This paper speculates upon the possibilities of a telepathically enhanced cultural environment, which might create forms of modulation in the neural networks of the brain. The first uncertain challenge, in the section Telepathy and the Idea of the XSF, is to understand telepathy as extro-science fiction (XSF) and show how XSF becomes real. XSF as understood by Quentin Meillassoux is contrasted to science fiction. In particular, I will concentrate on Meillassoux Type 2 worlds, whose irregularity is sufficient to abolish science but not consciousness, through an exploration of the artistic practices of Robert Barry, Marina Abramović, and Susan Hiller employing telepathy. I will suggest these art experiments have produced information that science could not. These artists and their work have laid the foundation for an integral understanding of telepathy, where telepathy in conceptual art processes are materially engaged with the brain, body and the world. Responding to a wealth of information manifesting in science fiction, these conceptual art practices, within a sub-genre I call extro-science conceptual art, an extension of XSF into art, have been reappearing in recent telepathic technologies. These conceptual art practices become the first materializations in the cultural schemata of these technologies and form a link to experiments with those of the 19th century to the present day. They manifest as migrations of the sensible and insensible, and form active visions to be harnessed by such things as material engagement theory (MET) and brain artifact interfaces (BAI). These are discussed in my next section: Material Engagement and the World Brain Continuum. Using these theories as a foundation, I analyze how a cultural environment, in the process of becoming more telepathically inclined as a result of more embedded telepathic technologies, might in fact sculpt the brain’s neural plasticity.

The third section, Immaterial Technologies of Mindedness, describes current and emerging telepathic technologies: brain computer interfaces (BCIs); cortical implants; electroencephalography (EEG); bio-neuroheadsets; ‘telepathic smart dust’ of networked sensor motes; social media and ubiquitous computing.¹ These technologies work together to build up an armamentarium (medical equipment) of telepathic devices and techniques. The mind is open in the sense that it is labile and capable of change especially as a result of interactions with forms of cultural modification.

The fourth section, Theories of Mind (ToM): Mind Reading, Empathy and Telepathy, focusing specifically upon the context of social neuroscience, will be unpacked before my exposition of various theories of ‘neuromodulation’ in the next section, Neuro-Modulating the Neural Material Substrate. Here, theories of neural plasticity especially those encountered in Jean-Pierre Changeux’s theory of selective stabilization of synapses will be connected to Stanislas Dehaene’s ‘neuronal recycling hypothesis,’ in which the cultural events of reading, writing and numerosity (numerical cognition) provide means to understand how cultural environments can modify neural architectures.

Through hands-on and rigorous experience with conceptual art and telepathy, rather than brain science, my research and practice leads me to wonder if telepathy and conceptualism, especially in its expanded role in the knowledge economy might operate in similar ways to produce engagements of the social brain and extended mind. In fact my strategy is to understand that “neuro-modulating the neural material substrate” means, in line with work by Warren Neidich and Catherine Malabou, how both the brains flexibility is molded by the environment, on one hand as a form of political control, and, on the other, as a mechanism of emancipation. Thus, the power of art can be seen as a means of liberation of both the world and the brain.

Telepathy and the Idea of the XSF

What is the definition of XSF (extro-science fiction)? In general the term XSF describes a world in which the scientific method is useless. Quentin Meillassoux delineates two regimes of fiction in his essay “Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction,” science fiction (SF) and extro-science fiction, (XSF). Science fiction has the possibility of opening up scientific knowledge to unknown horizons and as it is based on the presumptions of science it expands its knowledge, retaining possible futures inside it. Sometimes devices dreamed up in science fiction novels become real, as in the case of the ‘briefcase computer’ in Inherit the Stars by James Hogan. Meillassoux highlights Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, as a great example of XSF. Telepathy and psi phenomena are ubiquitous in the world of Ubik. A central character is an anti-telepath technician who blocks psychic powers in order to prevent a telepath from reading minds in order to enforce neuro-privacy, resonating with current concerns with computer assisted brain-to-brain and brain-computer interfaces by neuroethicists. Another example of science fiction mutating into the real by Hogan are the repair drones in The Two Faces of Tomorrow.

By XSF, Meillassoux means “where science is impossible in principle,” and where an object cannot be constituted as real or objective by scientific method.² In other words, it is a call for another method to establish such an object or fact. XSF is an account for a world that has become too chaotic for the laws of science to be applicable. It is divided into three types. Type 1 worlds are irregular but not chaotic and allow for a stabilized science and consciousness. These worlds contain spasmodic events, which do not jeopardize science because they are impossible to reproduce or corroborate in a regular fashion in multiple laboratories worldwide. Consciousness is also not jeopardized because it appeals to criteria of intersubjectivity, of other eye-witness reports or verbalized corroborating experiences. In Type 2 worlds events are so irregular as to abolish science but not consciousness. Scientific experiments yield the most diverse results, where there is not the possibility of corroborating evidence, and unrelated laws of the world can change at any time and are structured only chronologically while at the same allowing for the possibility of everyday life. Scientific laws could not be indeterminate essences and would always need to be qualified and bracketed by boundary conditions. In Type 2 worlds our consciousness is a socially elaborated one in which social regularity dependent upon the vigilant and reasonableness of others makes prediction and survival possible. Science is not possible but consciousness is. Type 3 worlds are simply too chaotic and lawless, and make both science and consciousness impossible. XSF Type 2 is the most “real extro-science world”³ of the three types of XSF possible worlds Meillassoux has imagined and described.

Here is where the phenomena of XSF have their possible entrance into the world of real effects. “A world in which the conditions of science disappear is not necessarily a world in which the states of consciousness would also be abolished. Consciousness without science is not the ruin of thought.”⁴ Importantly, because consciousness is still possible the development of consciousness still goes on. Consciousness has the possibility for development in a world without science. So what would take the place of science? Could the power of art play a role here? Until recently, psi phenomena, telepathy and mind reading have been regarded by science with extreme skepticism, partly because these phenomena have so far escaped the apparatuses and instrumentation and methodology of science to uncover its true being. Hard science has been impotent in exploring telepathy and, so far, has had little luck producing hard evidence. However there stands an alternative history of research on these phenomena. Art works, starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing until today, have laid the groundwork for real substantial materializations of integral telepathic work in the socio-political cultural environment. Further, these art practices instigate generalized maps of the world today in which the telepathic technologies emerging today play a role.

Artists Robert Barry, Marina Abramović, and Susan Hiller all began experimenting with telepathy around 1968 at the tail end of conceptual art.⁵ Robert Barry created two almost identical artworks, Marcuse Piece, 1970–71, Telepathic Piece, 1969, as well as Radiation Piece in 1969. He was very much inspired by technologies of invisible phenomena and Cold War psychic warfare and the conflicting radio propaganda broadcasts produced by the USA and USSR. Barry worked with radioactive substances including Microcurie Radiation and radioactive Cesium, inert gases, ultrasonic sound, microwaves, telepathy and is also renowned for his use of language and text, as well as technologies and revolutionary concepts that often appear to be almost immaterial.

Barry’s Telepathic Piece existed through its appearance in a catalog, which showed Barry’s will to communicate “thought art,” outside of language and image via telepathy.⁶ Microwaves and telepathy were being explored by scientists and military and deployed on both sides of the Cold War at this time. Robert Barry’s Marcuse Piece⁷ and Telepathic Piece⁸ were remarkably similar in that they added to the environment by taking away the clutter of stuff.

Barry is fascinated by the electrical energy of the body converted from biochemicals and his work with psychic, telepathic, energetic and radioactive waves. He explains he was “dealing with the electronic energy which takes place in the body itself. And I have always been involved in telepathy and parapsychological phenomena, and worked along those lines using mental energy as a medium.”⁹ Barry’s Telepathic Piece¹⁰ existed, very barely, as a bracketed statement in the catalog:

“[During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image.] At the conclusion of the exhibition the information about the work of art was made evident in the catalogue.”¹¹

Reiko Tomii observes that Barry’s Telepathic Piece, 1969, is coincidentally reminiscent of Matsuzawa Yutaka’s earlier work with formless emission, Independent ‘64 Exhibition in the Wilderness (Koya ni okeru andepandan ‘64 ten), 1964.¹²Telepathic Piece is so concretely conceptual and dematerialized that it only appears to exist within the catalog, like Yutaka’s work, and like Hiller’s recent text artwork Ideal Work, which states that her concern with the nature of conceptual art and art as transmission and reception also began in 1969. Late conceptual and post-conceptual artists continue experimental practices and speculative telepathic art into the present and the future.¹³ Neidich’s Global Telepathic Broadcast¹⁴ resonates with Barry’s Telepathic Piece, as well the video art telepathy identified by Rosalind Krauss.¹⁵

Stephen Melville’s theorization of telepathy in relation to conceptual art anchors the investigation of the dematerialization of the art object within a new community of artist-experimenters who mapped and tested new definitions and possibilities for the conjunction of art with life. Lucy Lippard’s exploration of the dematerialization of art acknowledges Barry’s work with telepathy and psychic phenomena,¹⁶ and Patricia Norvell comments that Barry’s telepathy takes the invisibility and liminality of an artwork to a new extreme.¹⁷

Art critic Barry Schwabsky has also observed how the closely knitted fabric of conceptual art and its critics enabled an almost direct transmission of ideas from artist to critic. Schwabsky observes this historical reinforcement of an almost (or virtual) telepathic communications system between artist and critic or historian, and that the artwork and the community were telepathically connected:

“The only alternative to criticism is art” […] Seth Siegelaub, the primary promoter of Conceptual Art, felt that because such art “just goes from mind to mind as directly as possible”—presumably telepathy would have been its ideal medium—“the need for a community of critics to explain it seems superfluous” [author’s italics].¹⁸In 1968–69, Susan Hiller began her ongoing, profoundly feminist experiments with telepathy and art.¹⁹ Experiments that transgress science with anthropology, mysticism and conceptual art in order to conduct interdisciplinary research. She explored automatic writing, trance and voice hearing in Sisters of Menon, 1972. She explored telepathy in a global postal mail assisted telepathy experiment in Draw Together, 1972, and group dream mapping and the influence of fairy ring mushroom circles in her Dream Mapping, 1974; and UFO reports describing alien communication and abduction conveyed through dangling sound speakers in Witness, 2000. Hiller’s work on dreams and telepathy in a conceptual art context relied heavily on notions of ‘experiment’ and ‘research’²⁰ that she took from her training in anthropology.

