results implicate oscillatory coupling between mPFC and medial temporal lobe/RSc theta rhythms in the dynamic mental exploration of imagined scenes.

Wasteland: A History by Vittoria Di Palma (review)

Reviewed by: Wasteland: A History by Vittoria Di Palma Izabel Gass Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Pp. 280. $45.00. From present-day descriptions of nuclear disposal sites to T. S. Eliot’s paragon of Modernist verse, the term “wasteland” evokes real and imagined scenes of devastation wholly resonant with the modern age. This enduring cultural trope is a product of the Enlightenment era, when physical landscapes were first categorized as “waste” and their “improvement” proposed. Vittoria Di Palma’s book charts the history of the concept of “wasteland” as it was developed in seventeenth- through eighteenth-century England, Scotland, and Wales. Wasteland: A History is a major achievement: meticulously researched, theoretically nuanced, and written in lucid, sensitive prose. The book’s first two chapters set forth a general history of wasteland, focusing on its seventeenth-century genesis, while the three following chapters provide case studies of specific wasteland typologies in the long eighteenth century. Throughout the book, Di Palma locates wasteland at the intersection of two discourses: theories of land use and the aesthetics of disgust. The seventeenth century witnessed an increasing tendency to value land according to its agricultural utility, an outlook symptomatic of the burgeoning enclosure movement and Enlightenment thought espoused by Francis Bacon and John Locke. This led to the designation of land as “waste” if it was unused, unusable, or “incorrectly” used (for proponents of enclosure, this last category included unenclosed or common land). Yet agricultural reform is only one piece of wasteland’s history. Equally crucial to its definition was the period sense of disgust, the idea that certain terrains were inherently repulsive to the senses: noxious, misshapen, or putrid, for example. Building on the work of several authors who have analyzed disgust—including, to name but a few, Mary Douglas, Aurel Kolnai, and Winfried Menninghaus—Di Palma reveals disgust to be a social and moral concept as much as an aesthetic one. The dovetailing of these two discourses is deftly portrayed in each of Di Palma’s case studies, in which specific landscapes are identified as both useless and disgusting. This nuanced framing of wasteland’s definition accounts for one of the book’s major strengths: it offers a fully interdisciplinary account of its subject that unites political, scientific, and economic history with the history of aesthetics, art, architecture, and landscape design. [End Page 311] The first chapter traces the early modern sense of the term “wasteland” to the 1611 King James Bible, where it signified land made barren through an act of God’s wrath. Redemption could be found through the cultivation of this wasteland, thus establishing an enduring set of cultural associations “between wasteland and the moral cycle of condemnation, devastation, atonement, and redemption” (19). Mythic wasteland would come to find real-world correlatives beginning in the later seventeenth century: for example, in John Bunyan’s influential The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Bunyan’s protagonist, the pilgrim Christian, journeys through an ominous landscape, navigating such biblical wastelands as “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and other terrains demanding physical and moral fortitude, including “The Slough of Despond” and “The Hill of Difficulty.” Yet Christian’s allegorical journey was in fact modeled on the actual route from Bedford south to London, containing many allusions to familiar territory. The Pilgrim’s Progress thus helped to popularize the notion that wasteland existed within England’s own physical landscape. Defining and “improving” such real-world wastelands became a preoccupying cultural imperative. The notion of attaining salvation through the cultivation of land would become bound up with worldly demands for material productivity. John Locke’s defense of private property in his Two Treatises of Government (1690) offers a representative case of the confounding of religious ideas with economic interests in agricultural production—including the call for land enclosure—common to discussions of wasteland. For Locke, unenclosed (common) land left in its natural state constituted “waste,” as did improperly cultivated enclosed land. Only through proper agricultural labor could a landowner acquire both wealth and spiritual salvation. According to Di Palma, Locke’s understanding of land in its natural state as “waste,” and agricultural labor as the divinely sanctioned...

Reward and Novelty Enhance Imagination of Future Events in a Motivational-Episodic Network.

Thinking about personal future events is a fundamental cognitive process that helps us make choices in daily life. We investigated how the imagination of episodic future events is influenced by implicit motivational factors known to guide decision making. In a two-day functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we controlled learned reward association and stimulus novelty by pre-familiarizing participants with two sets of words in a reward learning task. Words were repeatedly presented and consistently followed by monetary reward or no monetary outcome. One day later, participants imagined personal future events based on previously rewarded, unrewarded and novel words. Reward association enhanced the perceived vividness of the imagined scenes. Reward and novelty-based construction of future events were associated with higher activation of the motivational system (striatum and substantia nigra/ ventral tegmental area) and hippocampus, and functional connectivity between these areas increased during imagination of events based on reward-associated and novel words. These data indicate that implicit past motivational experience contributes to our expectation of what the future holds in store.

