Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus is a clinically effective tool for treating medically refractory Parkinson’s disease, but its neural mechanisms remain debated. Previous work has demonstrated that STN DBS results in evoked potentials in the primary motor cortex, suggesting that modulation of cortical physiology may be involved in its therapeutic effects. Due to technical challenges presented by high-amplitude DBS artifacts, these EPs are often measured in response to low-frequency stimulation, which is generally ineffective at PD symptom management. This (...) study aims to characterize STN-to-cortex EPs seen during clinically relevant high-frequency STN DBS for PD. Intraoperatively, we applied STN DBS to 6 PD patients while recording electrocorticography from an electrode strip over the ipsilateral central sulcus. Using recently published techniques, we removed large stimulation artifacts to enable quantification of STN-to-cortex EPs. Two cortical EPs were observed – one synchronized with DBS onset and persisting during ongoing stimulation, and one immediately following DBS offset, here termed the “start” and the “end” EPs respectively. The start EP is, to our knowledge, the first long-latency cortical EP reported during ongoing high-frequency DBS. The start and end EPs differ in magnitude and latency, and the end, but not the start, EP magnitude has a significant relationship to ongoing high gamma power during the EP. These contrasts may suggest mechanistic or circuit differences in EP production during the two time periods. This represents a potential framework for relating DBS clinical efficacy to the effects of a variety of stimulation parameters on EPs. (shrink)

To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different (...) cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception. (shrink)

Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home — informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs — perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication — as well as (...) illustrating other meanings and functions that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction. (shrink)

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that i...

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page W4-W7.

In these times of rapid change and constant upheaval, can we learn to think and communicate more effectively-at home, in school, on the job, and as citizens of the larger world? This book (like its predecessor Sensible Thinking for Turbulent Times), which is based on the formulations of general semantics, says yes, yes, and yes! Topics in it include practical ways to improve your thinking ability, emotional self-management, understanding of the media, and analysis of important social issues.

This book, which is based on the formulations of general semantics, offers useful information on a wide variety of topics (e.g., managing stress, enhancing creativity, communicating more effectively). It also provides cogent analysis of social issues (e.g., America's current foreign policy, communication in the internet age); offers ideas to help people be more successful at work (e.g., "How to Become a More Successful Leader," "How to Effectively Manage Your Career"); and includes suggestions to help children be more successful in school (...) (e.g.," Reducing School-Age Bullying," "Anger and Violence Prevention"). (shrink)

Stephen Yablo has attempted recently to revive the notion of contingent identity, identifying this with a relation of L coincidence between objects that are "distinct by nature but the same in the circumstances" (296). Yablo argues convincingly for the need of essentialist metaphysics to recognize some relation of this sort, a relation of "intimate identity-like connections between things" (296) if it is to acknowledge properly the intuitive difference between (i) the nonidentity of a bust B and a hunk of wax (...) H of which it is composed, and (ii) the nonidentity of the hunk H and the Treaty of Versailles. (i) and (ii) are clearly not on the same level. Even though B, like the Treaty of Versailles, fails to be strictly identical to H, it is very closely, and quite specially, related to it. What this relation is is certainly worth a general inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper, I hope to reintroduce debate on the issue of aesthetic supervenience, especially in light of work undertaken by metaphysicians in recent years. After providing a brief walkthrough of some of the major views on supervenience generally, including several important metaphysical distinctions, I build upon views by Jerrold Levinson, John Bender, Nick Zangwill, and Gregory Currie, to develop a realist thesis of strong local supervenience, such that aesthetic properties of artworks and other objects depend upon their formal/structural (...) properties and reduce to powers to produce aesthetic effects of particular kinds in suitable perceivers under suitable conditions. (shrink)

What Is Aesthetic Pleasure? When is pleasure in an object properly denominated aesthetic? The characterization of aesthetic pleasure is something that ...

This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. These highly influential essays are essential reading for debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms.

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics brings the authority, liveliness, and multi-disciplinary scope of the Handbook series to a fascinating theme in philosophy and the arts. Jerrold Levinson has assembled a hugely impressive range of talent to contribute 48 brand-new essays, making this the most comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field. This Handbook will be invaluable to academics and students across philosophy and all branches of the arts, both as the reference work of (...) choice and as a stimulus to new research and creativity. (shrink)

Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not.

