Professor Årnstay’s COGNITIVE EXERCISES provide experiential, sensory and phenomenological experiences of the mind configurations she explores in the IMPROVISING CONSCIOUSNESS LECTURE. Between 2011 and 2017 Professor Årnstay has made evolving and iterative versions of these COGNITIVE EXERCISES available at workshops and special events. Professor Årnstay and Zen Dyson intend to make online versions of all the exercises, but a pan-temporal anomaly has curtailed Professor Årnstay’s access to this aerea, and the plan has yet to be fully realized.
We apologize for missing and partial material, but we believe that her message of hope for, and radical cognitive change in, the future is clear.
The Bicameral Emulation Exercise
This audio/tactile exercise is designed to speak separately to the two lobes of your brain, giving you a taste of life with a Bicameral Mind. Pair this uplifting and mind-splitting experience with lecture 2 and lecture 3.
At enormous expense and with incredible technical sophistry, Professor Årnstay and her team have collaborated with a Real Live Alien Intelligence to bring you the Davian Bead Game – a visual meditation that allows you to reconnect with the deep visual and analogical centers of the mind. Pair this experience with lecture one and video lecture six.
The Alter Ego Workshop (AEW) encourages participants to construct and play with their own Alter Egos. The goal of the project is to provoke a phenomenological experience of “self” that foregrounds its language-based and very malleable construction. In earlier versions of this workshop, participants made avatars of peg dolls and used them in melodramatic improvisations with trained actors.
The ideas and experience explored in this cognitive exercise relate most explicitly to lecture five, and lecture six. But there are important connections to lecture two and lecture four.
***
