A New Perception

Phantom-Moving-For-The-Moving-Impaired (And Related Persons And Their Friends);

or, Metaphysical Experience And The Brain Computer Interface.

"I feel my hand moving as if to touch your face".  Cory's mouth is agape.  Sarah speaks with her eyes recorded by a camera mounted below a monitor displaying a cursor she moves with her eyes. Sarah is paralysed below the neck. She had been noticing before today a sort of eerie after-effect of her sessions on the Brain Computer Interface.

You think a move to the sim. The computer and you share the instruction set of the choreography of the move, each in your own way, and the software records your brain on that move. And when it has all your moves down? Compared to the training sessions, it should be like the coasting following a strenuous effort to top a hill.

If caffeine is a boost of energy Sarah often mused, and since caffeine equals hyperactivity,  then activity mental or physical is energy expenditure. She never expected the final product to be effortless,  just not as tedious. Well,  today, she finally reached the other side of the big hill on which all the other hills are steppes.
A flash warns when your eyes pan to the limit of eye movement.  What prevents  Linda Blair-ing.   She spies the Horde of Tinker Toys crest the hill.Carmen's eyes do a quick look at Juni,  Arnold,  Rez, Francis,  Grandfather. There is no time to revel in or question new sensations. She must be the first to Leap off Lava Mountain,  plummet down,  smash a Surf board sized chunk off the cliff-side,  mount,  and land surfing the Lava!  She is a Girl sized bit of exhilarated motion!

A cyan sky with shaded magenta cirrocumulus clouds is a blur, the jagged landscape a paler gray than the sky and streaked with brown.  The cliff-side face flashes magenta.  The lava is dark oozing bright yellow and orange. Only her center is sharp until she lands and begins to look around.  Actually, the presentation is always a sharp window in a blur of drecreased resolution. The motion she sees slides by like a reverse ouiji board where the hands move the board instead of move the planchette;

.

or like reading text or examining an image on a microscope slide you are moving (with the mind?). Moving in 3d!

When her session was over  she could feel things moving.  She felt Cory looming up to her reaching out to remove the head set. She felt as well as saw the delicate moving of her lady's fingers, her touches and tugs as the sensor net came off.

While Cory was monitoring Sarah's session,  she was viewing an e-mail on another screen.  Robert Bryce is a man of vision and Cory was sharing his.  Super Heavy Lift Helicopters transporting Super Batteries in relief efforts.  Meanwhile,  Sarah is sporting a Neural Monitoring System running on Server Clouds where Data Centers get as large as two football fields.  Liam Newcombe likes to remind how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.   A drop of a hat gets Nicholas Carr going on about how maintaining an avatar in a Second Life virtual reality game requires as much electricity per year as that used by the average Brazilian. "They're teaming up on me" she thinks. Sarah's session-ending broke her out of this reverie.

"What is this girl trying to tell me?  Of a juxtaposition of her virtual motion onto her perceived motion?  Her perception of movement has been enhanced? intensified? This is bad? She feels where before she felt nothing.  Phantom movement? What do I tell her?" Cory just realizes that Sarah had been "free-wheeling" the algorithm the last 15 minutes. This was It! Usually it's start and stop all the way in the painstaking process of filling the gaps in the data mining library.  Sarah and her mouthstick weaving  friendship bracelets,  Specialised two-year training course to design websites. Cory's eyes begin to tear.  This is a milestone.  They were alone in the lab.  Call Aleksi and Mirja at once.

This is feeling motion? feeling e-motion? derived from the French émouvoir based on the Latin emovere. Movere means 'move'. What to say to this bright eyed girl? You have achieved some alternate state of consciousness don't worry it will pass? The important thing is The program ran for a whole 15 minutes! Is it time for champagne yet?

"You imagine reaching out and touching my face and you feel the motion like a real thing rather than as an imagined thing?" Cory asks.  Not being quite the multi- linguist she'd like to be,  she has out her translator.  Two speech synthesizers going at it (is the inflection right?)  Sarah just looks at her. Oh right, this is Sarah, she gives herself a could of had a V8 smack in the head. She just spoke to me in english, duh.

Sarah's answer "well...yes, I guess so... Yes, it is real,  very good." "Can you turn it off" Cory imagines she's blurted this out.  Sarah seems to ponder the question and the process in question  "I don't know."  Cory: "Sarah,  it must be some kind of phantom motion brought on by the unique conditions of our work.  It could be an amazing discovery! Your name could go down in history! The first person to set foot there!"  Sarah's shining eyes are her answer,  followed by an eye roll that says"as if".  "Should we use the Finnish Flag?"

