Cognitive Innovation: A View From The Bridge

Two pages in Journal with remainder published on-lin

Cognitive Innovation, Irony and Collaboration

What seems clear from the experiences of researchers in CogNovo is that the concept of cognitive innovation offered a new vocabulary, and thus a clear space, within which creativity could be explored free from the baggage of prior conflicting definitions. The concept was, from its inception, intrinsically ironic in the sense that Rich⁠ard Rorty developed the term. Although initially we did not fully appreciate the potential this offered, approaching creativity under the rubric of cognitive innova⁠tion led to novel ideas that would not have emerged if we had taken a more con⁠ven⁠tional discipline-led approach. One example was expressing creativity as a mathematical function and as a media form in a parallel text. The absurdity of describing a process of such complexity in this form did not pass us by. However, this self-conscious irony, not a common rhetorical strategy in the sciences, clarified our understanding of cognitive innovation as a recursive function that allowed us to express a continuity between the basic life processes of exploration, innovation and the construction of the self, and the social and cultural ramifications of these processes; creativity. It led us to conclude that cognitive innovation furnishes a view of the self as a dynamic entity, for whom reality and novelty are contingent on one’s current state, both of which can change and be changed, and offers a means for enhancing the rigor of the current debate on what counts as creative. It also reveals the value of irony in not disavowing the inevitability of multiple perspectives and prospectives on reality, and consequently offers a way to avoid unnecessary reductivism. In this paper, we will argue, as we take the insights of CogNovo forward, that irony offers a hitherto unappreciated strategy for collaborative research

Place: Anecdote, Theory and Practice, and A Young Princess?

No embargo required.This article proposes that attention to the place of art and practice facilitates both a subject-to-object and object-to-object consideration of the artwork in a way that draws anecdote, history and theory together into a single perspective. It assumes an expansion of a number of established theoretical frameworks (new historicism, apparatus theory, object-oriented ontology and actor network theory), melding anecdote, theory and arts practice in a thick description of a single academic practice that encompasses theory, history and artworks. This expansion is contained by the consideration of apparatus theory, as it is understood and used in film studies, to the examine a number of ideas, images and artefacts that represent an external participation in the place that contains them. It concludes with a photographic essay by Jacqueline Knight on a series of objects made by the author that emphasise the artwork as a mobile constellation that has a fragile relationship with a place from which it derives some temporary stability

The World Viewed: The Silverfish and the Broken Planets

I was some way through Albert Camus’ novel A Happy Death before I realised that I had the capacity for self-reflection. Not that I knew that this was an existential classic, or that the pages I was chewing my way through were a rather strange English translation published to catch the emerging market that fed the paperback publishing revival of the nineteen eighties. All I really knew was that the pages were warm and soft and woody; just sufficiently damp to support a rather sweet bacterial bloom that made this book a quite special pleasure. It was perhaps three or four weeks since I started on the book, working my way through it steadily, mostly at night when there is a particular sort of quietness and the temperature drops a little which makes moving around is more enjoyable. At night this special quiet somehow delivers a fresher feel as one slips between the pages; less to catch the throat so to speak as the air cools and the exotic gasses become memories. I had just passed what I later understood to be the halfway mark, more or less, when I became aware of the workings of something that I can only call memory. I have no real sense of what it was like before I became aware of this, it felt like a positive decision; as though at a certain moment I had decided to remember what it was like to be me when previously the very concept of recollection had no part in anything that I di

Regarding: ‘Explorative study to identify novel candidate genes related to oxaliplatin efficacy and toxicity using a DNA repair array'

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Can People with Chronic Neck Pain Recognize Their Own Digital Pain Drawing?

