Drawing

Thursday, 6 March 2025

The topology of dreams

Visual representation of “Awake state” vs “Dream state” according the Topographic-dynamic Reorganisation model of dreams

At the end of my post on the Borromean Knot I stated that the topology of dreams was perhaps the next thing to explore. There always seems to be a gap between what goes on in the mind and experience. Sometimes it seems as if we measure all experiences in relation to the experience of being in a particular body. Consciousness being a sort of embodied realisation of the process of becoming aware. But when I dream I'm somehow conscious of something but at the same time not conscious, because I'm asleep. It's interesting to see that Dali's work is still used to indicate dream states, his "paranoiac-critical" method, was a very conscious application of a visual methodology, designed to sit between readings, in order to destabilise a viewer's perception. It is the flitting between states that is perhaps what fascinates artists.

Areas of the brain

Northoff, Scalabrini and Fogel, (2023) when explaining why they have developed their current dream model theory, state that it is produced, "In order to bridge the gap between brain and experience". Their theory is a topographic-dynamic re-organisation model of dreams. They state that topographically, dreams are characterised by a shift towards increased activity and connectivity in the default-mode network, (DMN). If that gap can be bridged, it might help me to visualise or at least begin to model in my mind, some sort of diagram of the interrelationship between perception and consciousness.

Raichle (2015) explains that 'the brain's default mode network consists of discrete, bilateral and symmetrical cortical areas, in the medial and lateral parietal, medial prefrontal and medial and lateral temporal cortices of the brain'. Interestingly, as well as this applying to humans, it applies to other primates, cats and rodent brains as well.

The discovery of the default mode network reignited a longstanding interest in the significance of the brain's ongoing or intrinsic activity, i.e. a growing awareness that it is always active and doing something, even when it would appear that there is no need for it to be active because we are asleep or at rest. Resting-state studies, have indeed come to play a major role in researching the human brain in relation to health and disease. For instance, 'happiness' is very subjective. It has been suggested that unhappy people are prone to ruminate more and therefore Luo, Kong, Qi, You,& Huang. (2016) have posited that unhappiness may be associated with increased default-mode functional connectivity during rest. The relative hyper-connectivity of the DMN areas may they argue, be associated with higher levels of rumination, which suggests that those of us who take time to rest, think too much when we do so.

My recent experience working with people who have suffered traumatic spinal injuries, suggests that the less people are able to use their bodies, the more their mind operates to compensate for this. I have been holding conversations with people in a specialist spinal injuries ward, whereby we work together to visualise how they feel pain. The most active images have emerged from conversations with someone paralysed from the neck down. Perhaps some of the images that have emerged from these types of conversations might become starting points for diagrams of the interrelationship between perception and consciousness.

Conversational image

But what of dreams, the images out of which so many of our inventions arise, all derived from a time when the body is supposed to be at rest?

From an anxiety dream: The visualisation of an inner feeling

Northoff, Scalabrini and Fogel, (2023), suggest that in dreams, there is a shift away from temporal segregation to temporal integration of brain inputs. This they believe results in 'bizarre and highly self-centric mental contents, as well as hallucinatory-like states'. However, no matter how interesting this research is, it doesn't really deal with the mind and it would seem to me that it is the mind that is conscious, not the brain.

