I'm "crazy" about how my brain "cooks" these images.

An illusion that "exploits our brain’s strategy for making sense of the visual world: uniting what it actually sees — known as bottom-up processing — with what it expects to see based on prior experience — known as top-down processing."

Emotion as a Way of Knowing

Visuals delineating my evolving emotional connection with crows.

Age 15-17:

Shoes for crows

Age 34:

Palliative Care: time measured by crows

Age 40-45

Breathing: more time and crows

Age 43-present

Art: home, protection and love.

Charlottetown's Crows

Here's a local issue ripe for analysis in terms of Knowledge Issues. This week, let's look at this topic. Consider the links below. Look for your own and bring them to class. Try to remain open-minded. How would you prepare a presentation on this topic? Can you rely on my guidance and the suggestions below given my emotional attachment to the subject? (More about that on Monday.)

Mitch Tweel on Crow plague in uptown Charlottetown.

The Guardian reports residents terrified.

CBC article indicating the Victoria Park crow situation may have N.S. roots.

Caws and Effect Penn State wildlife scientists study urban-roosting crows.

A beautiful photo of Charlottetown Crows from Stephen DesRoches' photo blog. And a second entitled Crow Population

Russell, Charlottetown's talking crow.

"While rock doves (pigeons), house sparrows, and crows are not considered protected birds on P.E.I. (unlike migratory birds, birds of prey, and game birds), causing unnecessary pain and suffering is against the law regardless of the species of bird involved." Peter Foley, DVM in a letter to the editor, Charlottetown Guardian. Read more in P.E.I.'s Fish and Game Protection Act.

International guiding principles for biomedical research involving animals which states, "Investigators and other personnel should never fail to treat animals as sentient, and should regard their proper care and use and the avoidance or minimization of discomfort, distress, or pain as ethical imperatives."

A Murder of Crows from CBC's The Nature of Things.

Joshua Klein's Ted Talk on the intelligence of crows:

"Show and Tell" I keep selecting sleep wear that I later discover has links to my childhood.

Knowledge Issues:

Can we hold others accountable for providing what we see clearly as bogus explanations for their choices? If we live in glass houses - or burning ones - should we really be throwing stones?

Related readings/links:

Jay Ingram, Chapter 6 "The Burning House" in The Burning House, 1994

Coincidences on ABC

What is a coincidence? by Arthur Kary

Visual Focus on Connotea

Most articles on Connotea- a reference management system for clinicians and scientists - are not for the faint of heart. The system may be of use, however, depending on your choice of topics for presentation or essay .

Here you will find referenced articles on Visual Focus.

More on Smell and Memory

Shigeyuki Ito
answers some of
my questions
in his article
"Smell and Memory"
for
Serendip's Website.

John Sutton
writes about "Memory"
for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Art in Paper Cups and “Other” Insecurities

My fifteen year old son loves to torment me by mentioning, with respect to my work, a comment which was made during the opening of “The Box Projects” in July of 2005. In parting, a woman refered to my pieces as “clever” and my son thought this was hilarious.

It struck a cord with me as well which seems ironic since I do consider my work more akin to parlour magic than high art.

When a fellow artist recently visited my work space and saw what I was working on, she asked, “What's this?” My heart sank as I replied, “It's just a paper cup I'm making.”

I had spent the previous week very excited about the possibilities inherent in my paper “test” and to hear myself describe it in these terms reduced it to what I, no doubt, secretly feared could be the perception of “others”.

In my work , I strive to be true to the process. I honestly don't give a lot of thought to what others will think of individual pieces. What is of interest to me, is the process inherent in story making, the revisiting of my own assumptions, the maliability of "truth" in the things I remember.

This brings criticism (from both within and without). Technique aside – all my “paintings” have more to do with cutting in and filling, for example, because of what I learned while painting door jams – the content of my work may very well just be a re-hashing of things best forgotten.

I really don't believe that, but I often think that. And I often, both in my head and in crowds of people I love, I say so.

My brain is often a blur with questions about art, and I guess what it really boils down to is a question about what it really is. Why is it important? Is it? What is its relationship to knowledge? Is it possible for it to be a way of knowing? Is making paper cups important?

Perhaps only a clever person would know for sure.

Critical Thinking On The Web

austhink.org
is an on-line directory of quality resouces.

Time spent here is time well spent.

Below the ToK Diagram are a number of links recommended by austhink and associated with the Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge.




Emotion
Reason
Perception
Language

Natural Sciences
Human Sciences
Mathematics
History
Ethics
The Arts

The Malleability of Touch Perception

An experiment led by neuroscientist Patrick Haggard of University College London.

Your ToK Journal

You are responsible for maintaining a journal in Theory of Knowledge. The goal is to reflect on the material covered in class and examine your own experience as a knower.

Amy Scott, a ToK teacher at Corral Reef High School in Miami, describes the objective of the Tok Journal as the creation of "a dialogue with yourself where you can question the world and propose your own insights into the how and why of things."

She outlines the following topics as suitable for journal discussion:

· Pay attention to instances of logical or informal fallacies
occurring around you.
· Describe instances in which your sense perceptions influenced your reactions to your environment.
· Describe arguments that occurred because people defined their terms differently. What were the different definitions and did the people involved finally realize their fallacies?
· Think of current events from a ToK framework ... Find related newspaper clippings on both sides of an issue.
· Take your journal to other classes (science, history, math, etc.) and jot down ToK related issues. Look for connections or discrepancies between or among disciplines.
· If you have visited an historical or art museum, what caught your eye? Aesthetically what did you find pleasing and why? What, to you, is good art, literature, music, architecture, dance, poetry, etc. ?

Amy Scott ToK

Richard Dawkins

The following links may be helpful when considering the role of Sense Perception in knowledge aquisition.


The universe is queerer than we can suppose. Evolutionary Biologist, Richard Dawkins makes a case for "thinking the improbable" by looking at how the human frame of reference limits our understanding of the universe. We live, he explains, in a middle-sized world and have difficulty understanding anything very large — like solar systems — or very small, like atoms.



For more information on Richard Dawkins