Background: Although the reliability of pain drawings (PDs) has been confirmed in people with chronic pain, there is a lack of evidence about the validity of the PD, that is, does the PD accurately represent the pain experience of the patient? Objectives: We investigate whether people with chronic neck pain (CNP) can recognize their own PD to support the validity of the PD in reporting the experience of pain. Moreover, we examined the association between their ability to recognize their own PD with their levels of pain intensity and disability and extent of psychosocial and somatic features. Study Design: Experimental. Setting: University Laboratory. Methods: Individuals with CNP completed their PD on a digital body chart, which was then automatically modified with specific dimensions using a novel software, providing an objective range of distortion and eliminating errors, which could potentially occur in manually controlled visual-subjective based methods. Following a 10-minute break listening to music, a series of 20 PDs were presented to each patient in a random order, with only 2 being their original PD. For each PD, the patients rated its likeliness to their own original PD on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 representing “this is my pain.” Results: Overall, the patients rated their original PD with a median score of 92% similarity, followed by 91.8% and 89.5% similarity when presented with a PD scaled down to 75% and scaled up by 150% of the original size, respectively; these scores were not significantly different to the ratings given for their original PD. The PD with horizontal translation by 40 pixels (8%) and vertical translation by 70 pixels (12.8%) were rated as the most dissimilar to their original PD; these scores were significantly different to their original PD scores. The Spearman correlation coefficient revealed a significant negative association between their ability to recognize their original PD and their Modified Somatic Perceptions Questionnaire scores. Limitations: The patients in the study presented with relatively mild CNP, and the results may not be generalized to those with more severe symptoms. Conclusions: People with CNP are generally able to identify their own PD but that their ability to recognize their original PD is negatively correlated with the extent of somatic awareness

Heteroleptic coordination environments in metal-mediated DNA G-quadruplexes

The presence of metal centers with often highly conserved coordination environments is crucial for roughly half of all proteins, having structural, regulatory, or enzymatic function. To understand and mimic the function of metallo-enzymes, bioinorganic chemists pursue the challenge of synthesizing model compounds with well-defined, often heteroleptic metal sites. Recently, we reported the design of tailored homoleptic coordination environments for various transition metal cations based on unimolecular DNA G-quadruplex structures, templating the regioselective positioning of imidazole ligandosides LI. Here, we expand this modular system to more complex, heteroleptic coordination environments by combining LI with a new benzoate ligandoside LB within the same oligonucleotide. The modifications still allow the correct folding of parallel tetramolecular and antiparallel unimolecular G-quadruplexes. Interestingly, the incorporation of LB results in strong destabilization expressed in lower thermal denaturation temperatures Tm. While no transition metal cations could be bound by G-quadruplexes containing only LB, heteroleptic derivatives containing both LI and LB were found to complex CuII, NiII, and ZnII. Especially in case of CuII we found strong stabilizations of up to ΔTm = +34°C. The here shown system represents an important step toward the design of more complex coordination environments inside DNA scaffolds, promising to culminate in the preparation of functional metallo-DNAzymes

From both sides now: Crossover effects influence navigation in patients with unilateral neglect

Unilateral neglect is a challenging disorder that pervades a range of behaviours following stroke and hampers recovery. Although a preponderance of clinical studies measure performance on a range of bedside assessments, including line bisection and cancellation tasks, there have been calls for studies to embrace more relevant functional measures. Here, for the first time, we present data from two separate tasks that characterise the performance of seven patients with unilateral neglect when navigating a power wheelchair. The tasks involved negotiating an obstacle course and steering a central path between gaps of different sizes. Results from the obstacle course confirmed the clinical observation and predicted bias of contralesional errors. However, the second task revealed a robust "crossover" effect. Patients deviated to the ipsilesional side for large gaps but deviated increasingly contralesionally when steering through small gaps in behaviour that was analogous to that previously shown on line bisection tasks. Contrary to being seen as an unintuitive finding, further analysis of these errors suggests that patients are giving disproportionate weight to the location of the ipsilesional object when plotting a midline course between two objects. Our results provide a platform for further studies to investigate the modulation and rehabilitation of this important skill

Tolerance to Self: Which Cells Kill

Immune self tolerance involves the deletion in the thymus of developing T cells that have the ability to recognize self-antigens, but by which cells? New evidence argues that cortical epithelial cells can induce deletion of self-reactive T cells