I like to play table tennis and one of the reasons I do this is that I don't have to think too much about what I'm doing, I simply have to react. In fact if I try to think about what I'm going to do, I will miss my shot. This tells me that when incoming stimulus is focused and in need of a response, that somehow decisions are much simpler for the mind to make. Twenty seven plus thirty five, is a simple sum, and as I do it in my head, I focus on just that, I don't begin to speculate on other things. But when I sleepdream, or when I daydream, little external stimulus is coming in and therefore in order to keep active, my mind goes on to predict other possibilities, some of which are wonderful, some stupid and some frightening. Even when nothing is coming in via external senses, my mind seems to want to keep processing something; it keeps on trying to predict other possibilities. Perhaps this is why at times we need to be bored. If we look at Bayesian inference theory to explain this, we find that subjective probability lies at the core of how our fast response systems operate. Fight or flight mechanisms are driven by these things, so our body believes in their vital necessity and wants to make sure we are always on guard, even when we don't have to be. It would seem that because of this, what could be seen as a wasted energy process, is in fact one whereby wonderful things like dreams are made to happen. As a model, this closely resembles how most of us operate when we develop a working process for making artwork. Both are iterative processes; according to Bayesian inference theory you receive an initial stimulus, test it and then update your model of the world based on the new information; when making art you set down an initial idea, test it out and then update the idea based on what you have discovered.

No matter how much better neurological visualisation techniques get, they do not seem to get us any closer to an idea of what consciousness is, or what a mind is. The mind is not the brain, it isn't even located in the brain, being it would seem distributed not just into the body as a whole, (the embodied mind) but out into the world itself, (the extended mind). In, 'You Are the Universe' Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos, go one step further and suggest that each of us is a co-creator of reality and that we live in a conscious universe. On the way to their current theory they dismiss animism as a way to think about this, but I still have a personal affection for an animist universe, as it allows me to inhabit and talk with and through non-human animate and inanimate things, if only in my imagination.

Night thoughts: Climbing out of the subconscious

In the image above, ladders and tree roots are extensions of my body/mind; my hand and arm as they extend out from the edge of the frame, are images of my hand and arm as they extend into my field of vision. The rest of my arm is known to me by proprioception, the interoceptual sense that makes us aware of balance and our body parts. This is also true of anyone who looks at the image, their own sense of inhabiting a body, allows them to feel what it might be like to climb out of the space below the edge of the frame. This inner sense is also part and parcel of my sub-conscious, a state that exists inside my body, just as much as consciousness does. They are intertwined sensations. Memories of ladders and tree roots being another set of neurological energy flows that are woven into the arrival of an image such as the one above.

Dreams are I believe central to my own imagination and I still keep a notebook at the bedside, so that when dreamt images emerge at night, I don't lose them; even if it means that when I wake I find I don't really understand what it was I was seeing during that night's dream state. It's the mystery that intrigues me, the fact that there is no answer, beyond a belief that there is something beyond the everyday and a feeling that underneath the surface of perception lies something deeper and profound. These are wonderful reasons to keep going, to keep looking for that unknown something that is just outside of my perceptual range. I am in making images looking for something I know is there, but I can never touch, something that I suppose is sometimes called reality.

There is another theory about how consciousness is constructed, called orchestrated objective reduction theory (Orch OR). It was originally proposed by physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff in the 1990s. It also, like art, seeks to bridge the gulf between physical matter and felt experience. The idea is that consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions in tiny proteins called microtubules, which are found inside neurons. Rather than being a product of neural connections, Orch OR posits that consciousness is based on non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits (like binary bits, qubits are the basic units of information in quantum computing), formed collectively in cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified through the neurons themselves. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles forming superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules. The oscillations are either electric, due to charge separation from London forces, or magnetic, due to electron spin. Consciousness therefore arising from quantum computations which are connected to the fine-scale structure of spacetime geometry. If this idea has traction, it might explain how 'spooky action at a distance' works to build some sort of cosmic consciousness, or at least free the mind from its prison within our skulls. The idea has reached the point whereby diagrams can be drawn to illustrate how it works, which for myself means that it has more visual momentum.

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse and they are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine
B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.

