The results of fMRI brain scanning require extensive analysis in the                  laboratory. In Handling Digital Brains, Morana Alac shows that fMRI researchers do                  not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in                  laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the                  scans with gestures, and talk as they work with computers. Ala? argues that                  to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning we must consider their                  dynamic coordination with gesture, speech, and working hands. These multimodal                  actions, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific visuals. A                  semiotician trained in cognitive science, Ala? grounds her discussion in                  concepts from Peirce's semiotics and her methodology in ethnography and multimodal                  conversation analysis. Basing her observations on videotaped records of activity in                  three fMRI research labs, Alac describes scientists' manual engagement with digital                  visuals of the human brain. Doing so, she turns her attention to the issue of                  practical thinking. Ala? argues that although fMRI technology directs                  scientists to consider human thinking in terms of an individual brain, scientific                  practices in the fMRI lab demonstrate thinking that engages the whole lived body and                  the world in which the body is situated. The turn toward the digital does not bring                  with it abstraction but a manual and embodied engagement. The practical and                  multimodal engagement with digital brains in the laboratory challenges certain                  assumptions behind fMRI technology; it suggests our hands are essential to learning.                  and the making of meaning.

Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers (Inside Technology) PDF

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