Rededication

[hrj]

In response to an LJ friend's asking whether people were still reading things over hear, I took a look at my recent posting history and discovered that I've been averaging something like one post a week. Wow. Not good. It honestly isn't that I'm posting all my good stuff in The Other Place (*cough* FB *cough*) because I really do only natter on about trivial everyday things there. I think in my case it's more that the rhythms of my life have shifted to fill in the spaces when I might otherwise have been writing journal entries. During the week, my lunch hour is dedicated to the gym, and while I do a lot of writing on my commute it's all on fiction projects. There may also be a bit of a mental hurdle to get over in that I've started thinking of LJ as where I do "blog-like entries" for which I set a certain expectation of thoughtfulness and care. (Even my own tolerance is limited for entries that focus on "wow, just one year ago, here's where I was in my house selling/buying/moving process". Oh, and on that note, "Wow, just one year ago I finished the final cleaning of my empty place in Oakland and had moved in to kahnegabs's spare room to start my life in Concord!")

So I herewith rededicate myself to posting thoughtful, substantive things on LJ on a more frequent schedule than once a week. (I'm not sure I want to set myself a specific goal.) This may well involve recycling content from other venues (little research projects, essays, whatnot). But I really do enjoy the content that LJ still has -- and, in fact, I sometimes think that it's become a more interesting place to read what with a lot of the ephemeral stuff moving elsewhere. And I've been coasting on other people's support of that content for a bit too long now.

* * *

So to make this post more than meta, here's a little essay I posted back in 2000 to some SCA mailing list or other on the topic of "neural (re)programming" for historic ambience enjoyment in the SCA. The post was in response to someone who was wondering whether it really mattered that she'd made a fuss in a local sewing workshop she was hosting about playing medieval music as background rather than "heavy classics" (the specific piece mentioned was by Grieg). My response:

* * *

In a sort-of sideways manner, I think it does matter (positively) that you did what you did, but it may take a roundabout discussion to show where I'm coming from.

I've been developing this theory of "emotional resonance" for discussing certain aspects of why things "work" or "don't work" for particular people in the SCA, and some day I hope to wrap it all up as an extended essay, but in the meantime here is the basic outline of ...

The Neural-Programming Theory of Historic Re-Creation

The essence of "nostalgia" is that certain sensory stimuli are able to evoke within our brains the context and circumstances in which we have previously experienced those stimuli. So when we hear a song on the radio that was extremely popular when we were in High School, we aren't simply hearing a particular song, our memories are stimulated to recall all the other experiences we've ever had while listening to that song. When you indulge in that "comfort food" of your childhood -- the dish your mother always served you when you needed cheering up -- your brain pulls up all the attendent sensations and experiences, of being loved and fussed over
and feeling cared for.

I'm not talking about some sort of "woo-woo" mystic connection here, but rather looking at the phenomenon from the point of view of cognitive neural theory, one aspect of which looks at the ways we understand and manipulate concepts due to the relatively "coincidental" neural connections made when we experience certain stimuli simultaneously.

So what does this have to do with the reason why the newcomer in your shire desperately wants to wear the dress in that movie she just saw and is indifferent to all the books of Renaissance portraiture you've been showing her? And what does it have to do with the reason why people will hang on every word of the 20-minute-long "Alice's Restaurant" filk and yawn for a two-minute sonnet?

The relevance is that one of each pair has come with pre-existing neural connections that make it a richer emotional experience. The dresses in the portraits are all just pictures in a book -- the dress in the movie is an entire story, with love and adventure pre-attached. The sonnet
comes with a half-remembered English literature class attached, but the filk comes with a smokey coffee-house and the frisson of '60s anti-establishment counter-culture.

And the ultimate truth is that these differences in "emotional resonance" can't simply be ignored, they have to be worked with. And the only way to establish "emotional resonances" for authentic historic material -- whether music, or clothing, or food, or whatever -- is to expose the experiencers regularly to that historic material in a context that creates pleasant and desirable neural connections for it. That is, you have to "train your brain" to evoke a complex emotional context for historically authentic stimuli, because you don't normally pick it up passively from the surrounding culture. What we pick up passively from the surrounding culture is "Braveheart" and "Camelot".

So the choice of what music CD to have playing in the background of the sewing party -- or what movies to have on the video at the household work party; the choice of what food you eat at events (even when it isn't the fancy banquet); the choice of what art you have around your house; all these are as important as what you do at events in creating that "medieval experience" at events. If you can connect, in people's brains, the idea of having a troubadour playing softly in the background while you gather in the solar ... uh, living room, sewing for coronation .... If you can connect, at a neural level, the experience of poking your head out of the pavilion in the morning, watching the mist rise off the meadow as the children play a quiet game of tag, and smelling the preparation of historic food for breakfast .... If you can take that newcomer and give her all the romance and excitement attached to the dress the woman in that portrait is wearing .... That's the only real and lasting antidote to Hollywood, modern filks, and cheeseburgers at the feast.

[And to extend a bit from what I originally posted ....]

For me, this is why exposing people to "real history" matters so much. The actual middle ages were so much richer and more varied and more unexpected than the version we are fed in modern popular culture. Going beyond the question of "how do you get people to enjoy historic food and music at events", take a listen sometime to how people talk about what is and isn't part of their image of the middle ages. Even if we could eliminate all the purely modern (and Victorian) ideas and archetypes from that image, we'd still be left with a very narrow and patchy vision of the scope of medieval society. The times that I've been involved with helping broaden people's experience -- either purely educationally or by immersing them in new, historically-based activities -- the feedback has always been strongly positive. People are sponges for images, archetypes, and sensory resonances. It isn't enough to bitch about the ones we wish they weren't getting, we need to do our part to expose them to the ones that we want to imprint on their brains. (Yes, I'm advocating deliberate "authenticity brainwashing" of those around us. It works!)

Comments

[ursula]

Neat post!

I've also noticed a bit of content-shifting between lj and dreamwidth: these days, my lj feed is mostly folks I've met in person and my dw page has posts from people I'm reading because they write long essays about books, whereas the two types of material used to be more mixed.

[cbpotts.livejournal.com]

I very much want to talk to you about this more although I'm on chapter deadline right now and sneaking away to read LJ to keep my mind from leaking out of my ears - but have you seen this article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/clothes-and-self-perception.html It is really relevant to your point :-)

[joycebre.livejournal.com]

that's a fascinating study. I'm going to try it with my chef's coat.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

"Embodied cognition" also ties in a lot with the field of linguistics I did my graduate work in. It's intersects with my essay above in the sense that if the "props" we interact with have been imbued with meaning for us, then, in turn, we can draw on that meaning to enhance our experiences. I piece of clothing that has a "story" attached -- and we have to know the story for it to be real -- takes us into the story and lets us inhabit the role. But the props and the story and the role are neutral with regard to "truth". That's where this angle diverges a bit from the linguistic approach I worked with, where the embodiment was concerned with transferring our physical understanding of interacting with the world onto our abstract thought processes. The connections made by the transfer might not be "true" but the source concepts are. In contrast, if you become a medieval princess (in your mind) by putting on a medieval princess dress, it doesn't matter whether the dress has any innate connection with medieval princesses as long as you encountered it as such.

Gah. That's probably incoherent.

[mariedeblois.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing that link! It looks quite neat.