David Bohm was very interested in these issues and he proposed a solution by looking at what he called 'implicate' and 'explicate' order, which he thought of as ontological bases for quantum theory, and are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behaviours of subatomic particles, which quantum physics describes and predicts but struggles to explain. In 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' he described how differing contexts might change the appearance of certain phenomena. The "implicate" (also referred to as the "enfolded") order, is a deep fundamental order of reality. The "explicate" or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally perceive. He stated in relation to this, "In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements." (Bohm, 1980)

As space and time become questioned as to their role in our perceptual understanding of the world, a door is opened into a universe within which the spaces and times of dreaming can be enfolded, their topology perhaps more like that of the tessellations and associated optical illusions that Roger Penrose introduced to Escher, which had a direct effect on his making of the print, 'Ascending and Descending'.

Escher: 'Ascending and Descending'

References

Bohm, D. (1980/2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London: Routledge

Chopra, D. and Kafatos, M.C., (2018) You are the universe: Discovering your cosmic self and why it matters. London: Harmony.

Davey, C. G., Pujol, J., & Harrison, B. J. (2016). Mapping the self in the brain's default mode network. NeuroImage, 132, 390–397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.02.022

Northoff, G., Scalabrini, A., Fogel, S. (2023) Topographic-dynamic reorganisation model of dreams – A spatiotemporal approach, Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews, Volume 148,

Lau, H.C., (2007) A higher order Bayesian decision theory of consciousness. Progress in brain research, 168, pp.35-48.

Luo, Y., Kong, F., Qi, S., You, X., & Huang, X. (2016). Resting-state functional connectivity of the default mode network associated with happiness. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 11(3), 516–524. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv132

Raichle M. E. (2015). The brain's default mode network. Annual review of neuroscience, 38, 433–447. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-014030

Friday, 28 February 2025

Erasers, rubbers and scrapers

Using a razor blade to erase parts of an ink drawing on Bristol Board

I have devoted several posts to various drawing mediums and suggested that their medium specificity was something you need to explore if you need to think about the full range of expression available to you. However except for a brief mention of erasers in my post on the pencil , I haven't given much time or thought to the importance of erasure techniques. So perhaps its now time to address this.

Erasure is of course also a conceptual idea and just as there are a variety of technical ways to remove the marks made to construct a drawing, there are just as many theoretical implications as to why we might erase and what the activity itself might mean. In my post on The Magic Slate I highlighted the importance of Freud's essay A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad and explained that he reasoned that especially traumatic conscious thought could vanish into the unconscious, but that it would always survive in the mind in a similar way to the faint impressions inscribed in the wax. I. e. that erasure usually leaves signs of how it has been done and that as a drawing medium in its own right, it can also act as a metaphor for how we think.

As Freud pointed out, the act of erasure can be related to how our subconscious operates, therefore as I go through the various ways that you might technically erase something, don't forget that as you apply a new process of removal, you are also creating a new story or narrative of removal. Perhaps these narratives can be seen as ghost stories, I'm always more frightened by a trace of what might have been than by most direct confrontations with reality.

Trace of a human erased by an atomic bomb blast

In Hong Kong cleaners are employed to hastily remove graffiti by painting over it with bleach, washing it off with a high-pressure water gun, or by taping over the graffiti with sheets of black or white plastic. They are not skilled enough however, and they still leave traces of what was written, therefore they in effect highlight the attitude of the Chinese government to what the people of Hong Kong are saying, rather than erase what they were saying from history.

Typical drawing erasers are made of synthetic rubber, nylon, or other man-made materials, but before these carbon heavy and not very sustainable petrochemical manufactured erasers were invented, stale bread was often used for removing chalk marks from paper.

Rubber was called 'rubber' by the English chemist Joseph Priestley because of its effectiveness in “rubbing out” marks on paper, and it soon supplanted bread as a correction tool. However bread can still be used.

Bread prepared for use as an eraser

Partial erasure of graphite with bread

As a remover of dry art materials from paper surfaces bread isn't great, (see this pdf for a full analysis) but if you know this, bread can still be used to 'ghost out' sections of a graphite drawing. This ability, coupled with an understanding that stale bread was used, perhaps even retaining the breadcrumbs in some way, could well become central to an image's meaning. For instance Anthony Gormley in his 'Bread Works', such as 'Bed' 1980, involved a programme of erasure by eating, during which he ate his own volume in bread.