"So,  what was it like,  in the sim I mean?"  Sarah nods as if to say "Yes, I know what you mean." "You're really there in the sim. You look up and up is up. You turn around and behind is really behind. The floor is below. You are inside. Yea, it's full immersion. You get out of sinc you get dizzy but you are still inside."

Sarah rests in a Lifestand Compact,  the lightest standing wheelchair in the world. With motorized propulsion and motorized standing, Web tension seating.  Armrests that convert to chest supports when standing. 12-inch quick release power wheels.  Adjustable leg rests and contoured tibial supports with anti-decubitus pad, ♫and a controller that uses an eye-gaze-response interface computer aid (Erica) in a Seat Rail Mount ♫ <in a pear tree>.

Sarah is obviously in an excited state and will soon crash. Dear Dweller (of Lapinkaari,  one of Finland’s Tampere University of Technology's student dorms) Hopes slippers "Tohvelit jalkaan ja olo lokoisaksi" "Feet in slippers and feeling grand".

There are ghosts.  Real ghosts.  So they say.  But what do these ghosts do?  Well,  they mostly plunder kitchens. They can take your bike,  clothes from the laundry room.  Beware!  How do tenants deal with it?  They eat in university cafeterias. They tend to buy food which can last longer on higher temperatures.  Keep food between window panes or outside the windows in plastic bags. Sarah and the other resident Stakeholders of Cogain (Communication by Gaze Interaction) can't get enough.

Complete Ophthalmoplegia is the paralysis of the eyes. Cory imagines herself a P. T. Barnum tracking down sad victims of circumstance.  This work with eye movement,  with those whose brains can move their eyes only without actual eye movement, is where she had anticipated the breakthrough, rather than here at Cogain. Data from all their work centers worldwide is collected peer-to-peer with continuous uploading and downloading. "No new alerts.  Maybe we're the first." She spoke. Her Nokia translated, whoops I thought I turned that off, but she saw that  Sarah watching her already understood before she had spoken.

Pushing Sarah into the next room,  The young Anniina looks up from her computer screen.

"Aren't you supposed to be alseep?" Cory tackled finnish. "I woke up with an idea." Anniina's english trumped her fin. Cory's nursing skill she owed to Anniina. Anniina was the acting resident care giver. She was also bedding down. A light sleeper,  all the residents in their own rooms were equipped with a nurse call switch.  Sarah  arrived late for her stayover and consequently is in a lag.
"How's that coming?" asks Cory motioning at Anniina's computer screen,  Anniina responds to this with an assessing look at Cory.  Cory laughs and adds "easy,  give it to me easy." "Morphometric Evaluation of Duodenal Biopsies (pause) in Celiac Disease. ..." begins Anniina, Cory nods her head "of course."  Anniina counts off on her fingers "(1)The quality of life and factors associated with it. (2)The mediating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between health literacy and..." she pauses "what is Sarah so pleased about?" The irony is not lost on Cory that thought controlled devices lag in popularity among the likes of Sarah.  (Perhaps this will change now.) Windbag lets Sarah use abbreviations, predictive type,  speak selected text from saved chat boxes,  speak from the clipboard,  all gaze controlled by a cursor on a screen.  Conversing with her requires a special etiquette so that interludes don't become strange or strained or rude.

"If the world were a game video," Sarah begins answering  Anniina's question,"if you became like me and could no longer feel your body,  yet you could  experience motion,  You would be there,  as I was." "In the place" Cory added as the synthesized voice ended.

Anniina looked to Cory as to say well? "We did it!" Cory began. "The program took over and Sarah was freewheeling." Anniina's face lit up with comprehension and enthusiasm. She looked to Sarah "you are ready to swim with the dolphins?" What with wheelchair ramps and manlifts to handle her in and out of the water,  Sarah has already been there and done diving and snorkeling with real dolphins. (Courtesy of The Scuba Trust Dolphin Care UK and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. )Virtual swimming, on the other hand, was undiscovered country when it comes to providing any level of reality. Jo Kay,  aka jokay Wollongong,  of The Islands of Jokaydia ( a virtual worlds community), has been enlisted.

Anniina jumps up taking Cory by surprise,  grabbing her hands they do an improv waltz after which Anniina redeposits herself in her seat with the slightest of smiles.  She watches Sarah typing...
"Wasn't it Omar Khayyam who wrote 'The Moving Finger writes;  and,  having writ,  Moves on:'" her punctuation is precise.  She types on: "In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand,  and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall,  Daniel chapter 5 verse 5".  Anniina is both impressed and puzzled. "Fitzgerald",  Sarah continues "I feel the moving finger now, however I can only put it to use in VR". "You mean, Now, this very instance?" Anniina has rolled her chair closer to Sarah peering into her face.  She turns her head as Cory speaks. "Some kind of phantom movement?  triggered by the CCI? (Cortex Computer Interface, as they have come to call it.)  Anniina returns to Sarah searching her face.