There are the differences between modernist artists working with telepathy and artists like Susan Hiller who are working with post-conceptualism and post-media practice. Some of Hiller’s artworks are immediately recognizable as scientific or quasi-scientific conceptual art experiments in classic models of telepathy. I want to elucidate in detail one such work, Draw Together, 1972, in which the artist profoundly collapses scientific experimentation into the art event.²¹ Hiller looks back at the surrealists’ experiments with mediums, which included mediums associated with the raw art movement, and automatism as once genuine subversive experiments, which have become accepted literary-artistic style.

“Looking back in their experiments with automatism, and then tracing the fate of automatism within painting has given me insight into how what was intended as subversive turned into an acceptable style. Breton’s writings on automatism were part of his endeavor to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis. He felt that a grasp of the implications of automatism would eventually erode all notions of personal property rights and individual authorships of works. (I’ve been working on that point for years, but you know being a woman artist and giving up one’s property claim to one’s discoveries is not quite the same thing as it is for a man, since one is never acknowledged to have had a right in the first place.)
The early automatist pieces produced by the Surrealists were collective and anonymous. An involvement with spontaneous gesture and utterance erodes notions of personal authorship because everyone can do it—no minimal standards. So why put your name to it? Particularly since it’s unpredictable and seems to be outside any kind of individual control.
I’ve looked into what happened to this approach historically.”²²

Important here, is the way early research in automatism first becomes an accepted style of art production, which future generations can utilize and then migrates out of the art system to become stabilized in alternative spheres of authorship and thereby plays a role in ethics and the political. This is important because, as we will see, results emanating from experiments in telepathy presumably seep out into the social cultural and psychological habitus where at first they act as interlopers but over time come to inhabit that space permanently. Thus creating a cultural disposition whereby future generations works can be ratcheted upon. This intergenerational building thus becomes constituted in the cultural memory of that society and as a possible inspiration for future generations.

Draw Together was an exercise in ESP telepathy modeled on Psychical Research experiments that Lippard says, “explored the transmission of images telepathically to friends other countries.”²³ Richard Grayson similarly describes it as “the telepathic transmission of images by artists” and also emphasizes the centrality of this early work to her current practice some thirty years later.²⁴ Rebecca Dimling Cochran’s record of the Draw Together event is again very similar to Lippard’s, although like Grayson she refers to the participating friends as artists: “In Draw Together (1972), Hiller conducted an exploration of the telepathic transmission of images by producing simultaneous drawings with artists in other countries.”²⁵

Hiller says of Draw Together that she “invited 100 artists to tune into images at certain times and make drawings, and the whole work was designed like an experiment into E.S.P.”²⁶ Draw Together is Hiller’s most classic and acknowledged telepathy experiment. It closely followed the precedence of telepathy experiments from the domain of Psychical Research. Hiller reiterates, as I do here for purposes of clarity, that the scientific experiment aspect of Draw Together followed the precedent of experiments conducted by the Society for Psychical Research²⁷ and the telepathy experiments of prominent journalist Upton Sinclair:

It was based on something that has a precedent in things like the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, but the original idea was done by Upton Sinclair and Mrs. Sinclair.²⁸

Over a period of years they’d [the Sinclairs] do a sort of art thing where she would go into one room and draw something, while he pulled something out of a hat. And they got amazing correlations, of course, which isn’t at all surprising. In Draw Together what was done was to get a collection of images from magazines, newspapers, places like that, and to draw out of a hat a number that referred to an image, and either David Coxhead or I, at a preannounced time would look in a concentrated way at the image and try to think about sending it out to various friends who were scattered all over the world at that time. Mostly they seemed to be in transit. And they sent back drawings of what they picked up, you see?²⁹

Hiller’s invitation for Draw Together invited participation in an art experiment in the telepathic transmission of images. The self-selected participants were given a range of choices to be involved in this work as an ‘art event,’ a ‘social event,’ a ‘psychic experience,’ a ‘scientific experiment’ or ‘doesn’t matter.’³⁰

Hiller and her partner David Coxhead were situated in the village of Loupien,³¹ near the village Sète, southern France. Later, during a seminar on Hiller’s art, an audience member drew attention to Draw Together’s function as a scientific experiment:

“There’s one piece you did, that ESP experiment in France, Draw Together, that certainly could be scientifically correlated, formulated and all worked out beforehand. All the results can be tabulated, as in a scientific experiment. There’s something, in distinction to this, fairly random and more what I would call performance in Dream Mapping—whereas the other was an experiment […] highly controlled.”³²

Hiller acknowledges the truth of this statement, but also explains how Draw Together happens to fail as a scientific experiment. Similar telepathy tests have also been made which use art reproductions as the subject of attempted transmissions and receptions, especially art reproduction postcards as target material. Hiller was working within the terrain of independent art practice and not the domain of science with a well-funded para-psychology lab. Her telepathy experiment was dependent upon the French postal system, run by low paid workers who happened to be on strike at the time. Some of the returns posted by her artist friends were delayed and even lost, fragmenting the materiality of documentation and hard copy evidence. Draw Together suggests a kind of telepathic remains of the postal service almost as if it were scripted by Jacques Derrida:³³

“There was a big postal strike in France at the time of Draw Together and most of the returns were delayed and finally lost […] so because of that it again falls very nicely into the area of art [not science] and funky documentation (laughter).”³⁴ Below is Hiller’s matter of fact description of Draw Together, explaining her randomization process for selecting images for transmission and her observations of correlations in the images she received back from distant participants.

“In Draw Together what was done was to get a collection of images from magazines, newspapers, places like that, and to draw out of a hat a number that referred to an image, and then either David Coxhead or I, at a preannounced time, would look in a concentrated way at the image and try to think about sending it out to various friends who were scattered all over the world at that time. Mostly they seemed to be in transit. And they sent back drawings of what they had picked up, you see? And there did seem to be some interesting correlations, particularly on the images that were most vivid, and maybe they had some emotional impact. There was one of a Navaho blanket, bright red, with sort of zig-zag motifs. And a number of people sent back either the word ‘red,’ or drew a red square, or some- thing that said ‘mountains’ or ‘triangles’ or ‘zeds’ or something like this… Um, this piece had to do very much with the kind of idea that’s behind the dream pieces, namely that art is a question of sharing subjectivity…”³⁵

Draw Together led to the unplanned work The Sisters of Menon in the same year, which then rolled into another group investigation piece The Dream Seminar, 1973.³⁶ The Dream Seminar lead to Dream Mapping, closely followed by her collaborative book on dreams and telepathy Dreams, Visions of the Night, 1976.³⁷

The student riots in Belgrade, 1968, inspired the young student artist Marina Abramović and her local peers to work with performance and the body,³⁸ and Abramović’s work with performance has encompassed various orders of telepathies associated with extreme endurance; drug-induced intoxication; intense partner collaboration as well as networked collaboration; charisma and occult associations; desire to collaborate with scientists to explore telepathy, teleportation, action at a distance; and crowd mimesis of meditative instruction.

Extro-scientific telepathies can be seen to migrate from Abramović’s artwork The Artist is Present, 2012, which summarized her epic body of endurance performance work especially her work with collaborative and endurance-based telepathy and brain synchronicity with Ulay in works such as Nightsea Crossing, 1981–87, towards science via the technologies of EEG neuroheadset interaction and brain games in her recent collaboration with neuroscientist Suzanne Dikker. Dikker invited Abramović to collaborate on Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze, 2013, after seeing The Artist is Present. As a neuroscientist, Dikker studies how mutual gaze facilitates access to areas of the brain associated with empathy, mind-reading, pre-emption, prediction and language skills, such as the common ability to finish someone else’s sentences.

Abramović, less concerned with the latest technological gadgetry which seeks to augment the basic human mind-body-world performance of empathy, mind reading and prediction, shows how telepathy can exist and be explored in her work: “We can learn telepathy in four years. We use telephones, but telepathy’s cheaper. There is so much extra sense of perception that our brain can develop with training that we don’t because we use gadgets and use computers and use all these other things that actually make us invalids.”³⁹

I would like to describe this seminal work of Abramović and her collaboration with Suzanne Dikker in more detail here now. As such I need to jump ahead of myself somewhat in order to do so. I will revisit some of this in later stages. Firstly, we need to understand the concept of ‘theory of mind’(ToM). Mind reading and the ability to predict the behavior of others is synonymous with ToM as well as pre-emption, empathy and telepathy. The mind reading of others appears to be an capacity connected to the ability to read one’s own mind and thus reflexively develop ToM. Although not adverse to working and experimenting with technology, Abramović prefers to work with the immateriality of ToM, rather than with technology in itself, and she works to foreground telepathies of empathy, mind reading, pre-emption and language prediction.