Image of a Man and the Universe in Kazakh and Mongol Myths

Myth can be defined in three ways: 1) ancient fable, story; 2) creation of myth, mythological cosmic genesis; 3) historically, culturally symbolized peculiar state of mind. Along with information about creation of the universe, animals, plants and humankind, myths transfer significant information about vital events in the history of mankind. It always informs us about ‘creation’ of something, it always informs us of how something happened. In myth we stay in the initial origins of some creations. In mythological time and space continuum there is no any borders between a man and the universe. Words and actions of mythological character are in syncretic and in unified feature. Power which realizes its unity is peculiar system of customs and traditions. At the age of unity of mythology of the person with the nature it was highly appreciated.Interlacement of the different cultures and worlds, intersection of different time lines, alternation of unbelievable and imagined scenes with the scenes of true life are appearances of mythological consciousness.

Edward Hopper’s Drawings

Edward Hopper’s Drawings Carter E. Foster (bio) Those who confront the awkwardness, illogic, and irrationality common in the figures and spaces of Edward Hopper’s paintings sometimes read such qualities as evidence of a lack of skill. Though praising him, critic Clement Greenberg famously called him a “bad painter,” a moniker that his reputation has never fully shaken, even among some who admire his art. But the evidence of Hopper’s drawings, which are relatively little-known, argues differently (as does close attention to his actual painting technique). On paper, his abundant skill is directly apparent, particularly in his virtuoso ability to tease subtle tonal effects from chalk and charcoal. The groups of related drawn studies that exist for many of his painted compositions reflect the long gestation period typical for a single oil—the drawings a partial record of a thought process, much of which also occurred intangibly in Hopper’s mind. The subtle anxiety and the narrative and social tensions that are hallmarks of Hopper’s achievement are qualities he worked out carefully in drawing; he arrived at formal disjunctions, strange torsions, and artificial spaces to underscore and enhance his taut psychological confrontations and atmospheres of disquietude. One need only look at the evolution of his subjects in drawing to see how aware Hopper was of what he was doing. It is far more useful to consider the precise nature of Hopper’s subtle expressionistic distortion, deployed with keen and precise control. It is astonishing how much of Hopper’s full artistic personality is here in this very early sheet (Figure 1), drawn at the New York Academy of Art when he was barely out of adolescence. He makes [End Page 206] life class more than that, setting up tension and voyeuristic frisson by aligning the spectator’s view with that of a classmate’s, the female nude model in between. Hopper’s supreme ability to create mood and atmosphere with light is fully evolved already, his manipulation of charcoal and exploitation of paper texture a means for extraordinarily subtle tonal effects. Hopper’s first trip to Paris over the winter-spring of 1906–7 yielded at least two sketchbooks, filled with rapid, fluid pen and ink observations of cafe and street life (Figure 2). The intermingling of accurate observation and caricature shows the artist’s interest in nineteenth century graphic art. His sharp, quick capturing of essences is appropriate to this medium—pen and ink resists less than chalk or charcoal and requires more certainty, as it cannot be changed. Hopper would never use pen and ink extensively as he got older, favoring black chalk and charcoal almost exclusively. Between 1920 and 1925, Hopper regularly attended life class at the Whitney Studio Club, focusing on the posed nude model and producing hundreds of drawings in the genre (Figure 3). He never again returned to studying the nude human figure with such consistent attention. Perhaps this self-imposed, concentrated self-pedagogy in the human form solidified a comfortable mastery in how to best deploy nuance of pose and gesture, a skill he mined for the rest of his career. Hopper made a clear conceptual distinction between working from direct observation—“from the fact,” and creating imagined scenes—”improvising.” His watercolors were always in the former category, directly executed outdoors from scenes Hopper carefully chose, and a group of finished chalk and charcoal drawings form a striking, monochromatic parallel in drawing. With its classical balance of verticals and diagonals and industrial subject, in this sheet (Figure 4) Hopper comes as close as he ever would to the American movement known as Precisionism; this drawing strikingly anticipates aspects of Charles Sheeler’s definitive industrial-themed canvases from the early 1930s. [End Page 207] Though seemingly slight, Hopper’s fire hydrant deftly records nuance of light and texture through the careful balance of blended, blurred chalk marks pushed into the paper support underneath crisply applied, sharper strokes (Figure 5). The artist adapted the hydrant into a symbolic protagonist in the painted masterpiece with which this is associated, a work devoid of people but rich with anthropomorphic allusion. In these three studies for New York Movie (Figure 6, 7, 8) we...