"Wow".  Sarah's eyes agree. "So when they tap our Sunday heads Two zombies walk in our stead" Anniina intones.  Sarah carefully types "Oooh waooooooo waooooooo". Cory bemused is left out. Sarah smiles up at her. "A song about a teenage lesbian couple in a small-town High School and the challenges they face." Says Anniina, then she recites: "2 weeks after her child,  she has a sensation often like baby movements on the right hand side of the belly. Could possibly be resettling." Anniina begans again after an introspective pause. She is back at her keyboard.

After a moment of fast typing reading from the screen: "'are able to will a movement and apparently to themselves execute it more or less effectively.  The certainty with which these patients describe their phantom motions and their confidence as to the place assumed by the parts moved are truly remarkable... the effect is apt to excite twitching in the stump.'  This is from Silas Weir Mitchell the first physician to describe phantom limbs in 1872. The last twenty years have seen great advances in neuroscience and biomechanical engineering advances particularly pertinent to the Wittgenstein phenomenon.  Neurophysiology has confirmed Weir Mitchell’s hypothesis that the entire sensory-ideational-motor unit is activated in phantom motions and engineers are developing highly sophisticated artificial limbs with delicate muscles" she makes quotation signs "amplification of nerve impulses servo-mechanisms etc which can be married to the still intact portion of the limb’s innervation and allow phantom motions to be turned into real ones. The presence of strong phantom sensations and of willed phantom movements indeed is essential to the success of such bionic limbs."

"Paul Wittgenstein was a Viennese pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I. He would say you should trust his choice of fingering because he felt every finger of his right hand. This is all from a Professor Sacks’s review of a John M. Hull book. You know,  Oliver Sacks from Awakenings, with Robert Deniro frozen by Encephalitis lethargica."

After a pause to see if she was quite finished, "Well" breathed Cory. "If you put it that way it's perfectly ordinary and how could it be any other way and whose making a fuss about it not me".  Anniina's laugh is a bark.
Cory squats down taking Sarah's hand and gives it a squeeze. "Those people can feel up to the point of amputation. The nervous system is up and running below the neck, below the waist."

After a moments typing Anniina says "movement is usually a non-painful phantom sensation", she reads "For surgery, patients that receive an anesthetic block of the brachial plexus experience phantom arm... It also occurs in the legs when there is an anesthetic block of the lower body and when there is a block of the spinal cord at the thoracic level patients have experience phantom body." After a pause "Yes,  it can occur in people who are paraplegic that have a complete break in the spinal cord... Even though no signals can get through the break in the spinal cord patients still report feeling in their legs and lower body,  uhhh ... when he lightly touched certain parts of the body,  a sensation was felt in the phantom limb."

After some fast work with the mouse scrambling and the screen flickering on her face "an 11-year-old girl who was born without both forearms and hands... Incredibly during her first years in school she had learned to solve simple arithmetic problems by counting on her phantom fingers, wow I don't remember this,  limbs that often gesticulated during conversation on still another young lady."

"Forbidden!.. You don't have permission to access!.. I - don't - know - about - that (A key tapping emphasis) Here! (the finale)  When the phantom does fade from consciousness it usually does so completely but in 50% of cases especially in those involving the upper limbs the arm becomes progressively shorter until the patient is left with just the phantom hand alone dangling from the stump... ya ya ya... (ja ja ja) the hand is very much over-represented in the somatosensory cortex,  hmmmm... yea,  involuntary or quasi voluntary movement the phantom may wave good-bye fend off a blow break a fall or reach for the telephone" she looks to Cory than Sarah for validation. "The cortical area originally corresponding to the hand is taken over by sensory input from the face,  an area as big as the hand" she nods affirmation in their direction "the cells in the hand area now start responding to stimuli applied to the lower face region".

She swivels away toward them looking like nothing else than a faithful hound who has dropped your bird at your feet. She scoots over to Sarah to place a hand on her forehead when suddenly her hand seems to be knocked away "Hey!, I felt that" They smile at each other for a moment. Sarah's eyes begin typing, "Cassandra Complex: being disbelieved or dismissed when attempting to relate the facticity of your experiences to others." Cory straightens up "What in the world have you been reading young lady? And what are you grinning at?" looking sidelong at Anniina who replies offhand "female hysteria", Cory suddenly feeling old "Comealong".