Suzanne Dikker, Abramović’s neuroscience collaborator, considers brains as proactive organs and prediction machines. Dikker explores the links between mutual gaze and the ability to empathize and activate the predictive aspects of the brain associated with pre-emptive language learning, which is what brought her to work with Abramović after Abramović’s epic artwork, The Artist is Present, 2012, involving endurance of communing silently through mutual gazing at a table with another. Like most scientists, Dikker quarantines the word telepathy and notes that Abramović, by contrast, is an artist who uses the word telepathy to describe mental, energetic and charismatic transfer. Dikker explains that as a scientist she herself must look for material connections in the brain process, even if Abramović’s art work with telepathy undercuts scientific method. Mind reading is also a term that both theorists of ToM and neuroscientists are more comfortable using than telepathy, although some futurist extreme-tech neuroscientists such as those at Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) refer to BCIs as Synthetic Telepathy Interfaces (STIs).

Compatibility Racer, 2013, was developed by a team involving Dikker, that was then was linked directly to Abramović’s social media Kickstarter campaign offering a ride on a mind-controlled kinetic seat device that is moved by participants if they achieve brain synchronicity whilst wearing an EEG neuroheadset. Abramović’s successful Kickstarter campaign enabled her to house Compatibility Racer in the science chamber of the Marina Abramović Institute. The social media gaming of crowdfunding —which is itself full of multiple telepathic associations connected to collaboration, crowd contagion and computer-assisted action at a distance—accelerates the development of brain game art and culture.

Material Engagement and the World Brain Continuum

“Material engagement may offer the optimal point to perceive what for many years remained blurred or invisible, i.e. the image of a mind not limited by the skin.”⁴⁰

Moving away from the conceptual arts telepathically-induced mutations of the cultural landscape I would like to describe how ideas of extended cognition might help us to link these changes in the cultural landscape to analogous but different changes in the material of the brain. Through the interdisciplinary cognitive science of Malafouris, particularly the idea of material engagement theory (MET) and brain artefact interfaces (BAIs), we understand that the mind is not limited by skull. MET theorizes the world of things, artefacts, immaterial and material signs, thought and action as integrated and inseparable, within a vital materialist definition of cognition itself, working as a conceptual bridge between neural and cultural plasticity, and it emerges from “extended mind hypothesis.” BAI denotes further metaplasticity (the dynamic feedback generated between neural and cultural plasticity), whilst pointing to cognitive assists as both cultural artefacts and mediated interfaces for the brain, such as material tools and prosthetics (for example: a blind mans stick, or a hunting spear) as well as immaterial artefacts, tools and prosthetics such as language and gesture.⁴¹

Within the disciplines of archeology of mind and neuroarcheology, thought, action and material things cannot be separated in MET. Malafouris shows how this is done through MET and through an understanding of how BAI work together, emphasizing how things (prostheses) actively shape the mind. MET and BAI extend Andy Clark’s earlier concepts of the scaffolded, leaky and extended mind,⁴² as well as the extended Mind Hypothesis (EM) as identified by John Sutton.⁴³ The mind is not a computer locked inside a brain—it is extended, transindividual, and it interacts with things and the material world.⁴⁴ Even if we do not intentionally want to share our thoughts, they run wildly on structures of language, semiotics, technologies, engagement with objects and things that criss-cross brain and world.⁴⁵ These structures are themselves clearly both immaterial and material, and they engage the inherent materiality and immateriality of cognitive processes and mind. J. Scott Jordan’s wild systems theory (WST) acknowledges that the borders between mind and world are fuzzy, unless you are an internalist, and this spreading externalist mind assimilates artefacts, artworks, human and non-human objects.

Telepathic potential in Jordan’s WST is in the recognition of fuzziness between mind and world and mind extension beyond the skin.⁴⁶ WST theory is allied to John Sutton and Andy Clark’s concept of the extended and leaky mind: The human mind is “leaky” both because it thus extends beyond the skin to co-opt external devices, technologies, and other people, and because our plastic brains naturally soak up labels, inner objects, and representational schemes, internalizing and incorporating such resources, and often redeploying them in novel ways.⁴⁷

If this extended mind appears abstracted and to be acting at a distance, it is, according to Malafouris, paradoxically grounded in the ontological inseparability of mind and material culture.⁴⁸ Mind and material culture are inseparable, despite the fact that “cognition continues to look like a disembodied information-processing ghost captured in the laboratories of Artificial Intelligence.”⁴⁹

Malafouris confronts Cartesian mind/body dualism, and erases the line dividing “thinking thing” and “extended thing” through analogy of the way “conceptual art transgressed the aesthetic tidiness of the Renaissance.”⁵⁰ The computational model of the human brain manifests the ultimate Cartesian Renaissance reduction of the brain to computer, which is the same as a “brain in a vat” detachment.⁵¹ Objects facilitate “exographic storage” of complex information outside of the biologically bounded brain.⁵² Pressure on the brain to remember is extended and offloaded into objects, such as clay tablets or computers. Reading is not remembering, and writing enables us to forget something and retrieve the memory later, with remembering and forgetting as co-dependent processes.⁵³

Malafouris presents two objects to help explain MET and BAI. The blind man’s stick is an extension of his senses, almost as if it is part of his body, although it can be simultaneously seen as part of his mind. MET and BAI, together with extended cognition, ensure the brain world continuum. Brain world continuum is the envelope of the mind, and worlding of the brain as the brain connects with inner and outer worlds, material and immaterial, virtual and real. Malafouris’ other exemplary object is the potter’s wheel, in which the components of the potter’s brain is not the only agent required to explain the cognitive process of making a pot. A “dance of agency” involving the potter’s brain, body, wheel, clay, product, context of activity is required. Indeed Malafouris says that cognition should be understood as occurring at the potter’s wheel and not within potter’s head.⁵⁴ The BAI brain interaction at the blind man’s stick does not only occur internally, the interaction is continuous with and dependent on mind, body, object and world, and Malafouris uses this blind man’s stick (BMS) hypothesis to exemplify the intersection of cognition and material culture.⁵⁵ Malafouris’ MET and BAI examples of BMS and the potter’s clay show cognition to be enacted at the stick and potter’s wheel rather than existing in the head.

The concept of metaplasticity, which Malafouris’ neuroarcheology defines as intertwined neural and cultural plasticity,⁵⁶ allows us to see all the elements of brain, body, and culture as plastic in a way that multiplies and extends the plasticity of each. In describing the way a plastic mind is embedded and enfolded in a plastic culture, Malafouris states that the brain is a material artefact of culture as well as being “as much a cultural artefact as a biological entity.”⁵⁷ Malafouris describes the mind as analogous to clay:

“Like a piece of clay, thrown on the wheel of culture, the human mind and brain is subject to continuous re-shaping, re-wiring and re-modeling.”⁵⁸

MET, as it comes out of cognitive archeology, material culture studies and interactive network approaches, informs Malafouris’ theories of boundaries between cognition and material culture⁵⁹ and how human experience is embodied.⁶⁰ Neuroarcheology, using digital “telepathology” of neuroimaging, has advanced knowledge of neuroplasticity, for example, through the discovery of mirror neurons. Telepathology is a medical term referring to blood diagnostics made at a distance through digital technologies.⁶¹ Evolutionary neuroscience advances are now able to better understand changes in size and shape of brain using fossil endocasts of the cranial hollow, and gain more insights into the expansion in the parietal area associated with modern humans.⁶² The brain interacts constantly with its internal and external environments through MET.

Malafouris’ neuroarcheological approach, using MET to look at how and why BAI work, combines arts disciplines such as archeology and psychology together with cognitive and neuroimaging sciences to recognize the “causal efficacy and constitutive role of material culture in the human cognitive system.”⁶³ Mind is not just a brain, it is distributed, mediated, situated, embedded, enacted, extended and dynamical.⁶⁴ As Sutton says: “The realm of the mental can spread across the physical, social and cultural environments, as well as bodies and brains.”⁶⁵ Human intelligence can be understood as involving more than a brain,⁶⁶ and as phenomena of an extended mind. Looking beyond cognitivism, human intelligence and thinking is seen to occur outside the brain.⁶⁷

Malafouris acknowledges the problem of using digital technologies as well as a “‘neurocentric’ view of intelligence” because “neuroimaging techniques often fail to capture the dynamical aspects of thought and behavior which consist of ‘softly assembled’ patterns of activity that arise as a function of time.”⁶⁸ Neuroarcheology does not just show how and why the mind and brain go beyond the skin spatially, neuroarcheology itself goes back in time to show how MET and BAI imagine human “paleopsychological” becoming.⁶⁹

Malafouris, and neuroarcheology and paleopsychology themselves, argue against “methodological individualism,” silo division and “ontological gulf” between material culture, which can be difficult to comprehend, especially if separated through time from producers and supporting temporal forms of culture, and the narrow ghost in a computer view of Artificial Intelligence (AI) cognition.⁷⁰ Sutton and Malafouris’ research overtly explores the necessity of arts and sciences interdisciplinarity together with their brain and mind research.