Anthony Gormley: Bed

Rubber erasers are soft and gentle on paper, and are often found on the top of pencils. They are typically pink in colour and are usually found in wedge shapes. The Faber pink pearl is probably the most well known of this variety and during manufacture it has pumice added into its rubber mix, thus giving it more abrasive power, whilst keeping the soft pliable nature of the rubber. The example below is of a double ended rubber or of course eraser if you are from the States. Notice it is latex free, a sign of the times, therefore made from synthetic rubber. The softer pencil erasing end is still pink and the harder ink eraser blue.

The Faber Castell ink and pencil eraser

I find this type of eraser OK but on charcoal not as effective as a kneaded one for ease of control. However kneaded erasers will not remove everything, so you need to get back to a pure white, use something harder, like the Pink Pearl. The Pink Pearl has pumice added into the rubber to ensure a better bite, which means that it is on the way to being an ink eraser. Sand ink erasers are often made out of rubber mixed with sand or silica, and these erasers are the toughest.

A sand eraser

Through the application of charcoal and chalk, and the extensive work to remove them, Auerbach creates an ebb and flow of creation, damage and repair, a cycle that reflects our everyday experience of being worn away by life's reality.

Frank Auerbach

The erasures in Auerbach'a drawings are as much about the creation of space, as the modelling of form, as much about the re-creation of a sitter's energy, as the establishing of planar direction. Touches of colour remind me of William Kentridge, another artist who has spent a lot of time erasing charcoal surfaces, but with a different intent. Kentridge uses erasure to establish and make a series of decisions, that could easily, as they sometimes do, become an animated series of consequences, whilst Auerbach is engaged with a philosophy of looking as opposed to a narrative about looking.

William Kentridge

For Auerbach to remove so much charcoal, I suspect he used a tough rubber eraser, whilst Kentridge may well have used a gum or kneaded eraser, because they can be stretched, compressed, split, and moulded for more precision erasing, pruning lines, cleaning edges, creating highlights through subtractive drawing, or performing other detailed work. They can completely remove light marks, but are ill-suited to fully erasing dark areas; notice the lack of deep tonal contrast in Kentridge's drawing. In fact, I suspect he often just used his fingers to wipe away charcoal, so that the ghost of the previous drawing activity is very clear. The other reason you might use a gum eraser, is that it leaves far less detritus on the drawing surface. A rubber eraser breaks down as it pulls the graphite, chalk or charcoal off the paper, so you get lots of crumbly bits on the surface, which you have to keep removing.

Notice this kneaded eraser is in various languages also a malleable gum eraser

A gum or kneaded eraser can be stretched without breaking up

A gum eraser typically comes with a clear plastic cover

A putty eraser that crumbles if you try and pull it apart

These kneaded erasers or gum erasers are also sometimes called putty rubbers, often the same but not always. Try and tear one in half, if it tears more like bread, it wont stick back together again, so is not a kneaded eraser/gum eraser and will break up as you use it. The other aspect of a kneaded/gum/putty rubber is that instead of rubbing to remove a layer of charcoal or graphite or chalk, you can press the eraser down and then lift it up to remove a thin layer. Done subtly this can be used to make very delicate refinements. To clean these erasers you can simply stretch a clean part over the used dirty part, hiding the layer of removed dust inside your ever changing flexible ball of kneadable gum/putty.

Gum Eraser

The other eraser that gets confused with the kneaded eraser is what is sometimes called the “art gum” eraser. A gum eraser has a soft, gummy texture and can have a slightly translucent-looking appearance. They absorb graphite and crumble as they erase. The eraser itself is a little bit softer than a typical rubber eraser, so it is better suited to use on some soft, easily broken up paper surfaces. The thing to think about is that the kneadable eraser is malleable like chewing gum, while a gum eraser looks like a solid block of gum Arabic.