Anniina begins to steer Sarah toward a door.  Out in the hall in through another door and they stop at Sarah's bed. Sarah has been typing. They watch as she finishes. "When we watch things move around us, we feel them move just like we feel our own body move yes? sympathetic or empathic. I am not as good with this because of my loss of the object* Yes? However, the subject becomes more dear, like a memorial.  Now, I have been given an upgrade!   Yes.  So am I going to be like Louie Pasteur?"

*The body as the object of perception.

"Save that Sarah. Here,  let me send it to my computer," Cory.  Anniina begins tidying Sarah and her chair.  Cory and Anniina have both been sitting on the bed. "When Annetelle gets here you dolphin girls can get this written into a decent paper." Her younger sister Annetelle is a dolphin in the local scouts. Anniina is kettu the fox.  As they ready to leave,  rising from planting a wet one on her forehead,  Cory warns "watch out for monkey girls",  Sarah gives her the eye flash response "Corinthians* 13",  her own invention.

*Cory is short for Corinthian, Corinthian Countee.

Back outside: "Lets don't all rush to the CC at once," (CC is short for CCI) Cory.  Annina drops back into her seat fingers poised over her keyboard "Where was I?" Pausing mid-act looking expectantly at Cory.  Cory meditative "I need to send some e-mails, who first? This is great." "Everyone?" grins Anniina. "Right now you only have Sarah's word good as it is. But this thing isn't going anywhere...I guess." Cory concerned and meditative "I want to know." The accent is on want.



Back in The Room,  Cory is deep in a sim. Real-time graphics engines. First Person Non-Shooter Shooter. This sim has until now required imagination to play it,  that is, imagine-airy moving. Real fingers crossed,  she started-up her imagination and the sim.  At first she's constantly tracking any progress toward freewheeling.  Only after she 's in deep does she "look-up" to realize the loss of a transition from thinking to doing. Instant Replay Slow Motion Highlights. "Scotty, I gotta have more power --" she thinks.  Still, she is amazed how real eye movements have become.  No need to pan the surfer hurling by when a glance can be more timely.

Convinced and feeling she should be shaking out her hair and toweling off,  video water splashed across her workstation,  she now sets about the emails. She (lazy girl, herself not Anniina) pings  Anniina in the other room SUCCESS!

Wolpaw? he'll just curb my enthusiasm. I'll go scholar later.  Curly! Across town.  Live messenger, No response. The Healing Room of Sinead O'Connor.  Log Into Yuku.  Chat room. Forum. There! She (Sinead) worked in a chip shop, was a kiss-a-gram girl in a French maid outfit, at night. "Got ya." Online." She messages Päivi Curly Majaranta.

She looks up.  Anniina says nothing.

Then "We woke up Kaylan and Tim".  After a pause. "They're ecstatic of course. Tim has a name. True Virtual Movement. True is better than Real. I think he wants a go Now." Cory returned to her typing: "Tell'm 'Come on Down'." Anniina: "I wish this was a cure." Cory makes a "yea right " face but nods along distractedly "In your business  hope is essential". Then more enthusiastically "Tim needs some fun". Pause, "Curly wants me to turn my cam on." Cory waves at her screen,  a small motion on the x axis.

On screen Päivi is saying "you take a still of an athlete caught mid motion and you tend to remember them being advanced along the motion... tracery of a perfect circle that speeds up top and bottom but slows down on the sides is perceived as an ellipse. This is muscle imagery.  Maybe for Sarah it has become heightened."

"You know,  I could just believe that" Tim is rolled into view by Kaylan. "They say your other senses are heightened by a loss,  yeah,  but I remember Troi saying to

Picard that this was alot of rubbish."

He makes a face that turns into a Picard face."Well,  anyway,  In the

Kingdom of the Blind..." He and the onscreen Päivi are apparently having a staring match.  He goes " Yeah" rock and rolling his head Oh so slightly in a bluesy way (you know he would finish in a air drum roll if he could.)

Päivi: "Your just innokas to try it"

He mouths "what?""Antsy" she says, him "Oh. Yea, I am."
Päivi: "They put a rubber hand on a table. Beneath it, the table that is, they stroked the subjects hand..."
Tim: "I know, they felt it on the rubber hand, awesome!
Päivi: "Barbara Montero, a gal I know, She's into prosthetics"

Kaylan: "I asked,  when she watched others move,  in sport or at home, how immersed in the movement she became. Julie thought it was similar to before her injury, with ‘a mirror inside her head’ reflecting what she saw. ‘I can picture myself kicking a ball still.’ The phenomenology of agency and intention in the face of paralysis and insentience. Jonathan Cole. Wow, can you believe I remembered that."