Immaterial Technologies of Mindedness

Mindedness is shared reflexivity, collaborative learning and the awareness of one’s own and others” thoughts, feelings, and motives. Mindedness has an immaterial technique as a social neuroscience and psychological theory of mind (ToM), this shall be discussed in the following section. It is technological in the sense that we develop ToM through technologies of learning, linguistics and symbolic enculturation as young children. ToM itself is weaponized in the very basic sense that the capacities for empathy and collaboration that it generates are always accompanied by the capacity for Machiavellian intelligence and competition. However, this section looks more at robotized and “synthetic” telepathy of media and artificial intelligence (AI) mindedness, where BAIs become brain computer interfaces (BCIs), also known as synthetic telepathy interfaces (STIs). BCIs/STIs of contemporary everyday and ubiquitous computing, as well as some more extreme and experimental forms of technologically mediated telepathy, are accumulating into a defensive arms race of potentially weaponized telepathies. Telepathy becomes weaponized in video game use of EEG bio-neuroheadset interaction to enable gamers to practice virtual telekinesis with the “world as their weapon” for entertainment. Some examples of this are Son of Nor and Throw Trucks With Your Mind, and in the nanotechnological, robotics, brain augmentation and Internet telepathy and telekinesis created by Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA).

The invention of the word telepathy accompanied the invention of the telephone.⁷¹ Synthetic and algorithmic telepathy is increasingly integrated within social media, BCIs, cortical im- plants, EEG bio-neuroheadsets, brain games, “telepathic smart dust” of networked sensor motes, and ubiquitous computing. The experience and phenomena of telepathy existed for humans before the word was invented in the late 19th century, just as experiences of otherworldly and divine instruction, voice hearing, hypnosis and the uncanny, empathy, linguistic pre-emption, mind reading, research imagination and memory- assisted future thinking exists widely and wildly in human experience beyond and across many languages that can scribe them. Through integration with these related experiences and phenomena, telepathy accompanies the invention of higher human consciousness and capacity for ToM and meta-empathy of metaplastic meta-cognition.

Video games using mind control replace the keyboard and joystick interface with direct Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), through the use of easily available EEG bio-neuroheadsets. At least two Kickstarter funded computer game development campaigns have promised telekinesis through neuroheadset interaction.

Son of Nor⁷² uses Emotiv EPOC and another video game, that invites “telekinetic superpowers controlled with your thoughts,” is called Throw Trucks With Your Mind and uses Neurosky Mindwave or Mindwave Mobile headset.⁷³ Both released trailers foregrounding the text “The World Is Your Weapon.”⁷⁴ These video games enable users to control and terraform the virtual environment with their mind. The virtual world extends the brain world continuum, overlapping BAI onto BCI.

Telepathic smart dust, or sensor motes, consists of tiny signaling devices that can be distributed in architecture, streets and roads, air and water, the environment, objects, clothes and even bodies. Everyday common radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can operate as motes, and they extend telecommunication, surveillance and sensor technologies. There are fantastical promises of the awe and freedom of telepathy in contemporary telecommunications, telemetric and smart dust sensor technology, and urban sensor connectivity. Transcendental poetics of machines that anticipate human needs and commands are celebrated in Jennifer Gabrys’ text Telepathically Urban, which explores sensor architectures and mobile smart dust, extending early twentieth century radio and electromagnetic transmission technologies and the long history of utopian futurist aesthetics.⁷⁵

Smart dust can be linked to the telepathic understanding of the 19th century interest in atomized ether and atomic dematerialization, as well as the future development of tiny neurobiological sensors of neural dust that consist of tiny motes that can be implanted beneath the skull.⁷⁶ The high ambience of smart sensors accompanied by florid promises of telepathy relates to the general invention and re-invention of telecommunications, which has always been paralleled by the invention and re-invention of telepathy. There is a strong collaboration and rivalry between spiritualism and radio to pull signals out of the air, as the history of communications shows.⁷⁷ In an environment where there is so much telepathic data circulating there may be a need for a telepathic filter in order to make sense of it all, as Gabrys supposes. As well as some anti-telepaths as Dick’s Ubik imagines.

Telemetric and parametric sensor technologies, such as telepathic smart dust, contribute to what Neidich refers to as the “statisticon,” where the bricks and mortar panopticon is replaced by mobilized electronic surveillance and pre-emption via statistical analysis. Neidich is alert to the fact that the statisticon does not just monitor and predict consumer choices, for example via predictive text. It is actually a new form of mind reading acceleration that changes the brain generationally and transgenerationally.⁷⁸ Consumer neuroscience is moving from bottom-up manipulation of people’s brains based on direct sense stimulation to top-down processing, modulation and acting-at-a-distance on our human faculties of prediction and pre-emption associated with higher consciousness and “global neuronal workspace.”

In mid-2015 Mark Zuckerberg announced that the future of Facebook is telepathy.⁷⁹ In an online town hall Q&A, Zuckerberg stated that their Artificial Intelligence (AI) department is dedicated to the culture of sharing and connecting like minds. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology”, Zuckerberg states, “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like.”⁸⁰ Although he doesn’t actually use the word telepathy, his forecast for Facebook is Brainbook, and worldwide news consistently headlined this as telepathy in July 2015, in a media mesh of vaporware, everyware and wideware. Facebook has invested at least two billion in Virtual Reality (VR) with the purchase of Oculus VR.⁸¹ Zuckerberg plans to develop AI that is ‘better’ than human primary senses. Blind computers will be taught to read what is in an image and communicate that to a blind person. Facebook telepathy requires new data management skills as it interfaces with surveillance, privacy ethics and advertising interests. Facebook will tap into mind reading abilities of EEG and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technologies and, using neuroscience research, map electrical and chemical activity of neurotransmitters. There is already technology and experiments that show it is possible to reconstruct video clips using the brainwaves of viewers.⁸² University of California, Berkeley, have reconstructed clips from movies watched by their subjects, based on their subject’s brainwaves.⁸³ This parametric digital surveillance and telepathological control mechanism, where telepathy is integrated with bio-neuro digital imaging technologies, is an example of Neidich’s ‘Statisticon,’ further displacing Bentham’s concept of the panopticon as a modulator of control within current and future society.⁸⁴ Facebook wants to use this technology to develop social media telepathy by hacking into the social brain and the minds eye.

BCI technology has been researched by National Science Foundation and DARPA since at least the 1970s.⁸⁵ In more recent years this has progressed to Brain to Brain Interface (BTBI), raising new and important ethical issues that psychologists and doctors, neurologists and neuroethicists are collaborating on. BTBIs involving mouse-to-mouse brain interaction; mouse to human brain interaction; human-to-human brain interaction raises complex ethical issues of neurobiological enhancement, agency, identity and neural privacy.⁸⁶ These science fictional BCI’s and STIs are becoming a reality in the near future, despite being fairly awkward at the moment.⁸⁷ It might be possible to hack into neural devices such as DARPA’s cortical implant, an invasive interface installed under the skull deep inside the brain, as has happened with heart pacemakers.⁸⁸

DARPA’s cortical modem, first publicly discussed in February 2015 to innovators and investors in DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office (BTO)⁸⁹, is a cortical implant that will restore otherwise untreatable lost or missing sensory functions; replace all virtual reality and augmented reality displays; enable virtual overlay of the real world via visual cortex and integrate virtual objects into our perceived world. It would also “enable electronic telepathy and telekinesis.”⁹⁰ It acts like augmented reality in one’s natural vision, eliminating the need for a VR headset or Google glasses.⁹¹ Neidich explained, in his presentation for the European Graduate School, that this works as optogenesis⁹², which is the control of brain neurons and therefore behavior using light. “As virtual and real images become indistinguishable so too for short and long term memory and the image of thought. Science fiction becomes reality.”⁹³ As it stands, this device would likely harm the user if plunged directly into the cortex.⁹⁴ The company Blackrock currently has a similar working device that enables paralyzed people to command a robotic arm, but they impact on the cortex when removed.⁹⁵ ExtremeTech have responded to DARPA and advise that penetrating the grey matter of the cortex is too extreme and harmful, and they recommend connecting to white matter of the axons instead, as this brain material can better withstand overstimulation.⁹⁶ Axons are what make synapses when they form junctions, so this ExtremeTech proposal for the cortical modem appears to be to create something like hybrid synapses.

There is healthy skepticism towards the potential of BCI/STIs and telepathology data visualization devices to reveal the secret of consciousness, accompanied by ethical concerns that they spell the death of privacy.⁹⁷ Data from neuroimaging telepathology devices such as fMRI machines combined with algorithms can recover information about original stimulus as a form of “electronic telepathy.”⁹⁸

Theories of Mind, Mind Reading, Empathy and Telepathy

Theory of Mind (ToM) was coined in 1978 and remains a hot topic in a range of disciplines: “cognitive development, social psychology, comparative psychology, abnormal psychology, and philosophy of mind.⁹⁹ ToM was followed by a social turn in cognitive neuroscience: bringing the study of imitation, empathy, mind reading, group cognition, social brain as well as the “socialist cortex” and “cognitive capitalism” to the foreground, as described by Charles Wolfe, Warren Neidich and others.¹⁰⁰

As I mentioned above, mind reading and ability to predict the behavior of others is synonymous with ToM as well as pre-emption, empathy and telepathy. ToM processes are concentrated in the frontal cortex but they are also necessarily distributed throughout all brain areas.¹⁰¹ It is a common finding that the dorsomedial frontal cortex is most consistently activated when people engage in mind reading of others.¹⁰²

Mind reading of others appears to be an ability connected to the ability to read one’s own mind and thus reflexively develop ToM. ToM is itself theory-like, and is thus also described as ‘Theory Theory’ in cognitive neuroscience.¹⁰³ Telepathy (distant feeling) was coined and conceived as inseparable from telethesia (distant theory) one hundred years earlier in 1882 and overlaps with ‘theory theory’ and mind reading, although contemporary cognitive neuroscience overwhelmingly prefers the term mind reading rather than telepathy. There is uncertainty and risk in dealing with ‘theory theory’ instead of something that is observed,¹⁰⁴ such as an artefact, body or artwork. The Japanese neuroscientists Masaki Isoda and Atsushi Noritake, state that although ToM work is concentrated in the frontal cortex, it also works with other areas depending on the nature of the mind reading computation involved in reading self and other, and they conclude that ToM is a product of global neural networks linking multiple brain regions.¹⁰⁵

Empathy is also located in the frontal lobe, but also involves the parietal and premotor area (which are also involved in reading and writing) to help people ‘read’ and understand basic intentions behind gestures. Empathy is associated with imitative learning and is, of course, inherently essential to developing a ToM for understanding others and self. The frontal cortex is the area of the brain with most increase in size compared to that of our closest hominid and ape relatives, resulting in our more forward tilting foreheads. Tied to memory, empathy, consciousness, the ability to theorize, and to theorize with ToM, is the ability to integrate telepathic potentials with what makes us uniquely human.

