rigorousintuition.ca

Turkewitz writes that differences in the rate of development of the right and left hemispheres might, “in relation to the changes in the nature of the fetal acoustic environment, help to shape hemispheric specialization.”

According to this view, during the period when the right hemisphere is more advanced than the left the intrauterine environment is characterized by a disproportionate amount of internally generated noise. Because of its developmentally more advanced state the right hemisphere would come to be specialized for dealing with the prevailing noise. Later in development the…shift in the acoustic environment to one in which maternal speech became more salient would be coincident with the emergence of the left hemisphere as the more advanced of the two. Because noise would still be present in the intrauterine environment the right hemisphere would be engaged in its processing so that it would be less available for processing the newly prominent maternal speech. This type of input could come to be processed by the left hemisphere both by default and because of its emergence as the now more advanced structure. It is important to note that…relative differences between the hemispheres, even if small in absolute terms, could be sufficient to produce important structural and functional differences. (p. 133-134).

Turkewitz realizes that his position is highly speculative, but I find it quite provocative nonetheless. Even more remarkable is his suggestion that lateralization could be further influenced by the posture and limited mobility that characterize normal fetuses in their final 10 weeks in utero. As fetuses become larger, gross changes in position become increasingly difficult. By the end of pregnancy, fetuses are normally suspended in utero head-down, and facing towards their mother’s right side. In this position, their left ear is closest to their mother’s spine and their right ear is closest to their mother’s abdominal wall. This arrangement, according to Turkewitz, “would be likely to result in differential exposure of the two ears to…maternal speech propagated [down the spine] by bone conduction. This position would also result in differential exposure of the two ears to externally generated sound….fetal posture would accentuate asymmetric differences in the nature of the acoustic environment and could contribute to the development of the hemispheric specialization under discussion” (p. 134).

82_28 wrote:I don't believe it myself, as in, I just thought of it, but perhaps technology is catching up with the global human and animal and botanical brain and not the other way around. Perhaps because our human sensibilities don't know where we're headed in and of an invented and controlled system, it isn't malfunctioning, but it is overcoming it, in slow steps, slower than the cycle of the newest processor or lately, the cycle of the iPhone.

My little laptop here, sure, has a processor. My little cellphone and PS3 have processors too. Sir, how many of our processors control your life? A google search retains the activity of who knows how many processors around the world? But the processor knows. There are little processors in the submarines, which are little more tham cyborg extensions of the BP controllers at the surface of the sea, probably wearing proto-cyborg bluetooth earpieces they don't even take off when they go to bed or hell, I bet some fuckers have sex with their bluetooths on. Do the processors know? Do we know the processors? But the processors yet know. And our lives are increasingly and increasingly and increasingly not worth living really, without some kind of processor.

Live without a single processor for a week. There is no way you could do it. Live without solid state memory on a camera on a deep woods camping trip for a week -- virtually impossible. Not only will you take a pic or two, but your absence from the grid is being processed. Bank card not used, didn't clock into work, hasn't accessed Internet in week, didn't okay virus scan in the amount of time he usually does, you know. The lack of activity is the activity in many cases, I do believe.

The sci-fi writer in me says it is close to "coming alive" and it will be seized on, only not for the cause of good. Yet perhaps, just perhaps, we are, nature is, intuition is, a number of steps ahead of it. It could be only the perception that it controls us that it controls us. "It" could already be alive, but is so smart that it knows how to play dead. There is so much we just don't know and are forced to speculate over in our small and seemingly insignificant ways.

brekin wrote:Really like the charts below why invest the time? Its like subway maps
of foreign cities. If you really aren't having a good time and want to leave
why bother?

In 1969, Nabokov told an interviewer, "Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced."

I find the charting of the dream levels by Nolan to be fascinating, myself.
His drawing above immediately reminded me of Nabokov's map of Joyce's Dublin that he used to lecture on Ulysses his famous literature course at Cornell, attended by Thomas Pynchon.
Not to put Nolan on the same footing as ol' Vlad, but such charting seems an excellent story outline tool for the author and audience alike.

brekin wrote:Perhaps though Inception is one of those films, like the band the Grateful Dead, which you don't get the first couple of times but think is the greatest after you've forced yourself to watch a couple of hundred times.

brekin wrote:
Perhaps though Inception is one of those films, like the band the Grateful Dead, which you don't get the first couple of times but think is the greatest after you've forced yourself to watch a couple of hundred times.

barracuda wrote:
I dunno, man. I went in expecting to watch a heist movie, and that's exactly what I got.

Alright blokes, listen up, this is the plan...Former architecture student Dominick "Dom" Cobb and business partner Arthur perform corporate espionage by dreaming and using an experimental military-developed machine to infiltrate the subconscious of their targets and extract information, their latest target being powerful Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe). Tiered dream within a dream strategies are used and dreamers awaken by a sudden kick or by dying in the dream. Each extractor carries a totem, a personalized small object whose behavior is only predictable to its owner, that serves the purpose of identifying dream-state or reality-state: in the different states, the totem behaves differently. Cobb's totem is a spinning top that perpetually spins in the dream state. The extraction fails due to Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb's deceased wife, whose memory projection sabotages his missions. Saito reveals that he is in fact auditioning the team to perform the difficult act of inception: using dreams to implant an idea.