Cory: "It's important to you."

Kaylan: "Christopher Reeve talked about when they put the tube down his throat into his lungs suddenely he

could actually feel himself sailing his yacht."

Tim, not to be left out: "the tempo and rhythm of movement and the manner in which it is being pulled from one position to the next is an aspect that we feel visual motion. The Non-visual Perception of External Motion J. J. Gibson, Cornell University"

Päivi: "Curly's World of Digi Wonders, Ta-Dah, demostrating the photography process she developed to allow us to see motion not able to be seen by the naked eye." A carnival bark.
Kaylan: "Pete Smith!, Turner Classic Movies, The Pride of the Yankees. "

Päivi: "Lou Gehrig,  anyway,  what I want to tell you about is a study by a guy I know,  Jeff Rush,  It's a phenomenalistic approach to first person shooters. Moving from one encounter to another: I quote:  The pre-reflective world will be disturbed by the fact that as soon as we round the bend,  we are fired upon by personnel carriers or some such. Well-crafted games play against our ability to savor these moments by imposing immediate threats to our lives. The gunshots instantly terminate our meditation; causing us to choose among the many intentionalities the pre-reflective potentially suggests,  picking those that most protect our life.

Tim: "You know Moe,  you aught to get your arse over here,  you are just across town."
Anniina laughs surprising everyone.
Päivi,  continuing as if she hadn't heard "We're all familiar with Merleau-Ponty aren't we children. Circa the 30's and 40's.  He goes on about things we now take for granted. His model of phenomenological time identifies the movement generated by perception itself. Human time is experienced in some video games as the progressive narrowing down of the possibilities embodied in a new game space."

Anniina: "Use of the word 'reflective' today is influenced by work with mirror neurons".

Tim: "Look,  going good against remotes is one thing. Going good against the living? That's something else. Or

in this case, the same." He gives a perplexed scratching his head look. He sees that Anniina is eating it up.

Anniina: "People always had a notion of a world that transcended their own,  it was the realm of the gods or God, then it was a realm accessed only by metaphysics and/or revealed by science".

Tim: "and/or?"

"The philosophers took it out of the hands of the natural philosophers by saying yeah, but just because you have a story about what objects really are doesn't mean you've got something other than a story;  and when Kidd says a story,  he means a story!
Kaylan: "Cary Grant, The Philadelphia Story (1940)! You have idle time Anniina?"

Päivi:"Exactly. I think. Ricour’s model of narrative time seeks to bridge individual and cosmological time."

After a pause, "Well, what does miss PhD Philosopher have to say?"

Cory: "of Statistics. Yes, well, clearing her throat, hmm, before Ricour and Ponty there was Shadworth Hollway

Hodgson,  english, circa the 80s,  eighteen 80s.
First let my finger-tip rest upon an empty lidless square box;  I move my finger-tip gently along  over the outside surface of the box;  round the inside of the box. Let the box be turned topsy-turvy, (Tim mouths topsy-turvy) with the finger-tips resting on its upper edge, and then moved forwards till the whole hand, fingers and palm, lies flat on its upper surface. They are no longer felt only as a change of extention in time; they are felt also as an addition in original extension. Still there is no knowledge of surface distinct from the surface-perception. When we take a bath of cold air or water, The difference is,  that here we are comparatively passive to the sensations. Completion is when we grasp with the hand so as to let the fingers close upon it, and to meet the palm of the hand. The object to be felt on all its sides at once.  A boy's playing marble is not perceived completely at once unless the hand grasps itself.  This is the blind men and an elephant, this is about grasping yes, but it is also about extenstion (she started to say i.e, but glanced at Tim), which is to say it is about movement.

The movement of the eye, adjusting and focussing,  is not the movement that we perceive.   The eye is not the object but rather the condition. We do not feel things with the eye. The congenital blind man cured could not reconcile his old world with the new. Yet visual imagery is muscular as if a muscular force or agent were to move things about. I grasp and feel one hand with the other, looking at them while doing so,  as I turn them round and round. 'Till groups of space perceptions have been formed in consciousness, we can have no experience of ourselves as percipients,  nor even of perception at all,  as different from physically material percepts.  Perception in time alone,  though the simplest and most essential form of experience,  has yet to wait for recognition of what it is,  till matter also has been perceived...'"