Another cognitive function that occurs without awareness is the sharing of joint action and ‘common ground.’ Firstly, shared attention is sought, for example by pointing at an object. Shared attention can be achieved by pointing at an object and mirror actions and shared goals can be asymmetrical, for example when two people carry a heavy object and one walks forward and another backwards. So much cognition is unconscious, however, self-conscious learning and deliberate instruction significantly enhance cognition. A mother might simulate fear in order to instruct a child about a dangerous object, enhancing instruction with eye contact, using the child’s name and ostensive gestures, gesture, point and use the ‘motherese’ of baby talk and deliberate instruction.¹⁰⁶ Apes can learn by observation, but learning through instruction is likely ‘uniquely human.’¹⁰⁷ A child develops awareness and self-conscious ‘theory of pretense’ through games such as a mother pretending a banana is a telephone. Pretense skills, such as pretending a banana is a telephone, accompany children’s understanding of difference in intention between people and attitude with regards to objects. This is where empathy, theory of mind and mind reading are developed in the human child. C.D. Frith refers to this as meta-cognition and the self-conscious ability to reflect on our own cognition.¹⁰⁸ This ability to read the minds of others is precisely the ability to develop common sense, with the human brain working with meta-cognitive abilities that are a unique, species-specific, and which I would like to speculate form of socially integrated cognitive telepathy. This instructional learning form of telepathy involves cognitive functions of attention, memory, pretense, and it accompanies and extends into the uniquely human ability of reading and writing. Cultures of commons and sharing, especially the sharing of mindware such as language, facilitate the ‘integral telepathy’ of the social brain.

Social cognition is also famously known to involve mirror systems, originally observed in mirror neurons of monkeys, where the brain is activated when we do or experience something, or when we witness someone at a distance doing or experiencing the same thing. Does this suggest a predisposition system for knowing and sharing thoughts and resonant dynamic neural synchronizations? Mirror systems operate in emotion, touch and action. Fear and physical disgust can be transmitted using the mirror system, so that when one sees a disgusted face one feels disgusted too.¹⁰⁹ Mirror responses also occur via the chameleon effect of interaction.¹¹⁰ We often unconsciously mirror each other’s movements and mannerisms and synchronize posture and gestures. Mirroring responses are automatic and are a result of mirror neurons. Rapport relies on unconscious mirroring, because conscious imitation is usually automatically read as a mocking action.

Neuromodulating the Neural Material Substrate

In this section I will look at Neidich’s and Malabou’s work on neuralplasticity, in the context of Jean-Pierre Changeux’s theory of selective stabilization of synapses and Stanislas Dehaene’s Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis. In What Should We Do with Our Brain, Malabou asks us to understand the difference between plasticity and flexibility. She says we now have choice, necessity and plasticity with which to take action with regards to pressures exerted on the brain by post-Fordism.¹¹¹ Instead of being endlessly flexible either by choice or necessity, the third option is to change our brains.

Selective stabilization of synapses, also known as synaptogenesis,¹¹² effects the development of neural circuits in the mammalian brain by sometimes ubiquitous and recurring cultural agents.¹¹³ Selective stabilization of synapses concerns how synapses are constructed, maintained, stabilized and modified, and it relates to plasticity since it informs us as to how brain circuits can be modified by experience. The ‘substrate,’ or material support, in the brain for plasticity is the synapse. Synapses can remain stable for a long time without losing their ability to change. They are labile (which means changeable/unstable), depending how the branching synapses are trimmed, a process called apoptosis, or newly generated.¹¹⁴ Epigenesis, which is gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself, develops the adult nervous system. In neuroscience this word is used to speak about how environmental pressures modify neurogenesis, understanding the regulation of genes may be a secondary effect.¹¹⁵ For Jean-Pierre Changeux, art, language and writing occurwithin a “robust genetic envelope”¹¹⁶ of human genetic limits, and this capacity is linked to “prolonged and extensive postnatal increase in neuronal branching and synaptic activity in humans and its modulation by extended epigenetic responses to the environment.”¹¹⁷ Thus, the potential human capacity for culture is hardwired into the prerequisites of the brain’s development. This exuberant production of synapse is a genetically transcribed event that occurs at different moments, called critical periods. Synapses are then pruned back as a result of interaction with the environment, which today for most humans living in urban centers is culture!¹¹⁸

Dehaene’s Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis accounts for the ability of becoming-human brain circuits to evolve over hundreds of thousands of years from their simian ancestors’ abilities for object recognition to the uniquely Homo sapiens’ ability to recognize patterns of letters and words used in reading and writing.

Reading and writing evolved too recently to exert evolutionary pressure on the human brain, with reading invented about 5400–6000 years ago.¹¹⁹ There are logically no entirely new brain mechanisms evolved for reading, but nevertheless the brain was absolutely crucial to the creative invention and development of reading and writing.¹²⁰ Linked to the brains extra capacity for language is malleability or plasticity, called neuroplasticity, as well as empathy, pre-emption, meta-cognition and human mind reading capacity. Any telepathy associated with posthumanism is grounded in being a natural-born cyborg through our use of BAI prior to BCI. Plastic and malleable parts of the brain associated with animal visual recognition especially face recognition in the Macaques, were colonized by a virulent pre-emptive form of alphabetic, pictographic and script-based cultural telepathy. This theory embraces BAI and MET to understand how tools and apparatuses for learning can develop from being transient interlopers in the brain to permanent residents. Could telepathic environments one day do the same? Integral Telepathy (IT) cannot be separated from the immaterial and material engagement of mind and brain, engrams and exograms. This should not be as science fictional as it sounds, and this is why the concept of the extro-scientific is so useful in looking at how telepathy is entwined with pre-emptive and predictive neuroplasticity.

Many of the functional features required for highly efficient processing of reading and writing, which are both cognitive and cultural artefacts, already exist. Dehaene makes explicit the connection between pre-emption, “neuronal recycling,” cultural learning and the appropriation of existing brain circuitry. The human brain shares many traits with non-human primates and is genetically constrained with a “fringe of variability.”

“Accordingly, cultural plasticity is not unlimited, and all cultural inventions should be based on the pre-emption of pre-existing evolutionary adaptions of the human brain. It thus becomes important what may be the evolutionary precursors of reading and writing.”¹²¹

The visual word form area (VWFA) of the brain provides the cerebral bases of reading, even though reading one word activates several brain regions.¹²² Dehaene points to research on IT neurons that show an overlap between object recognition, such as faces, and script recognition.¹²³ Cat-face emoticon, simplified shapes, and primitive font, can be seen to be variations of the eye-pit shapes that have influenced many human script systems and visual communicative aesthetics. Specific neurons fire for specific shapes, loosely based on variations of eye shapes encoded to external objects.¹²⁴

Learning to read changes the human inferotemporal (IT) cortex, which correlates to both the IT area in macaques and human VWFA. Humans can read because they can spontaneously access the ancient primate visual recognition system, designed to make sense of new shapes including words. Humans also access their extra capacity for pre-emptive neuroplasticity to create their (extra-sensory) cultural sense, and this is an example of where telepathy and XSF might migrate with flows and folds of the sensible and insensible. VWFA is not inherited but must be cultivated through learning to read, linked in human behavior to developing theory of mind, mind reading and empathy with others around the age of four or five. Cultural pre-emption involves learning to attribute meaning to conventional shapes, efficiently and subliminally. Neuronal ‘reconversion’ or ‘recycling’involves the invasion of novel cultural objects into cortical territories designed for similar brain functions.¹²⁵

For pre-emptive neuroplastic telepathy, and any other variant forms of bio-cognitive telepathy to develop further as a cerebral organ it can be speculated that new telepathies would colonize existing brain regions analogous to the way reading did so in the VWFA, possibly diminishing and/or enhancing capacities. Perhaps this colonization will occur in a sympathetic area in the prefrontal cortex or intraparietal areas. Areas, by the way, shown to have a tremendous increase in the evolution of the hominid species. Such future instances of neuronal recycling might take place in an increasing technotelepathic environment. Neuronal recycling hypothesis predicts that human cultural invention and learning is limited by the potentiality of human brain circuits. In considering these limits of the human brain, Dehaene anticipates the existence of writing systems that are unlearnable to humans, such as the computer bar code.

His recycling hypothesis predicts that pre-existing biases should speed up the cultural acquisition of novel material¹²⁶ provided by new telepathic media and communications technologies.