Saito wishes to break up the energy conglomerate of his ailing competitor Maurice Fischer, by planting this idea in his son and inheritor Robert Fischer. Should Cobb succeed, Saito will use his influence to clear a murder charge against him, so he can return to the U.S. and his children. Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: Eames, an identity forger; Yusuf, a chemist who concocts the powerful sedative needed; Ariadne, a young architecture student tasked with designing the labyrinth of the dream landscapes; and Arthur. Saito accompanies as mission observer.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, due to the effects of heavy sedation and multi-layered dreaming, death during this mission will result in entering Limbo, unconstructed dream space where the dreamer could be trapped indefinitely. Elapsed time in each dream level is, on average, roughly twelve times greater than in the level above it; in Limbo, the deepest level of all, 24 hours of outer-world time would be experienced as about half a century there. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he spent "50 years" with Mal in Limbo constructing a world out of their shared memories whilst seemingly growing old together. After waking back into our outermost world, however, Mal remained convinced she was still dreaming and committed suicide, trying to persuade Cobb to do so by retroactively incriminating him in her death. He subsequently fled the U.S. and left his children behind, ostensibly in the care of his father-in-law.

When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney and his body is flown back to Los Angeles, the team share the flight with Robert Fischer and Cobb sedates him, bringing him into the shared dream. At each stage, the member of the team generating the dream stays behind to initiate the kick, while the other members sleep within the dream to travel a level deeper. In the first level, Yusuf's rainy downtown dream, the team abducts Fischer. However Fischer's antibody-like trained subconscious projections attack, severely wounding Saito. Eames temporarily takes the appearance of Fischer's godfather, Peter Browning, to suggest Fischer reconsider his father's will. Yusuf drives the team in a van as they are sedated into Arthur's dream, a hotel, where the team recruit Fischer, convincing him his kidnapping was orchestrated by Browning. In the third dream level, a snowy mountain fortress dreamed by Eames, Fischer is told they are in Browning's subconscious, but they are, in fact, really going deeper into Fischer's. Yusuf, under assault by trained projections, initiates his kick too soon by driving off a bridge, sending Arthur's dream world into zero-gravity and causing an avalanche in Eames' dream. Arthur is forced to improvise a new kick using an elevator that will be synchronized with the van hitting the water, while the team in Eames' dream races to finish the job before the new round of kicks.

Saito finally succumbs to his wounds, and Cobb's projection of Mal sabotages the plan by killing Fischer, sending them both into limbo.[13] Cobb and Ariadne enter limbo to find Fischer and Saito, while Eames remains on his dream level to set up a kick by rigging the fortress with explosives. Cobb confronts his projection of Mal, who tries to convince him to stay in limbo. Cobb refuses and confesses that he was responsible for Mal's suicide: having convinced her to leave limbo by using inception to plant the idea in her mind that the world they had been living in for 50 years was not real, and hence the need to kill themselves in order to return to the real world, once back in the real world she continued to believe dying would wake her. Mal attacks Cobb but Ariadne shoots her. Through his confession, Cobb attains catharsis and chooses to remain in limbo to search for Saito. Ariadne kicks Fischer off a balcony, bringing him back up to the mountain fortress, where he enters a safe room to discover and accept the planted idea: that his father wishes him to be his own man and, accordingly, that splitting up the conglomerate might not be such a radical notion after all.

All of the team members except Cobb and Saito ride the synchronized kicks back up to reality: Ariadne jumps off a balcony in limbo, Eames detonates the explosives in the fortress, Arthur blasts an elevator containing the team's sleeping bodies up an elevator shaft, and the van in Yusuf's dream hits the water. Cobb eventually finds an aged Saito and the two remember their arrangement, presumably killing themselves (not actually shown) and awakening to outer-world reality on the airplane. Saito honors the arrangement and Cobb passes through U.S. customs once the plane lands in Los Angeles. Just before reuniting with his children, Cobb tests reality with his spinning top, but he turns away to greet his children before observing the results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception#Plot

The Dream of a Lifetime is a 2002 Donald Duck comic by Don Rosa. It appeared in the May 2004 issue of the Scrooge McDuck comic book (Uncle Scrooge #329).[1] It is famous for sharing many similarities with the blockbuster Christopher Nolan film, Inception, which was released six years later in 2010.

Plot

While Scrooge McDuck is having a dream, the Beagle Boys invade his dream, via a device stolen from Gyro Gearloose, in order to steal the combination to his money bin. Since it is extremely difficult for a dreamer to stop themselves from correctly answering questions posed to them in dreams (according to the in-story dream science), Donald Duck must enter his uncle Scrooge's dream to prevent Uncle Scrooge from blabbering the combination to the Beagle Boys.
[edit] Similarities with Inception

Several similarities have been noted to Christopher Nolan's film Inception, including the plot similarities of entering dreams to steal secrets and falling to exit dreams.

I believe Nolan gave a clue of his intentions or at least his mindset in Batman Begins with the piano keys opening the door to the batcave.