She trails off and then acts as if shaken out of a stupor.

Päivi: "Hmph!"

Cory: "What?"

Päivi: "Just kidding"

"Yes" says Cory pointing to Kaylan's uplifted hand, Tim laughs "see" he says to Kaylan who just shakes her head meeting Cory 's eyes in a girl to girl "what can you do" conspiratorial thing. "What? oh" Cory with a "you guys" expression.
"wiiwant2play" recites Tim.
Cory



Tim elated "Blue Magic! Your full of surprises."
Päivi from within the screen  laughing "Is that what their calling it now."
Tim: "70's R&B?"
Cory: "They played at my Mom's prom." pause "I was going to do the traditional Huurry Huurry thing but,  you know,  you guys deserve better."



Suitable for all hair types with the exception of corn rows and dreadlocks.  Successful with difficult-to-record populations,  such as autistic children,  patients with dementia,  ADHD teens. 15 minutes for 256 channels.  Staff rapidly learn the technique.  Complete head coverage=smaller intersensor distances.  Children are far less likely to cry because the process is rapid and abrasion-free. Nor does it smell or damage the hair.  The net is immersed in saline to soften the sponge electrodes and to facilitate contact and rewetted  without removal to maintain electrolytes and keep scalp impedances low.

Standing at the side of the subject,  look at the ear. In front of the ear canal is a small flap of cartilage called the tragus.  Just above the tragus is the point at which the top of ear lobe begins to form. The small dimple-like indentation between the tragus and the formation of the top of the ear lobe is the pre-auricular point.  If in doubt,  ask the subject to open and close his jaw. Look and feel for movement at the indentation above the tragus.  Facing the subject,  look into his/her eyes.  Find the small dip at the bridge of the nose between the eyes. This point at which the forehead meets the nose is the nasion.  Part the subject’s hair down the center,  in the back of the head.  Starting at the nape of the neck,  run a finger up the back of the participant’s head until a bony ridge  or bump can be felt.  Having the subject move his/her head up and down may help you to identify this bony ridge. The slight hollow just beneath this bony ridge is the inion. This landmark may be difficult to feel,  in which case,  standing on the side of the subject,  visualize an imaginary line forming a band around the head connecting the nasion and preauricular the back of which should identify the inion.

Nominally,  you would part the hair and hold in it place with hair clips for the electrode to rest on the skin and not on hair.  With re-positioned metric tape and measurement guides used for placement. "You have it easy" thinks Kaylan of herself. For the attachment of gold disk electrodes (the retro version), the skin at the marked sites must be properly cleansed and lightly abraded.  "You have it easy" Kaylan thinks at Tim.  He must have read her mind because he looks up and smiles a knowing smile.
Although blood is not evident, the technician must understand that these areas are now non-intact skin and pose a risk for blood borne pathogens.  Personal protective equipment (PPE) recommend.  Lemon Prep has the highest volume of abrasive and is suitable for weathered scalp or if low impedance cannot be otherwise obtained.  She kisses the top of his head and squeezes his hand always attuned for that telltale pressure of a squeeze back.

Preparations such as Nu-Prep and Skin Pure contain relatively less pumice and may be preferred for those with sensitive or fragile skin.  Tim licks his lips as they brush The sealed microenvironment of the unique soft pedestal design of the HydroCel Skin Interface Chamber®,  which hydrates the skin to create an interface between the skin and electrode.  "Mmm...Salty"says he.

Slowly count to 5 while you scrub the site (1 onethousand, 2 one-thousand, 3 one-thousand, 4 one-thousand,  5 one-thousand). You are done when the skin “pinks up”.   She did her homework with help from
Faith and others of Once Awesome Army when she discovered they were booking a flight.  Only to learn that with A little help from © 2010 Electrical Geodesics Inc,  that torturing Tim would not be necessary.  Shoot.
Päivi to Cory and Anniina (who was watching Kaylan critically) both still in her field of vision regaining their attention:  "We perceive change and motion.  This appears metaphysically significant, because it is what the immediate awareness of the passage of time amounts to.  We are indirectly aware of the passage of time when we reflect on our memories, which present the world as it was, and so a contrast with how things are now. But much more immediate than this is seeing the second hand move around the clock, or hearing a succession of notes in a piece of music, or feeling a raindrop run down your neck".