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show (...) that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

Responding to calls for more substantive studies into ethical and responsible lobbying, we analyze data collected over a 5-year period in Brussels to explore how individual lobbyists understand the ethical dimensions of their work. Mobilizing insights from the sociology of the professions, we expose an emerging lobbying professionalism and unpack practitioners’ understandings of what being a professional lobbyist entails, focusing in particular on their espoused values of transparency and honesty. While expectations to lobby more transparently and honestly stem from political (...) institutions, we find individual lobbyists—acting as conduits—attempt to disseminate these expectations by setting limits that incite their clients to embrace what policymakers consider professional lobbying practice. Our study contributes to corporate political activity (CPA) scholarship by providing a professions-based understanding of ethical and responsible approaches to lobbying. We provide new insights into contextual and individual-level factors behind the emergence of such approaches, and elucidate implications of lobbying professionalism for business and European Union (EU) governance. (shrink)

Contemplating Art is a compendium of writings from the last ten years by one of the leading figures in aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson. The twenty-four essays range over issues in general aesthetics and those relating to specific arts--in particular music, film, and literature. It will appeal not only to philosophers but also to musicologists, literary theorists, art critics, and reflective lovers of the arts.

Ritual consciousness is an altered state of consciousness that transpires beyond the boundaries of the known and gives rise to a duration referred to as time out of time. This extraordinary duration encompasses three interrelated factors: digital as opposed to analogue conduct of time, tempo and communitas. Under specific formal conditions, these factors may emerge in the context of networked rituals and outside their traditional and earthbound religious or spiritual settings. In this article, the three factors are analysed in relation (...) to the author’s networked rites on the Waterwheel platform. The rites are designed to explore ritual consciousness and produce prototype morphic fields of compassion, which are aimed at counteracting the prevalent narrative of violence. There is an emphasis on communitas, a liminal and nonhierarchical communal state of oneness that could generate compassion. Based on researches in anthropology, biogenetic structuralism, cognitive neuroscience and morphic resonance, communitas is metaphorically envisioned as the communion of non-local brains within a networked mind and morphic field. The article postulates that the virtual and organic hybridity of the rites involve the participants’ body, brain and fields of the mind in the explorations of ritual consciousness. (shrink)

The article proposes that the modern notion of the spiritual in art, which was theorized at the beginning of the twentieth century, although remains pivotal to the discourse of art and the spiritual, has radically shifted as a result of changing attitudes to the body–mind relations instigated by popular trends of contemporary spiritualities. This cultural tendency is demonstrated by the analysis of the networked art form of Moon Ribas, e.g., dance with earthquakes. Ribas performs a cyborg body and consciousness that, (...) as contended, could be holistically enhanced and develop a unique compassionate awareness. In addition, I reflect on two examples from my performative practice of Networked Rites that interplay with speculative metaphors, spiritual and shamanic techniques, networked aesthetic forms and technologies. The first invokes communitas as a collective, non-local, networked noetic field. The second utilizes a decision-making app as a mediating device between the body and mind for the making of a prototype cyborg noetic field instilled with auspicious resonance. The article mainly implies that spiritual art continues to evolve through technoetic aesthetics fusing emerging technologies, science and shamanic, spiritual insight. Current trends may develop into benevolent and experiential applications based on the interrelations of human and cyborg body and consciousness. (shrink)

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is shared with some prior approaches. The present discussion moves forward (...) from there to a detailed proposal for how the mapping problem for the lexicon is solved, as well as a presentation of experimental findings that support this account. We describe an overlapping series of steps through which novices move in representing the lexical forms and phrase structures of the exposure language, a probabilistic multiple-cue learning process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The machinery is set in motion by word-to-world pairing, a procedure available to novices from the.. (shrink)

What is the significance of the Father in psychoanalysis today? This book constructs a much needed framework to allow psychoanalysts to consider the difficulties of a generation without a solid anchor in the Father. _The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry_ provides a necessary addition to decades of work on the role of the mother in development. The editors bring together world renowned scholars to discuss current observations in their fields, in terms of the Father’s changing but essential functions, both in (...) the lives of the individual and collective. Divided into four parts, chapters focus on: The Lost Father The Father Embodied The Father in Theory Father Culture. Exploring the role of the father in individual psychology, everyday interpersonal and social experience and cultural phenomena writ large, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, as well as psychologists, social workers and scholars in the humanities. (shrink)