Vinyl Erasers

Vinyl erasers are the hardest ones and can even erase ink marks. They feel smoother when erasing as they do not catch the paper so much as you work the eraser backwards and forwards. I often use Steadtler Mars Plastic erasers to remove underlying pencil drawings from images that have had watercolour built up over initial pencil marks. Their plastic 'crumbs' are finer than the ones that come off rubber erasers, so again you have less mess. However you do need to keep cleaning them by rubbing them over a clear paper surface, if not they can begin to smear dark marks back onto your drawing.

My old friend Richard Baker used to use an electric eraser to refine his pencil drawings and found it a very powerful tool. It has a small tip, so it lends itself to detailed work.

Richard Baker: Collection only; Graphite

Electric erasers

Electric erasers usually come with both 5mm and 2.5mm tips and these tips can be sharpened further with a piece of sandpaper if you need a really precise erasure.

Glass erasers were originally designed to remove ink from transparent papers, and they are actually made of' 'fibreglass'

Glass eraser

As well as for ink removal, they are often used for tarnish removal of battery terminals and getting rid of corroded solder when re-soldering. You can draw with them in a similar way to the use of an electric rubber, especially if you want fine white lines within a grey graphite texture. As rubbers they are good for working on a wide range of hard surfaces.

Eraser shields. If you are looking for precision then you might look at using eraser shields. These are thin sheets, usually made of metal or plastic and designed with different shaped spaces. An erasing shield is a mask used to control the effects of an eraser, like a reverse stencil, instead of adding a new surface through a cut stencil, you remove one. The tool is made of a thin, flexible material such as transparent plastic, or stainless steel shim stock for durability and it is used for very precise work, so usually you will see them in an engineering drawing office. But like all tools they can be used by an artist in any way you want, for instance to create precise gaps within an image. This video shows how they are normally used.

Using an eraser shield

Blackboard chalk can be erased using a blackboard eraser.

Blackboard erasers are made of laminated felt pads made mostly of nylon threads. They make a very distinctive erasure surface and are often used not just to erase an image or writing but as a symbol for an idea being erased. But remember a wet rag is sometimes better, again it is the quality of the mark on erasure that is important as well as the association you want to make with it.

The textures of blackboard erasure.

Poster for a Cy Twombly exhibition using the idea of the blackboard and its erasure

The origin of the word erasure is radere, to scrape and scrapers and scraping are also important erasure processes and tools.

Scraping into oil pastel

Artists often draw with scrapers, and this is sometimes done by laying one colour down first and then going over it with black. On the other hand if you are working in ink on Bristol Board or a similar tough surface, a razor blade is an effective way of removing any dry ink you don't want before proceeding to re-ink the surface. (See image at the top of this post)

To scrape away an image can make it feel as if you are conducting some sort of speeded up erosion of a surface, but by cutting into the surface by changing the angle of the blade, suddenly it begins to feel as if you are plowing it up and then a little more angle and push and then you are digging into the surface. All these approaches can be further facilitated by laying gesso grounds of various thickness onto your papers before beginning to draw. See link below on drawing grounds.

Each form of erasure will come with its own associations and metaphorical possibilities, the issue being that the removal of your marks is as important as their initial application and it is one of the main ways that artists embed time into their images, because you can read each faintly visible erased mark, as a frozen moment of the past.

Lucienne Rickard: extinction studies

Extinction studies is a series of drawings made by the artist Lucienne Rickard, whereby she erases each image of a species as soon as she has constructed it. The ghosts of previous drawings build up behind the image she is presently making, all reminders that the actual animals she is depicting are also gradually being erased from existence.