"There is nothing inferential,  it seems,  about the perception of change and motion: it is simply given in experience.  But now consider what happens in motion perception: we see an object occupying successive positions. We must see these as non-simultaneous,  for otherwise we would just see a blur. (Of course,  when motion,  especially oscillatory motion,  is sufficiently fast,  we do see the object as a blur.  But standardly,  the moving object is in sharp focus.) It follows from this that we do not see these successive positions as present.  But if the perception of motion just is the perception of successive positions, then it seems that we do not,  after all,  perceive motion as present,  which is to say that we do not perceive it at all. Yet how can we deny such an obvious feature of our experience? Just look at the birds flying overhead,  the bus moving off down the lane, the leaves tumbling down from the trees".

"If,  while keeping one’s eyes as still as possible,  one looks for a long time at continuous movement in a particular direction—as when,  for instance,  we watch a waterfall,  or railway tracks flying past when we are looking out of the carriage—and then turn one’s gaze to a stationary object,  it will seem for a while to move in the opposite direction.  A similar effect is produced by looking at a rotating spiral.  While it is rotating,  it will appear to expand (or shrink, depending on whether it is an anti-clockwise or clockwise spiral, and whether it is being spun clockwise or anti-clockwise). If it appears to be expanding,  then,  once the spiral stops,  it will appear to shrink (and vice versa). The experience is paradoxical:  the spiral seems to remain the same size and change size at the same time. In the case of linear movement,  the stationary object seems both to move and to stay in the same position".

Two neural mechanisms are involved here.  The motion-registering system is somehow disturbed by the previous exposure to movement,  and continues to indicate movement when all external motion has stopped. The change of position-detecting system is not disturbed in this way".   Suppose motion to be registered simply by a change in retinal stimulation. A more sophisticated system takes a series of snapshots of an object’s relative position and compares them.  Any discrepancy would result in the perception of change of position.  It is possible,  then,  that the more primitive system would register  motion happening now,  while the more sophisticated system would report no change in relative position" and could not unproblematically be said to give rise to the sense of change of relative position happening now. Yes!"

Anniina dumbfounded, "You remember all of that?"
"Yes,  no,  I looked it up,  ROBIN LE POIDEVIN."

Tim:

The celebrated opening bars of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The first B-flat clarinet, starting from a long low trill,  crescendos flamboyantly through a smooth two and-a-half octave glissando to arrive on a sustained minim concert B-flat.
(a) the alternation of successive notes at the beginning of the phrase,  first piano and steady,  then louder and faster as the trill accelerates;

(b) the rapid,  long,  continuous seventeen note ascent that emerges from it; and

(c) the final sustained minim, lingering for a moment before relaxing into the next passage.  In listening to the clarinet,  we experience persistence,  succession,  and,  with the final B-flat, simultaneity— assuming that the rest of the orchestra is brought in on time.

Your talking about Principle of Simultaneous Awareness and Specious Present Theory.  Specious Present Theory provides a very clear account of how temporal experience is possible despite the constraints of Principle of Simultaneous Awareness.  There's Object Time t1 t2 and Experiential Time,  Ian Phillips. Names like Barry Dainton,  Guyer,  Kant, Guy-ers you could really jam with."

A pregnant silence. Tim a poker face.  Anniina: "Going once going twice..."  Kaylan roughs his head a puppet in her hands.
Tim: "James and Husserl."
Tim: "There is no logical impossibility in God creating the world in the state it is in at any moment, yet lacking any history.  One might then add a supervenience claim to the effect that the mental facts at a time supervene on the physical facts at a time. This would then commit one to the view that all facts about our conscious or mental lives are compatible with the world having been brought into sudden existence any finite time before the present moment.  Russell Worlds. Wow are you impressed or what!" Trying to look up at Kaylan.  She knows that despite the bravado he is genuinely pleased with himself so that so to is she.

Tim: "The Appeal to Memory.  If notes simply persist in consciousness in the manner in which they were first presented,  ‘instead of a melody we should have a chord of simultaneous notes or rather a disharmonious jumble of sounds’.  If notes remain in consciousness in a different way...

C major broken triad played staccato and allegro. You hear each of the notes of the broken chord in turn.

Next a staccato G.
After the G-key has been struck,  one hears a G.  An ordinary experience of a G natural.

We hear the G following on from the two previous notes of the triad or hear it in lonely isolation.  With the triad you are not just hearing a G note.

Simultaneous Awareness is  possible if it is possible to hear the triad but not experience succession hearing the final G.  Fail to hear any relations of succession between the notes over and above the individual sounds. One would not be in a position at time t to attend to the whole triad  spread out as it is over a temporal interval.   It follows that a merely temporal cannot ground the difference in experience.

