![]() ![]() Connectionism's central argument - influenced by associationism à la David Hume - is that information is stored in between the units of neural networks, that is, among the synaptic connections themselves. The explanatory gaps evoke the connectionist model of cognition, a competing paradigm that fell out of favor in the late 1960s. ![]() Like the "" filled with inscrutable detritus, the collection's poetic objects lack a fixed location or categorization. ![]() The failure of the neat files-and-folders system to adequately capture or explain its objects is an early suggestion that Brain Fever is interested in what exceeds the classical model of cognition. Unlabeled, with no discernable organizing logic, this file's suggestive objects are less objects-in-themselves than an invitation for the reader to contemplate the synapses, or the minute gaps at the "junction between two neurons." 5 Some entries are suspiciously "," while one is mysteriously marked ": Spirit Photograph Exhibit/admit two, lavender lace thong, two flattened Chinese handcuffs" (6). The text opens with computer commands, invoking the digital encoding of memory: This development has been aptly dubbed "the neuroscientific turn" by Science, Technology, and Society (STS) scholars Melissa Littlefield and Jenell Johnson, who point out "the 'neuro,' (whether it refers to the brain or to neuroscience) is a historical object, created and shaped by inquiry." 4īrain Fever initially seems to conform to the classical computational model of cognition, the dominant paradigm of thought that views information processing sequentially and symbolically (analogous to computer data). But a more recent referent of "brain fever" may be the critical frenzy surrounding all things brain or cognition. Today, brain fever has been mostly subsumed into the medical term encephalitis, a generalized description for inflammation of the brain. The term "brain fever" is often associated with the Victorian literature that portrayed it as a severe psychosomatic reaction to an emotional shock, experienced predominantly by women, and whose symptoms are a high fever and delirium. While Hahn's previous works also experiment with Japanese and Chinese poetics, Brain Fever's thematic departure from her earlier collections' focus on natural phenomena reveals a preoccupation with the mechanisms of racial thinking. The collection interlaces quotes from New York Times reportage on neuroscience with idiosyncratic lists in the zuihitsu 3 style of The Pillow Book, Japanese poet Sei Shōnagon's observations and musings on her time spent in the Heian Palace. And it is this ingrained relationship that Kimiko Hahn takes as her entrée to excavate language's relationship to thought in her most recent poetry collection Brain Fever (2014). ![]() If Swanson's words evince a striking yet unsurprising symmetry - people use computer networks to study brains, which are like computer networks - it's because the underlying metaphor of cognition as computation is so naturalized. The Internet has countless local area networks that then connect with larger, regional networks and ultimately with the backbone of the Internet. The cerebral cortex is like a mini-Internet. 1 Larry Swanson, corresponding author and professor at the University of Southern California, summarized the findings by proclaiming, In April 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study analyzing data culled from forty years worth of research on rat brains that produced a macro-level analysis of the cerebral cortex's neural networks. ![]()
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