Conclusion: Tensions in Telepathic Mind Mesh

Generational neural plasticity and transgenerational neuronal recycling hypothesis shows that culture can significantly modulate brain materiality and develop new organs of perception.¹²⁷ This invites speculative thinkers to bring hard-nosed cognitive science backed up by fMRI evidence and peer review, which nevertheless remains hypothetical, to the niche work of prescient artists, with artists being fringe dwelling ‘variables’ on the edge of society pioneering its creative innovations. In this way, artists such as Abramović are, in a way, inventing new telepathic organs for future distribution amongst the in/sensible. Of course, as we have seen, artists are not the only cultural force, and it would be naïve to ignore the work of the industrial military complex, although for somewhat more cynical reasons. DARPA, who are pioneering and creatively experimenting with all manner and range of telepathic extreme tech, are directly linked to government and corporate control in contrast to the de-linked sense-research work of radical artists. The social brain of cognitive capitalism pre-emptively inventive, and entwined as it is with the age of information and the endlessly proliferating extreme tech telepathies of telemetrics. It invents, as Neidich says “new organs of perception and new possibilities for thought.”¹²⁸ Porush agrees: “using different alphabets (or losing the capacity to read the alphabet), even within the lifetime of an individual, is a bit like growing a new brain.”¹²⁹ What we all ask is how and why is art, architecture and language able to affect behavior, learning and genetics,¹³⁰ and grow new brain/sense/telepathy organs through generational and trans-generational plasticity.

Telepathy cannot be permanently stabilized as science fiction or the paranormal—ghettos in which it can too easily be caricatured—because it is actually constantly becoming real through the XSF of migrating sensibles, insensibles, and their associated pluripotentialities in biology, culture and world. The human capacity for symbols and religion prior to the development of reading and writing involved a telepathic BAI, and used telepathic neuroplasticity to develop and maintain new technologies of externalized memory storage via cooperative and competitive social brain networks.

Meillassoux’s speculative take on science associated with his concept of XSF overlaps with the persistently hypothetical nature of cognitive science, especially Stanislas Dehaene’s neuronal recycling hypothesis. We cannot pretend that Dehaene is interested in pre-emption as a kind of human telepathy per se, however that idea is supported by attention to telepathic aspects of material engagement and immaterial technologies and mindedness, as well as experimental artists working with post-Fordist and late-conceptual art telepathies.

Dehaene, Neidich and other cognitive scientists argue that the brain uses its material engagement to adapt itself to new tools, which become embedded in its own materiality as language was. The brain and culture change together and become more telemetric together, evolving new techlepathy that less resembles language and reading and writing, and more resembles algorithmic and computational mesh of the digital age and quantum computing.

Work with telepathy by conceptual artists was recognized by theorists Lippard and Krauss—the former focuses on telepathy as part of conceptual dematerialization of art, and the latter focuses on telepathy of video and performance art as involving both psychological and technological processes of transference. Artist and theorist Jean-Jacques Lebel wrote a May 1968 manifesto that emphasized the telepathic aspects of riots, artistic happenings. Working with crowds makes clear the association telepathy has with crowd contagion and society of control that is also brought to attention today by Maurizio Lazzarato and, before him, by Gabriel Tarde. 1968 was not only a time of political revolution, it signified the shift to the “societies of control” when action at a distance of societal (mind) control mechanisms took hold through electronic surveillance technologies and telemedias. Generational and transgeneration plasticity could be creating new forms of pre-emptive cognitive software or telepathy in the brain in response to the acceleration of immaterial labor in the post-Fordist era and associated teletechnologies. Marcel Duchamp worked with telepathy across both surrealism and conceptual art. Linda Dalrymple Henderson details Duchamp’s work with wider telepathy aesthetics of “vibratory communication” and “sexual encounter-at-a-distance” informed by experimental occultists, psychoanalysis and aspect modernity at largely associated with “the invention of telepathy.”

Late conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s reestablished the paradigm of the experimental situation and this was also closely tied to a concern with telepathy and telepathetic-like phenomena, which has continued to be explored in current post-conceptual work by these same artists today as well younger generations. Conceptual art, and its post-conceptual art lineages, is especially useful for understanding the relationship between telepathy, extended cognition, immaterial labor and the cognitive turn. The utopian and liberatory spirit of conceptual and automatistic artist telepaths can be seen as aligned to the work of activists: the 1968 revolutionary work with telepathy, revolution and happenings, as described by Lebel; as well as more recent activists such as San Precario Operaist workerist activists who work with the telepathy of 24/7 digital availability, Catholicized saintly performance and protest art, and the associated trauma of their flexploitation. Ancient art, and other art forms outside the narrow timeframe of the official conceptual art movement, are conceptual and cognitively engaged too, of course, and entwine materials with symbolic and psychic immaterial engagement, using matter, objects, body, brain, language and whatever new engram and exogram, software and hardware technologies of the day. Conceptual art’s emphasis on immaterial ideas and politics, the dematerialization of the art object, and transferential engagement with performance and new technology, has enabled future artists to work with noopolitical telepathy aesthetics in contradistinction to corporate neurocapitalistic telepathies of Google and DARPA.

1. Following the lead of Warren Neidich in his lectures at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) and European Graduate School (EGS) in which he introduced the cortical implant together with his concept of the statisticon and neuroplasticity, and highlight mutations of cyborg telepathy of the psiborg. This word ‘mindedness’ implies shared reflexivity, or collaborative learning through ‘open-mindedness.’
2. Quentin Meillassoux, “Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction,” in Robin Mackay (ed.), Speculative Solution (Falmouth: Editions Mego and Urbanomic, 2011), 24–60. Meillassoux asks us to leave aside the overt science fictional explanation of XSF as a “psychic world of a cryogenically frozen body, slowlydevoured by a comatose child with monstrous mental powers.”
3. Ibid., 24–60.
4. Ibid., 24–60.
5. Jacquelene Drinkall, Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art, COFA UNSW unpublished PhD thesis, 2006. Many other artists also worked with telepathy at this time, such as Yoko Ono worked telepathy and media empathy into her work with kehai, or music of pure vibration, and bed-ins with John Lennon, as well as Larry Miller’s quasi-therapeutic drawing and performance work that use hypnosis so that he can become his dead mother, who had had a traumatic life.
6. See also Robert Barry’s contribution to the Dusseldorf Prospect 69 exhibition, comprised of a question and answer text:
   Q: Which is your piece for Prospect 69
   A: The piece consists of ideas which people will have from reading this interview.
   Q: Can this piece be shown?
   A: This piece in its entirety is unknowable because it exists in the minds of so many people. Each person can really know only that part which is in his own mind.
   See: Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 75.
7. Barry’s Marcuse Piece, 1970-71, combines aspects of Closed Gallery and Telepathic Piece, both made in 1969. It consisted of pencil writing on the gallery wall and read: “Some places to which we can come, and for a while, ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’(Marcuse).” Barry prompted viewers to reflect upon spaces that promote mental creativity. He wanted to show firstly, the production of objects of thought, and secondly and only by extension, the production of objects of art. Barry’s Closed Gallery examines the nature of “art activity in its dependence on invisible systems for communicating thoughts that originate with the artist.” See: Russell Ferguson and John Alan Farmer (eds.), Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-1975 (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 70. Closed Gallery consists of cards which were mailed to announce a series of exhibitions in galleries in the US and Europe. What is unusual about these cards is that they state that for the duration of the exhibitions “the gallery will be closed.” There is no object and no way of entering the exhibition area.
8. Artist Jonathon Monk used Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece in a show at the project space of Jan Mot gallery in March-April 2003. For an interview with Robert Barry which talks about Barry’s work with telepathy, produced to coincide with Monk’s exhibition, see: Raimundas Malasauskas, “You never know where it goes. Interview with Robert Barry by Raimundas Malasauskas,” newspaper 36 (March–April 2003).
9. Robert Barry and Patricia Norvell, “Robert Barry, May 30, 1969” (Patricia Norvell in conversation with Robert Barry), in Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (eds.), Recording Conceptual Art (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: Univesity of California Press, 2001), 86–100, 90.
10. Telepathic Piece was included in the “Simon Fraser Exhibition” presented at the Centre for Communications and the Arts at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, May 19–June 19, 1969.
11. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York, NY: Praeger, 1973), 98.
12. Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan”, in Philomena Mariani (ed.), Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s –1980s (New York: The Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 15–29, 17–19. ‘Proof’ of Matsuzawa Yutaka’s Independent ‘64 Exhibition in the Wilderness (Koya ni okeru andepandan ‘64 ten), 1964, exists as an advertisement within Bijutsu Journal 15 (1964) which reads, as translated on page 18, as:
    “Text 1 Independent ‘64 Exhibition in the Wilderness
    Don’t believe matter
    Don’t believe sense
    Don’t believe the eye
    Site: Tundra Field, Nanatsushima
    Yatsushima Highland, Nagano Prefecture
    Period: Before daybreak, December 3 to before daybreak, December 9, Installation/deinstallation date: Past, present, future
    Entry fee: None
    Entry method: Please keep your entry in your hand and deliver the formless emission from it (imaginary work) to the exhibition site. Any delivery method will do. It is very likely the site will be filled with many bizarre, formless things of Nil, making the exhibition a rare merry occasion. Those who wish to enter may begin contact in material and/or immaterial ways.
    Please contact: Void-Space Situation
    Research Centre, 5370 Shimo Suwa-cho, Nagano Prefecture”
13. Stephen Melville, “Aspects,” in Russell Ferguson and John Alan Farmer (eds.), Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965–1975, (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 229–45. Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-1975 discusses Jonas’ Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy and Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece and Steven Melville’s chapter “Aspects” addresses some of the problems of conceptual art and the conceptual in art in terms of telepathy and anti-telepathy. Melville’s use of the term telepathy is indexed but not dependent upon the “telepathy” works of Jonas and Barry, as needing further articulation in terms of the overarching project of Conceptual Art. Jonas’ telepathy is anchored in magic, transformation, narcissism, mirrors, performance and video, whereas Barry’s telepathy is driven by his exploration of the invisible and is aligned to invisible/visible tensions and thresholds of language, images, gases, electrical and radio waves and radiation.
14. Warren Neidich, Global Telepathic Broadcast, video, 4:20 minutes, 2010, https://vimeo.com/43403067.
15. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1. 1 (Spring 1976, reproduced in ed. Gregory Battcock, New Artists Video; A Critical Anthology (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 43–64.
16. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York, NY: Praeger, 1973), xiii.
17. “Robert Barry”, op. cit., 96.
18. Barry Schwabsky, a review of Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, College Art Association Reviews (March 23, 2002), http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/alberro.html.
19. Susan Hiller, “Duration and Boundaries (1975),” edited transcript of a talk by Susan Hiller, in Barbara Einzig (ed.), Thinking About Art, Conversations With Susan Hiller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 170–81, 180, and 170–1.
20. Jacquelene Drinkall, Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art, COFA UNSW unpublished PhD thesis, 2006, see my introduction to the chapter on Hiller.
21. Rebecca Dimling Cochran, Guy Brett, and Stuart Morgan, Susan Hiller (London: Tate Publishing, 1996), 49–89, 52.
22. Susan Hiller, “An Interview with Rozsika Parker: Looking at New Work, 20 Dec. 1983,” in Susan Hiller et al, Susan Hiller 1973–83, The Muse My Sister (Londonderry: Third Eye Centre, 1984), 19–33, 23.
23. Augustin Lesage was a medium gifted with automatic writing associated with the raw art movement, Andre Breton, and the Surrealists.
24. Richard Grayson, “Susan Hiller : Richard Grayson,” in Richard Grayson et al., Ideal Work (Adelaide: Experimental Art Foundation, 1998) 75-9, 77-9, 77.
25. Rebecca Dimling Cochran et al., Susan Hiller, 49–89, 50.
26. Matthew Higgs, “Susan Hiller. 20 Questions: A Project by Matthew Higgs,” in Susan Hiller et al., PSI Girls (Sheffield: Site Gallery; Taxingrand: Tensta Konsthall, 2000), 37–52, 48.
27. The Society for Psychical Research was founded by Myers at the same time that he coined the term telepathy. Myers intended, and partly succeeded, in his attempt to evoke a lofty and scientific aura, with some distance from spiritualism and theosophy, with his new term telepathy (and telethesia) and the new institution of Psychical Research.
28. “Duration and Boundaries,” op. cit., 180..
29. Ibid.,180–1.
30. Dimling Cochran et. Al., Susan Hiller, 49–89, 52.