Roy Eastland: Silverpoint on gesso

Roy Eastland often deals with fading memories and he will sometimes sand away his silverpoint drawing in order to emphasise the delicate nature of memory; his images emerging out of their gesso surface as if they are coming out of a morning mist. The drawing above is of an old toy, it dissolves back into our collective memories, just as easily as it emerges from them, Eastland is one of the few people who I think can work effectively from photographic imagery, his approach transcending the idea of copying and replacing it with a material memory, one that is able to embed the frailty of humanity into a reflection upon a mechanical process, at the heart of which is something to do with mark making and erasure.

Saturday, 22 February 2025

The geometry of consciousness

I have been fascinated for some time with attempts to use diagrams to visualise invisible forces and the projective consciousness diagram (below), which uses projective geometry to describe consciousness, has inspired me to have my own attempt to visualise consciousness in diagrammatic form. The image directly above, 'The geometry of consciousness' being a first attempt to make a diagram of what is surely the most important invisible force to affect us. When I attempted to visualise a field of perceptual experience earlier, I had to include the idea that there was never a static moment that could be picked out of that experience. Therefore I used an idea of oscillating eyes to explain this in a static diagram, which I have included top left, in the image above. This was I felt missing from the diagram below of projective consciousness, as developed by Rudrauf et al.(2023).

Projective Consciousness: Rudrauf, et al. 2023

This is how the Projective Consciousness Model is explained by Rudrauf, et al:

'Modelling approach: from metaphors to computation. (Left Tier) Two principles to be combined: A Global Workspace (GW), integrating and processing multiple sources and types of information and priors, and a Subjective Perspective (SP). (Right Tier) Field of Consciousness (FoC), projective geometry and active inference, as a GW through a SP. The FoC is structured by a 3D projective space, undergoing transformations through the action of the projective group ( $𝑃 𝐺 𝐿$ ) for perspective taking (PT). Each possible perspective is associated with affective and epistemic values depending on the distribution of information in the space, with the values themselves yielding a value of FE. The projective transformation associated with the lowest expected FE is selected, providing the agent with a model for its actions (moving so as to adopt the perspective minimising the FE). The approach is based on the duality between PT and actual or imagined actions in ambient space. At the lowest level of processing, the FoC is calibrated (FC) to select the specific projective framing of information in the projective space (which modulates the precise representation and perception of information in space). This process underlies conscious access to information and is the basis for multiple perceptual illusions'.

Rudrauf, et al. 2023

The complex text above does not really help me to understand the diagrams that Rudrauf, et al. came up with, but I could sort of see what they were getting at.

I think the diagrams of B. W. Betts and his use of them to explain geometrical psychology might be of more use in the visualisation of both a three dimensional model of consciousness and the many possible intersections and overlaps between emotions, perception (interoception and exteroception), drives and social constructions that underpin that strange thing we call consciousness. Strangely, by leaving out Betts explanations and simply looking at his images, I get a better intuitive grasp of the diagrammatic possibility of a projective consciousness.

From: Louisa S. Cook (1887) Geometrical Psychology or The Science of Representation: An abstract of the theories and diagrams of B. W. Betts London: Redway

Betts believed that consciousness was the only thing that we could actually experience and therefore it was the only thing that we could in effect ever explore or research, because everything else, all our interoceptual or perceptual experiences, had to be received via consciousness. Mathematical forms, such as geometry, are products of pure consciousness, and they don't need any external verification, therefore they will produce, according to Betts, the most pure images of our inner subjective activity. Geometry and mathematics underpin his “Science of Representation,” a system of symbolisation that was regarded as the mediator between the corporeal and the incorporeal. An idea that had its antecedents in the writings of Philo of Alexandria who believed that the Logos or mathematical world was in fact the shadow of God, and that mathematical thought was used as an instrument and a pattern of all creation.

Betts seems to make more sense in terms of visualising consciousness to me, than Rudrauf. et al. However I thought what was needed was a dose of poetry, because if we have actual and/or imagined actions occurring in a space so complicated that in reality we cant understand it, we might have more success by resorting to instinct and feeling tone. In particular I was interested in how to visualise the overlapping awareness of two people who were in conversation; a situation that happens in my workshops, when we collectively try and visualise and communicate interoceptual experiences.

