Unit 2: Part 3 Vocabulary

This is one of those sensations you encounter especially when, in a foreign city, you run into someone you met back home, or vice versa. A face out of context creates confusion.

You can be a student of mass communication, debate the effects of reality, or the confusion between the real and the imagined, and expound the way some people fall permanently into this confusion; but still you are not immune to the syndrome.

“Look there’s X.” “Are you sure?” “Of course I’m sure. It’s X, I tell you.” And they continue their conversation amiably, while X hears them, and they don’t care if he hears them: it’s as if he didn’t exist.

She wished her hair shone flaxen in the sunlight of the market square like little Geertruida’s.

All that month she did not speak, the occasion too momentous to dislodge it with words.

The honey-colored window, the Spanish chair, the map she’d stared at, dreaming, hanging on the wall, Grandmother Maria’s golden water pitcher, Mother’s pearls and yellow satin jacket—they commanded such a reverence for her now that she felt they all had souls.

The style of the sculpture seemed reminiscent of the Anavyssos kouros in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, meaning that it seemed to fit with a particular time and place.

When Zeri was taken down to the museum’s restoration studio to see the kouros in December of 1983, he found himself staring at the sculpture’s fingernails. In a way he couldn’t immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him.

But that, too, fell into doubt: the closer experts in Greek sculpture looked at it, the more they began to see it as a puzzling pastiche of several different styles from several different places and time periods.

In years when the rains were particularly hard, the ancient Egyptians living in the Nile Valley faced a recurrent problem. The river would burst its banks and flood the surrounding plains, washing away the markers that the farmers used to indicate the boundaries of their land.

To overcome this problem, they needed a way to accurately reconstruct the obliterated boundary lines.

To obtain his map, Peters had to resort to some fairly intricate mathematics—there is no simple geometric projection that will produce a map representing area accurately.

With hearing, for example, a pattern of raw frequencies is mapped onto the primary auditory cortex.

This does not mean the hippocampus suddenly lights up with miniature sensory images. But a pattern of activity forms that “points back” to a stack of other neural patterns.

Metzger put volunteers in rooms that were lit very carefully so there was no shadow and no gradients from light to dark.

These experiments are interesting but they are also artificial. It takes something as contrived as a polished white wall, or halves of a ping-pong ball, to create a wholly uniform visual field.

In the end, when there is nothing left to see, the eye and the brain invent lights. The dark room begins to shimmer with entoptic auroras.