    Dear________,
    Would you like to take part in a genuine (SELECT ONE)
    ___a. art event ___b. social event ___c. psychic experience ___d. scientific experiment ___e. doesn’t matter ?
    Here are the details:
    On Friday, April 21; Monday, April 24; Friday, April 28; Monday, May 1; and Friday, May 5, at 7:00 pm (Greenwich Mean Time), Participant A. will choose at random a number corresponding to one of 100 illustrations and photographs previously selected at random by Participant B. On each of these five occasions, A. will concentrate on the designated image or picture for at least five minutes, trying to transmit its essential details to all the other participants in the event. A. may use whatever transmitting technique he/she likes. The other participants (C. 1-100), from their respective geographical positions, will simultaneously attempt to tune in to and record what they pick up of A’s transmission of the image, drawing or otherwise describing it in as much detail as possible. They may use whatever receiving/recording techniques they like. Each participant will send her/his records to INFO (London), where they will be correlated, analyzed, and admired. A complete report of some kind will probably be sent to everyone involved. Please let us know (soon) if you will be able to take part, and if you have any questions or comments, pass them on. Also, if you know of someone we haven”t contacted who would like to participate, send his/her name and address along, too.

    Could be serious
    Should be fun
    & a chance to draw together.

    Love,
    ACE POSIBLE [sic]

    N.B. On each of your five reports, please include 1. your name 2. geographical position 3. local time of reception 4. date of reception
    If you forget/to [sic] tune in on a designated date, or if your local time equivalent of 7:00 pm GMT is an inconvenient hour of the day/night, you may pre-receive or post-receive. Just remember, please, to record the date and the time when you tuned in.