Scene construction in developmental amnesia: An fMRI study

Amnesic patients with bilateral hippocampal damage sustained in adulthood are generally unable to construct scenes in their imagination. By contrast, patients with developmental amnesia (DA), where hippocampal damage was acquired early in life, have preserved performance on this task, although the reason for this sparing is unclear. One possibility is that residual function in remnant hippocampal tissue is sufficient to support basic scene construction in DA. Such a situation was found in the one amnesic patient with adult-acquired hippocampal damage (P01) who could also construct scenes. Alternatively, DA patients’ scene construction might not depend on the hippocampus, perhaps being instead reliant on non-hippocampal regions and mediated by semantic knowledge. To adjudicate between these two possibilities, we examined scene construction during functional MRI (fMRI) in Jon, a well-characterised patient with DA who has previously been shown to have preserved scene construction. We found that when Jon constructed scenes he activated many of the regions known to be associated with imagining scenes in control participants including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, retrosplenial and posterior parietal cortices. Critically, however, activity was not increased in Jon's remnant hippocampal tissue. Direct comparisons with a group of control participants and patient P01, confirmed that they activated their right hippocampus more than Jon. Our results show that a type of non-hippocampal dependent scene construction is possible and occurs in DA, perhaps mediated by semantic memory, which does not appear to involve the vivid visualisation of imagined scenes.

Jane, the Fox & Me by Fanny Britt (review)

Reviewed by: Jane, the Fox & Me by Fanny Britt Karen Coats Britt, Fanny Jane, the Fox & Me; tr. from French by Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou ; illus. by Isabelle Arsenault. Groundwood, 2013 101p ISBN 978-1-55498-360-5 $19.95 R* Gr. 5-8 Combining picture-book size and style with graphic-novel narrative sensibility, this elegant Canadian import chronicles the experiences of Hélène, a sensitive junior-high outcast shunned and bullied by girls who were once her friends. She takes refuge in her reading of Jane Eyre, hoping that she, like Jane, can emerge out of difficult circumstances into a slender, wise woman whom people admire. For now, though, the mean girls tease her for being fat, a judgment that is belied by both the illustrations as well as by her doctor in the end, but one that she takes to heart as she looks in the mirror and tries on bathing suits for the class camping trip. The camping trip lives up to all of her fears at first, as she bunks with the other social outcasts and gets tormented by the mean girls, but two nice things do happen: she has a transformative encounter with a fox, and a new girl named Géraldine rejects the mean girls and becomes her friend. Hélène’s emotional tangle is given poignant expression through Arsenault’s pitch-perfect mixed-media art; thin pencil-lined figures picked out against smudgy neutral grays and muted sepia tones highlight both the sharp-edged sources and limned echoes of Hélène’s everyday sadness, while the depictions of her imagined scenes from Jane Eyre are cleaner and more colorful, bringing in reds and greens, and even on occasion exploding into luminous watercolor landscapes. The contrast is striking and sets up the almost mystical tone of the encounter with the fox, who stands out in the red previously reserved for Hélène’s imaginary connection with Jane. The gradual emergence, accompanied by a progressively friendlier font style, into the full-color bloom of the final spread, assures readers that Hélène’s inner and outer worlds have been reconciled into a happier and more hopeful place. Hélène’s story is sweetly comforting and compelling on its own merits, and, as with Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (BCCB 1/08), the form in which it is presented also has value for those interested in analyzing and understanding the full aesthetic potential of the graphic-novel format in storytelling. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Exploring the role of space-defining objects in constructing and maintaining imagined scenes

It has recently been observed that certain objects, when viewed or imagined in isolation, evoke a strong sense of three-dimensional local space surrounding them (space-defining (SD) objects), while others do not (space-ambiguous (SA) objects), and this is associated with engagement of the parahippocampal cortex (PHC). But activation of the PHC is classically associated with scene stimuli. The comparable neural response within PHC to both full scenes and single SD objects, led us to hypothesise that SD objects might play a more critical role in the construction and maintenance of scene representations than SA objects. To test this we used scene construction and deconstruction paradigms, where participants gradually built and maintained scenes using SD, SA and background (wall, floors) items. By examining the order in which each item was added (and later removed) to (and from) a scene, we could estimate the significance of each item type. In two different experiments, participants chose SD over SA objects and background items as the first and most critical item in their constructed scenes and, more generally, selected SD objects earlier than SA objects across the scene construction process. When deconstructing scenes, participants retained significantly more SD objects than SA objects, and the last remaining object across all scenes was highly likely to be an SD object. SD objects therefore enjoy a privileged role in scene construction and maintenance, and appear to be an essential building block of scenes.