Brain Trains
Sometimes when I’m sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the tunnel--just when it is ready to roll out of the dark station at the set departure time--I experience “phantom motion”. One’s anticipation of motion makes it feel as if the train is moving.
I once had the idea for a video installation of a large clock with the second hand slowly moving (or giving the semblance of movement), and a sound getting gradually loud and strident, yet not in sync with the pace of the second hand. Our brains want congruence between the two but sometimes it isn't congruent. This would be the feeling of phantom motion produced by the brain.
Expectation is nine-tenths of experience in heightened states of anticipation. The memory of what motion feels like sometimes is a kinetic experience. This goes for all kinds of things that involve body movements like sports or music performance--and we can use the phantom experiences in a practical sense.
Per my last post, some experiences are "vapor". Mental practice can sometimes be a proxy for real playing, but not always. The perception of movement is not movement: Hearing a sound in the mind's ear is not the same as the hands and fingers producing the sound. [Doing things manually always involves some kind of physical or emotional pain as any athlete or musician will tell you--but the audience only gets the painless part].
Consider the removal of one sensory element of an object, such as a film still. The sound is removed, although the sound could have been an essential element at the time. Experiences in isolation are never full experiences. Screen experiences as proxies can never be full experiences and work on our brains in a phantom fashion. It's an effect, which interestingly can be effective as a chain of consummated experiences regardless of whether they were actual physical sensations or if they were just conjured in the brain.
Photographs (not stills) can produce a "phantom audio", as it did in this Alan Schaller photo posted on Twitter. In my mind's ear, I heard Neko Case singing "haunted (hunted) by American Dreams" in her song Things That Scare Me. It was a sound that was never there, diegetically or non-diegetically, but I added it as a "soundtrack". Then I realized this is how I sometimes compose music by merely seeing something random in isolation and it gives an idea of the feeling of creative momentum, then actual movement. It seemed to move, and I was "moved" both physically and emotionally.
#metaphors #CognitiveDissonance
For further reading, if you're interested:
Comments