31. Susan Hiller, “Notes I,” in Sisters of Menon (London: Gimpel Fils 1983), unpaginated.
32. “Duration and Boundaries,” op. cit., 180..
33. The “accident” of Derrida’s Telepathy article not “arriving” with his other essay The Post Card and remaining lost for several years has itself also been described as a performative act in the domain of philosophy, as has Freud’s well known “secret essays” on telepathy, delayed by Freud’s English translator Ernst Jones’ prejudice against telepathy as well as Freud’s own hesitation on the subject.
34. “Duration and Boundaries,” op. cit., 180.
35. Ibid., 80–1.
36. The Dream Seminar, 1973, was a group investigation piece. It was given exactly the same subtitle as the Draw Together experiment in art and ESP/telepathy, as “an investigation into thenorigin of images and ideas.” Participants “selected themselves” formed a discussion group of twelve people. See: “Duration and Boundaries,” p.181. Participants included Carla Liss, Esther Beven, Christina Toren, Amikam Toren, Rosemary Dinnage, Domingo Armengol, Suzan Arthur, Tamara Kadishman, Hugh D’Ange, Signe Lie, David Coxhead, and Susan Hiller. It comprised of twelve weekly meetings that involved discussion of personal dream material and readings of papers “submitted as alternatives to the so-called ‘normal’ post-Freudian and/or mechanistic definitions of dreaming prevalent in contemporary European culture.” The Dream Seminar sought redefinition of fundamental facts of dream experience and reconsideration of the relationship between ‘art’ and ‘dream.’ These new definitions were not achieved by the end of the work, but all participants became very committed to it. What was achieved could resemble scientific experiment: “accurate observation and recording, careful description, openness and intimacy among the members of the group, correlations of group dream experience and shared dreaming, analysis of the overlap between dream and waking life.”
37. Susan Hiller and David Coxhead, Dreams; Visions of the Night, 1976 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990). Discusses dream telepathy.
38. “Participation: Individual and Collective Bodies,” in Performance and Participation, Marina Abramović: In Residence, Education Kit, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Project No. 30: 2015, http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/_photos/projects/ 30_Abramović2015/MA_EdKit_15June15_RGB_web.pdf, cited 15 August, 2015, 18-20, 20.
39. Rebecca Harkins Cross, “Marina Abramović ‘We can learn Telepathy’”, CNN Style: Arts, July 1, 2015, cited July 2, 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/30/arts/marina-Abramović-method-sydney/
40. Lambros Malafouris, “The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate,” in E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden and C. Renfrew (eds.), Rethinking Materiality: the Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archeological Research, 2004), 53–62, 59–60.
41. 41 Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2013), 244–245 and 35–53. Also Lambros Malafouris, “The brain–artefact interface (BAI): a challenge for archaeology and cultural neuroscience,” Social and Affective Neuroscience 5, 2–3, (June/Sept, 2010), 264–273, 273, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894672/pdf/nsp057.pdf
42. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, (Cambridge MA / London: MIT Press, 1997), 45, 53, and 85–97.
43. John Sutton, “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: history, extended mind, and the civilizing process,” inRichard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2013), 189–225, 189.
44. Colin Renfrew, “Foreword,” in Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2013), ix–xi.
45. 45 Chris Gosden’s materialist oriented spiritualism of animism and Marx’s Grundrisse explains extended cognition in terms of wild agency and Wild Systems Theory to show how the how brain the interacts and develops wildly with everything around it.
46. J. Scott Jordan, “Wild agency: nested intentionalities in cognitive neuroscience and archeology,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363 (2008), 1981–1991, 1981, accessed August 3, 2013.
47. John Sutton, “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity,”, op. cit., 190.
48. How Things Shape the Mind, op. cit., 58.
49. Lambros Malafouris, “The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement” op. cit., 53.
50. Ibid., 54.
51. Ibid., 55.
52. Ibid., 56.
53. 53 Ibid., 57.
54. Ibid., 59.
55. Lambros Malafouris, “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming: Principles of Neuroarcheology,” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 88 (2010), 49–72, 62.
56. 56 Ibid., 56.
57. Ibid., 55.
58. Ibid., 55. However, this analogy can only be taken so far, of course, and Malafouris also cautions that brains, bodies and culture complement rather than replicate each other, see page 64.
59. Ibid., 52. The brain is “extremely plastic, and culturally situated and permeated by history and material culture.”
60. Ibid., 51.
61. “Telepathologies of Cognitive Capitalism” are discussed in a forthcoming paper, showing overlap of telepathy, telepathology and teletechnologies. Jacquelene Drinkall, “All That Is Solid: speculative, quantum and cognitive aesthetics of telepathy and telekinesis”, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Special Issue: Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics, forthcoming mid September 2015.
62. “Metaplasticity and the human becoming,” op. cit., 50.
63. Ibid., 52.
64. How Things Shape the Mind, op. cit., 57.
65. “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity,” op. cit., 189.
66. “Metaplasticity and the human becoming,” op. cit. 51..
67. How Things Shape the Mind, op. cit., 57.
68. “Metaplasticity and the human becoming,” 50 and 58. “The approach of neuroarcheology focused on explaining mutual constitution of brain, body and culture beyond skin and across scales of time, may have much to offer to this end protecting us from a sterile neurocentricism that has no place in the archeology of mind.”
69. “The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate,” in Elisabeth De Marrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew (eds.), Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2004), 53–62, 59.
70. Ibid., 53 and 60.
71. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870-1901 (Oxford/New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002); John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 2000). See also my unpublished research thesis “Metaphors of Telepathy, Telecommunications and Transparence” and “Telepathy in Con- temporary, Conceptual and Performance Art.”
72. sonofnor.com/
73. http://store.neurosky.com/products/throw-trucks-with-your-mind
74. Trailers were released in 2015.
75. Jennifer Gabrys, “Telepathically Urban,” in Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw (eds.), Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 48–63. Available online at: http://re-search.gold.ac.uk/4544/1/Gabrys_Telepathically_Urban.pdf. Gabrys refers to Roger Luckhurst’s book The Invention of Telepathy, op. cit.
76. Dongjin Seo, Jose M. Carmena, Jan M. Rabaey, Elad Alon, and Michel M. Maharbiz, “Neural Dust: An Ultrasonic, Low Power Solution for Chronic Brain Machine Interfaces,” Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA (July 8, 2013), arXiv: 1307 2196 volume 1, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.2196.pdf
77. Speaking into the Air, op. cit.
78. Warren Neidich, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 2 (Berlin: Archive Books), 339–341.
79. Mid -2015.
80. Stuart Dredge, “Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg thinks telepathy tech is on its way,” The Guardian (July 1, 2015), cited July 5, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-telepathy-tech.
81. Ibid. Oculus VR is the company creating a wide range of virtual reality products such as Oculus Rift, the first widely accessible virtual reality headset that enables complete immersion in virtual worlds.
82. Caitlin Dewey, “Mark Zuckerberg thinks telepathy is the future, here”s how it could actually work,” Sydney Morning Herald (July 2, 2015), cited July 5, 2015, (republished from The Washington Post), http://www.smh.com.au/digi-tal-life/digital-life-news/mark-zuckerber…s-the-future-heres-how-it-could-ac-tually-work-20150702-gi34sc.html.
83. Ibid.
84. Warren Neidich, “Computational Architecture and the Statisticon”, in ed. Warren Neidich, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Two (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), 335–363, 347.
85. Originally formed as the USA’s response to the lunch of Sputnik satellites, in the seventies DARPA worked on “technologies permitting direct communication between a user’s brain and an external device” and infamously ARPANET, the very first version of the internet developed for defense purposes. Just as ARPANET evolved into the internet, BCIs are now catching up and are more and more integrated in wider society. “When “I” becomes “We”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921579/pdf/fneng-07-00004.pdf, op. cit.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Rich Trenholm, “Scientists propose ‘cortical modem’ implant to give you terminator vision,” CNET, Sci-Tech, Feb18, 2015, cited August 24, 2015 http://www.cnet.com/au/news/scientists-propose-cortical-modem-implant-to-give-you-terminator-vision/.
90. Warren Neidich, European Graduate School, Steinmatte Plenum, E, June 15, 2015. I was introduced to DARPA’s Cortical Modem by Neidich in his lecture this year at European Graduate School, and in Ben Vickers class at the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. See also Anthony Cuthbertson, “DARPA Cortical Modem connects brain directly to computer for ‘electronic telepathy and telekinesis’,” February 18, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/darpa-cortical-modem-connects-brain-directly-computer-electronic-telepathy-telekinesis-1488476.
91. Rich Trenholm, “Scientists propose ‘cortical modem’ implant to give you terminator vision”, CNET, Sci-Tech (February18, 2015), cited August 24, 2015, http://www.cnet.com/au/news/scientists-propose-cortical-modem-implant-to-give-you-terminator-vision/.
92. Optogenetics will use light to manipulate the DNA structure of the axons, potentially restoring some sight to blind people.
93. Warren Neidich, Lecture at European Graduate School, Steinmatte Plenum E, June 15, 2015.
94. John Hewitt, “DARPA dreams: cortical modems and neural RAMplants for restoring memory,” ExtremeTech (April 28, 2015), cited August 23, 2015, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/203718-darpa-dreams-cortical-modems-and-neural-ramplants-for-restoring-active-memory.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. Michael Hanlon, “The Mental Block: Can we get our heads around consciousness?,” Aeon Magazine (2013), accessed 10 March, 2015, http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/will-we-ever-get-our-heads-round-consciousness/.
98. Ibid.
99. Laurie R. Santos, Jonathan I. Flombaum, and Webb Phillips, “The Evolution of Human Mindreading: How Non-Human Primates Can Inform Social Cognitive Neuroscience,” Yale University, 2006, 1–30, 2, http://caplab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/santos.evcogneuro.pdf, accessed 5 March 2015. Also published in S. Platek(ed.) Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MY: MIT Press, 2006).
100. 100 Charles Wolfe, “From Spinoza to the Socialist Cortex,” in Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich (eds.), From Biopolitics to Noopolitics: Architecture and Mind in the Age of Communication and Information (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 185–206,185.
101. “Researchers have identified areas as diverse as parts of visual cortex, the amygdala, the anteriorcingulate cortex (ACC) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS).” “The Evolution of Human Mindreading”, op. cit., 2.
102. Masaki Isoda and Atsushi Noritake, “What makes the dorsomedial frontal cortex active during reading the mental states of others?,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 7 (2013), 232. Published online December 5, 2013. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00232
103. “The Evolution of Human Mindreading”, op. cit., 2.
104. Masaki Isoda and Atsushi Noritake, “What makes the dorsomedial frontal cortex active during reading the mental states of others?,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 7 (2013), 232. Published online December 5, 2013. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00232, and “The Evolution of Human Mindreading,” op. cit., and Laurie R. Santos, Jonathan I. Flombaum, and Webb Phillips, “The Evolution of Human Mindreading: How Non-Human Primates Can Inform Social Cognitive Neuroscience” (2006), 2. http://caplab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/santos.evcogneuro.pdf, accessed 5 March 2015. Also published in S. Platek (Ed.) Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
105. Ibid. “What makes the dorsomedial frontal cortex active during reading the mental states of others?,” op. cit.
106. J. Scott Jordan, “Wild agency,” op. cit. C.D. Frith, “Social Cognition,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363 (2008), 2033–2039, 2037, accessed August 3, 2013, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0005.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid.
111. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York, NY: Fordham University Press: New York, 2008), 1 and 8–9.
112. Monica Hoyos Flight, “Synaptogenesis: selective stabilization,” The Signalling Gateway, available online at: http://www.signaling-gateway.org/update/updates/200708/nrn2199.html, cited September 10, 2015.
113. Ibid.
114. Warren Neidich’s first introductory talk at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, 2015. At Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, students including myself learned from Neidich about selective stabilization of synpases.
115. Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Synaptic Epigenesis and the Evolution of Higher Brain Functions,” in Epigenetics, Brain and Behaviour, (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2012), 11-22, 11.
116. Ibid., 14.
117. Ibid., 124.
118. Ibid., 12. See also: Warren Neidich, “The Early and Late Stages of Cognitive Capitalism”, in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Two, ed. Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), 9-28, 26.
119. Stanislas Dehaene, “Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic: The “neuronal recycling” hypothesis”, online paper, pre-publication version in S. Dehaene et al. (eds.), From Monkey Brain to Human Brain, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), accessed August 3, 2013, http://peterdanpsy-chology.ro/ro/pagina/25/files/docs/DehaeneFyssenChapterPre-emption2004b.pdf. Arabic notation appeared not even a thousand years ago, see “The Early and Late Stages of Cognitive Capitalism”, op. cit., 28.
120. “Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic,” op. cit.
121. “Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic,” op. cit.
122. VWFA brain activation is systematically observed in the left occipito-temporal sulcus of the lateral border of the fusiform gyrus, which is at the “back” of the brain, or rather, well away from the frontal cortex. VWFA activates for visual and not spoken words. Lesion damage to this area only affects the visual word recognition, and fMRI studies correlate VWFA to reading skills. VWFA is activated by real words and pronounceable pseudo words rather than consonant strings, suggesting that learning to read a specific script changes VWFA. The human VWFA belongs to a brain area that likely correlates to the inferotemporal cortex (IT area) of Macaques.
123. Dehaene reviews work by Manatubu Tanifuji and Keiji Tanaka.
124. “Some neurons, for instance, fire to two superimposed discs that form a figure of 8, others respond to two bars forming a T, and yet others may respond to an asterix or a circle. Neurons responsive to these forms may have been selected, during either phylogenesis or ontogenesis, because as an ensemble they provide a repertoire that can represent an immense variety of object shapes. The T shape, for instance, is useful because it frequently signal[s] [sic] occlusion of a contour behind some part of the object.” “Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic,” op. cit.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid.
127. Warren Neidich, “Computational Architecture and the Statisticon,” in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Two, ed. Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), 335-363, 336.
128. “Computational Architecture and the Statisticon”, op. cit., 336. Neidich references Fredric Jameson’s earlier observation of the power of architectural encounters to create new perceptive organs.
129. David Porush, “Telepathy: Alphabetic Consciousness and the Age of Cyborg Illiteracy,” in Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy (eds.), Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, technology and Post-human pragmatism, (London: Routledge, 1998), 45–64, 47.
130. “Computational Architecture and the Statisticon”, op. cit., 336 and 345. See also Jacquelene Drinkall, “All That is Solid: Aesthetics of Quantum Telekinetics and Telepathic Smart Dust”, forthcoming in Leonardo Electronic Almanac.