If when I experience each individual phase of the note, my experience of the final phase is independent of my experience of preceding phases.  It is not obvious that one could—at the very moment the G sounds—have an experience which was not in part an experience of succession unless there was some difference in history.  Whew,  we definitely do not,  -wish to follow Kant and others in their denial that we perceive temporal properties. Where are the case studies?  They would never be musicians."

Kaylan: "So,  the moral of the story.  What we experience as motion in the 3 dimensions of space, begins as motion in the 4th dimension of time,  but is essentially the same animal.  Furthermore,  this beastie is somehow quickened by our infernal device.   How so this quickening?".
Anniina: "Sensitization."
Tim: "From pinball to Space Invaders to Xbox,  the skill is in the hands.  No longer!  Tommy would be left out. Oh

Right. Haptics."

Kaylan: "Have you considered that this thing may be a New Perception?" She walked around behind the desk to sit in front of a computer that had a second monitor behind her,  wall mounted,  an Apple Cinema display.  The Wacom Intuos4 Pen Tablet - Large - Offering an advanced pen Tip Sensor.
"Let's review."  She began gently but quickly a smooth scrawl. "Movement Perception" she speaks and writes.


One voice a quivery whisper: "Keep absolutely still - - it's vision's based on movement!"

Another voice:
"You're sure?!"

First voice:
a pause
"Relatively".

This she tells while she sketches a scene: T-Rex snorts man's hat off.

"You guys current with computer vision? Of course you

are,  silly me".

Anniina turns Tim so that he can enjoy this performance.  Cory does the same for Päivi.  Päivi has Kaylan's screen open in a window as well.
Kaylan: "Is the computer a T-Rex unable to quite make out stills without help from motion pictures? She only sketchs out keywords and phrases.

"Such amazing penmanship." Tim.
"A watch hand changes just before or during the period our eyes are in motion." Kaylan continues, "We think for a moment that the watch has stopped working because the moment seems to exceed one second."
"While these eye motions called saccades are very fast,  speed is relative here.  These are gaps and we don't notice them.  We get a continuous uninterrupted stream.  This is temporal stability.  This is different than a camera being panned around."
"The eye is a foveal sensor that allows high resolution only at the point of interest.  We often backtrack to a previous observed person thinking 'oh that's my friend'.  At these times we can get blurred images because recognizing a person and moving the eyes are separate overlapping operations.  Less frames per second is the way we get images while our eyes are moving."
"The phi phenomenon is perceiving constant movement instead of a sequence of images. It is The maker of the correct working of the cinema,  and this persistence of vision is in fact a limitation of the human eye."
"Rapid serial visual presentation lets us see without moving our eyes. To go on a virtual ride."
"A circle surrounded by small circles is perceived as being larger than the one surrounded by large circles.  Yet when we pick up the disk we perceive as the circle,  we open our hand the right size. Vision-for-perception is on a relatively slow time scale with conscious control.   Vision-for-action is on a faster time,  body time,  with no need for conscious control."
"Passive VR has the potential for greater immersion into VR. The graphics can be as well rendered as what we see at the cinema.  Sex and violence looking out someone elses eyes.  Some bugs are the participant losing  the sense of the video"
"You haven't said yet Cory."
Cory: "I've been checking. Whenever I'm still,  I feel it.  Phantom moving.  It's really neat.  It's like an after-thing.  Maybe it is something that was always there,  but now that I've had it isolated for me in VR,   I can home in on it,  or hone in."
Päivi: "Well".
Anniina: "Wow".
Tim: "When you have to shoot,  shoot.  Don't talk."
Kaylan: "Huh?"
Tim: "I mean yeah wow but in the immortal words of

Tucco..."  Blank looks all around. "The Good,  the Bad and the Ugly."
Kaylan: "A real man of action".

Tim and Kaylan hold each others gaze for a moment as if some line has been crossed.  Then they both seem to be barely able to contain their mirth. "Awkward" they say in unison. Kaylan comes around to Tim's side.  Anniina moves in.

Tim has chosen to work from a Second Life simulation where he can mingle with the Often Awesome crowd.  The small island known as live2give is the virtual residence of nine adults with cerebral palsy.  Brigadoon is a place created for sufferers of autism and Asperger's.  "People of all kinds can find something meaningful to do".  Says Philip Rosedale virtual architect advisor and consulant.  Tims request seemed simple enough.  It became a major undertaking.

Enter Lori Landay--Associate Professor of Cultural Studies Berklee and her Machinima; her mechanical eye.  I,  a machine,  show you the world as only I can see it.

Jun'ichi Ushiba and the gang at Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, had already incorporated the BCI system into Second Life.

Coming soon! Next chapter: Definitely not the Forbidden Experiment