I have a thesis about dreaming and film making. I think that the rhythm of film editing that works best is one that approximates the way our brains generate images while dreaming. This thesis could only be tested by working with aboriginal people who have never seen composited or edited image streams.
It seems that memories are stored visually. That is to say that memories, while they may have other senses associated with them, seem to be keyed visually. But the thing that is most interesting is the act of image composition that happens during dreams.
I was standing on a hill where I was looking south toward the University district in Seattle. I never saw the hill, but I infer it from the angle of sight down toward the buildings of the U district and the curve of the eastern shore of Lake Union. I don’t think I have ever seen a picture with those combined elements.
I looked up and saw an airplane similar to an early Wright Brothers design. It was flying north. North, only because it was moving away from the U district. I say similar because it had a single engine but it was mounted to one side. It was a big engine, maybe a Merlin, clad in shiny metal, and the propeller described a very large arc. It was like the front of a P-51 was stuffed between the wings of an early Wright Bros. plane. I watched it for a bit and then it suddenly pivoted in the sky and fly back to the south.
It flew straight into a tall building that was being constructed there. The building had wooden braces between the concrete floors. I watched the pilot try to avoid the building and then the crash and he was ejected from the airplane and his blue clad form was left on a balcony of the building. The airplane was destroyed.
I started to run toward the building and was met by a blizzard of wood chips, about the size of two quarters. They were wood chips that you get when you chop wood, thick with bevelled edges.
Then I woke up.
To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen an airplane of that design fly. I have seen pictures of that kind of plane, and perhaps a movie, but my brain synthesized the movement of the airplane. There has never been an airplane of that design with a big motor mounted that far outboard on the wing. It is simply not flyable. But my brain synthesized the composite image and animated it.
The style of building construction from my dream is common in the Northwest. Wooden braces are used to keep concrete floors from sagging as the concrete cures after the forms are removed. But the logical combination of the action of the airplane with the wood to generate a stream of wood chips is something synthesized by my brain and then the images were animated.
I have, to the best of my knowledge, never seen an image stream like this dream. This was not the mere juxaposition of familiar images with unfamiliar settings. These were discrete images that had been put together, then animated. Motion was generated for these things.
I write this because in the last week, I have seen several things posted about gaming. A study was released that said:
According to the study, the more time student respondents reported playing video games, the worse they assessed their relationships with peers and parents. “It may be that young adults remove themselves from important social settings to play video games, or that people who already struggle with relationships are trying to find other ways to spend their time,” Walker told the BYU news service. “My guess is that it’s some of both and becomes circular.”
One response in the blogosphere was to attack the validity of the report because it was done by someone from Brigham Young University. This attack asserts that because the study supports the cultural position of the Mormon religion, it must be suspect. The reaction from gaming supporters is uniformly this: unless you have direct, observable, repeatable, cause-and-effect mapped results, your findings have no validity.
This is the defensive method offered up by people who have no other defense. This is the same as the schoolyard chant of “Prove it!”, and about as valuable. A simple example of can show this defense to be suspect. Consider automotive anti-freeze. It has a slightly sweetish taste. You would not know that drinking it will certainly kill you. Without the science to know that the metabolites of ethylene glycol, principally glycolic acid and oxalic acid, cause metabolic acidosis, cardiovascular dysfunction, and acute kidney failure, there is no direct proof that ingesting ethylene glycol is toxic. Since the rate of toxicity is dependent on body weight and metabolic rate, and the point of expiration is removed from the ingestion, it would be hard to make a direct correlation that ingestion of ethylene glycol was the one element that causes death.
This is what is being asserted, axiomatically, by the “all computer gaming is okay” position: without incontrovertible scientific proof, you are wrong. The only rational response to this is: I don’t accept your axioms.
So little is know about brain chemistry, neurotransmitter interaction and correlative human behavior that you can safely say that the science doesn’t exist yet.
Computer games flood the memories with violent, anti-social images, accompanied by music that also seems violent and anti-social. Are kids, particularly adolescent males, drawn to these games because it allows social interaction without social vulnerability?
This is the issue. Adolescence is the time where kids become aware of their vulnerabilities and either learn to live with them or hide from them. It would seem that the computer gaming crowd is in favor of the latter more than the former.
