{"title":"From the Mental State of Noise to the New Frontiers of Cognition","authors":"Cecile Malaspina","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216537","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"outside his window, Schopenhauer famously lamented, would lacerate his brain and quash every thought in its infancy. In “The Concept of Noise,” which we are happy to be able to republish here, Steven Sands and John Ratey can be credited with first spelling out the cognitive dimension of the predicament that Schopenhauer so lamented, offering the following definition of the “mental state of noise”: “By ‘noise,’ we mean an internally experienced state of crowding and confusion created by a variety of stimuli, the quantity, intensity and unpredictability of which make it difficult for individuals so afflicted to tolerate and organize their experience” (Sands and Ratey 290). However, noise, in this enlarged and cybernetically inflected sense, now alludes to a relation between contingency and control, which includes but is no longer limited to the experience of unwanted sound. In the past few decades this novel, cybernetic conception of noise has become synonymous with the complexity of our world and its global digitised information networks. As the economist Fischer Black put it so adroitly in his seminal paper from 1986, simply entitled “Noise”:","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216537","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
outside his window, Schopenhauer famously lamented, would lacerate his brain and quash every thought in its infancy. In “The Concept of Noise,” which we are happy to be able to republish here, Steven Sands and John Ratey can be credited with first spelling out the cognitive dimension of the predicament that Schopenhauer so lamented, offering the following definition of the “mental state of noise”: “By ‘noise,’ we mean an internally experienced state of crowding and confusion created by a variety of stimuli, the quantity, intensity and unpredictability of which make it difficult for individuals so afflicted to tolerate and organize their experience” (Sands and Ratey 290). However, noise, in this enlarged and cybernetically inflected sense, now alludes to a relation between contingency and control, which includes but is no longer limited to the experience of unwanted sound. In the past few decades this novel, cybernetic conception of noise has become synonymous with the complexity of our world and its global digitised information networks. As the economist Fischer Black put it so adroitly in his seminal paper from 1986, simply entitled “Noise”:
期刊介绍:
Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities was established in September 1993 to provide an international forum for vanguard work in the theoretical humanities. In itself a contentious category, "theoretical humanities" represents the productive nexus of work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. The journal is dedicated to the refreshing of intellectual coordinates, and to the challenging and vivifying process of re-thinking. Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities encourages a critical engagement with theory in terms of disciplinary development and intellectual and political usefulness, the inquiry into and articulation of culture.