[UA] [OT] Sleep Deprivation

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

I've had visual and auditory halucinations after pulling all-nighters in
college and sometimes when feverish as a child. They weren't terribly
stunning, just weird noises that I don't "notice" until a second after
they happen and wonder, "was that an actual sound?". The visual ones
were hard to distinguish from quick dream in microsleeps; for instance,
I closed my eyes in class and had the impression that someone wa walking
in front of my chair, but then I opened my eyes and no one had been. It
was probably technically a "dream", but it was hard for me to tell a
second later whether my eyes had been closed or open or whether I'd been
awake or asleep when it happened.

I imagine that moments like that are what Oneiromancy is all about.

> After several days of working at a job where I typed for eight hours non-stop each day, I began to experience all my thoughts in the form of typing.  As I was thinking about something, I would see in my mind my fingers picking out each key on the keyboard.

I've talked to a couple of academics about this phenomenon, which I'd
love to study on my own. As our attention becomes focused on a small
"area" of our sensorium (i.e., a small set of stimuli and response), we
habituate to it and begin to "spcialize" our cognition to attend to that
task or phenomenon. This can go on after we stop, even when trying to go
to sleep. Thus, many of us have no doubt had "Tetris dreams" when trying
to sleep shortly after playing the game. I once worked late into the
night building a project in Macromedia Director, and when I tried to
wake up the next morning, my half-awake mind tried to move the "Matt"
widget off of the "bed" widget with the mouse. I also know lots of
people (including myself) who have dreamt in code. 

Marshall McLuhan (and many more since) makes the case that this kind of
cognitive habituation over long periods actually changes the way our
minds work for the rest of our lives, especially if it happens during
our neurologically plastic adolescence. I'm concerned that a lot of our
computer interface devices are shaping us to the machines in scary ways:
for intance, users of PDAs find their handwriting taking the form of
"Palm-script". As speech recognition becomes usable but still imperfect,
will people get into the habit of speaking in monotone? 

One professor I talked to about this -- Ted Selker, an ex-IBM guy who
invented the "track-point" (that little rubber nipple used to control
the mouse pointer on a laptop) -- reminded me that humans have _always_
adapted to their machines. Look at the calloused hands of a farmer or
the stooped back of a factory worker, or even the tempermental changes
that accompany certain professions. McLuhan also does a good job of
pointing out that our cognitive toolshave been changing us profoundly
since we came up with written language. Still, as our tools become
increasingly abstract and cognitively complex, I think we'll see more
and more intricate alterations of our higher brain functions.

So... this is labelled OT, but I still feel guilty with such a long
non-UA post. I'd like to see more actual media theory incorporated into
Infomancy; right now, the school seems a little dry. Anybody use it in a
game yet? How'd it go? Any ideas?

-Matt Norwood

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