Process Archive / Studio Bhoan

field notes & fragments from an itinerant studio
ongoing marginalia on image, memory, and place

Copycat

Neuroplasticity, as it's called, gives us a much more acute understanding of how the brain works, but it doesn't bring us a great deal closer to the ghost in the machine: consciousness. Many scientists believe the sensory map imprinted on the brain forms a rudimentary consciousness, and the next stage of development is "mirror neurons", which enable us to ape the actions of others.

These neurons were first discovered in monkeys in the 1990s and last year they were formally identified in humans. Ramachandran, the mirror therapist, was quick to reflect on their potential and he predicts that their discovery "will do for psychology what DNA did for biology".

What they appear to tell us is that humans are first and foremost mimics. We make ourselves up as we go along by improvising from what we see. This model also suggests the self is in dynamic interaction with otherness, both copying behaviour and projecting its emotions on to others, which is the basis for the vital human quality of empathy. (Ramachandran speculated in 2000 that autism was caused by deficient mirror neurons and medical research is now going in this direction.)

*via The Guardian : VS Ramachandran: The Marco Polo of neuroscience, 2011

Category
Research, Mirror Neurons, Empathy

Scanning and Imaging

Lidar scans, 2023

First comes the blood work—CA-125 in her case—then the imaging: MRI, followed by a sonogram. The gradients and radio-frequency coils map the body slice by slice, stacking them into a three-dimensional volume.

Chemotherapy begins but exacts its price; chemicals flood every tissue. Her bones feel hollowed, her cells as if they are burning from the inside.

Category
Medical Imaging, Embodied Trauma, LiDAR

Reading Mohammed Iqbal in Ahmedabad

An old man corrected my pronunciation. Two men on a scooter stopped, leafed through the Iqbal poems, and snapped photos of the pages. “Where did you find this?” they asked. “It’s hard to get Urdu books here”

Video recordings in Urdu with English subtitles.

Category
Urdu Poetry, Identity, Collective readings

Family Archives

You know how sometimes you find images that were bundled together in a photo album, a few inserted in that slot-for-one? The ones that can only first be felt with fingers and then their density tells us, there is more here.

Category
Personal Memory, Photo Albums, Domestic History

Studio Bhoan 2025