An overlapping conversation gradually comes to an agreement

I also have also had to more rigorously theoretically support the recent work I have been doing on visualising interoception. In order to do this I have decided to look at the work of Catherine Tallon-Baudry a neuroscientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She heads a research team that has been looking at the reverse hierarchical nature of conscious perception. I.e. it is believed that visual information is passed through a cortical hierarchy in a bottom-up fashion, with cells in the early visual cortex responding to simple visual information such as the direction of lines or edges, and the next or following set of cortical areas having increasingly complex response to edges or profiles in that they are read as faces or particular scenes. The reverse hierarchical theory states that; 'conscious perception of that visual information does not arise with the processing of local details, but rather emerges in higher cortical areas where global information about the outside world is represented.' Campana et al: 2016. This research used specially designed images containing local information (oriented lines) and global orientation (shapes defined by clusters of similarly oriented lines). Importantly, local and global information in those images could be manipulated separately.

Tallon-Baudry has stated that the brain on its own isn’t enough to generate subjective experience, and that without the body, the self simply wouldn’t exist. Interoception plays a major role she believes in not just creating emotions, but in how our thoughts as a whole come into being. Interoception it is argued, is in fact a fundamental feature of consciousness. She has stated that our internal organs, particularly the heart and gut, are vital in the creation of our conscious experience, both having their own self-generated rhythms, separate from the brain, on which the brain can hang its sense of self.

In her paper, 'The topological space of subjective experience', she asks, 'How many dimensions do we need to account for subjective experience, and how do those dimensions differ between individuals? What are the properties of the space defined by those dimensions, are they homogeneously distributed, or are there some regions with specific properties?' (Tallon-Baudry, 2022) All of these questions are ones that I feel overlap with my own far less scientific investigations, but which help me to push forward with some sort of intuitive fumbling, in a territory I realise many scientists would think of as foolish.

However, Williams (2023) points out that Antonio Damasio has stated that internal body signals aren’t just involved in consciousness, they are consciousness. He states, “People continue talking about consciousness as the great mystery that will be revealed by understanding the brain, and that’s wrong", he says. “It’s not about the brain, it’s about what the brain achieves with the interoceptive system in the body.” (p.43)

Gradually as I read around and at the same time make drawings based on how people talk about their interoceptual experiences, I begin to feel as if I'm getting at least a tenuous grasp on what I might be dealing with. I many ways it is best as an artist not to know too much, but by sniffing around the edges of science, I do feel that it gives me the confidence to keep trying things out. I like to feel that the early Cubists were in a similar position. They didn't really understand the mathematics of relativity but they did grasp some of its implications intuitively and that intuition led to some of the most powerful images to emerge from the early 20th century.

The merging of two subjective worlds

References:

Rudrauf, D., Sergeant-Perthuis, G., Tisserand, Y., Poloudenny, G., Williford, K., & Amorim, M. A. (2023). The Projective Consciousness Model: Projective Geometry at the Core of Consciousness and the Integration of Perception, Imagination, Motivation, Emotion, Social Cognition and Action. Brain sciences, 13(10), 1435. Accessed from: https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13101435 22.01.25

Tallon-Baudry, C. (2022) The topological space of subjective experience Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 26, Issue 12, 1068 - 1069 December Accessed from: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00219-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1364661322002194%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Tallon-Baudry, C. (2021) From global to local in conscious vision: behavior & MEG Journal of Vision September, Vol.21, 63

Campana, F., Rebollo, I., Urai, A., Wyart, V., & Tallon-Baudry, C. (2016) Conscious Vision Proceeds from Global to Local Content in Goal-Directed Tasks and Spontaneous Vision. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(20), 5200-5214. DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3619-15.2016

Williams, C (2023) Why the mind-body connection is vital to understanding consciousness New Scientist 10th May