British Congress of Optometry and Visual Science 2019

The fear of death and the myth of immortality are themes long present in various narratives, whether literary or visual. Science fiction as a genre offers us many venues for new explorations of this idea. Mind uploading is one of them. This fictional technique, related to cloning, is performed when the mind and consciousness of a person are transferred to another biological body or machine with the help of technology. In this way, a person continues their social life through their brain functions. This paper looks at four separate recent screen narratives – the movies Self/less, Transcendence, and Replicas, and the episode “Be Right Back” of the TV show Black Mirror. With the help of Tzvetan Todorov’s structural analysis, we find clauses that are present in all of the plots and see what ideas and topics they share. The paper also uses the idea of anthropological reading of science fiction and therefore uses scientific research to analyze these themes. By looking at anthropological findings of immortality, mortality, death in modern society, and digital techniques, we see how the analyzed narratives portray a unique mixture of fear of and longing for all the mentioned processes and ideas. Finally, this paper shows how science fiction could possibly reflect reality – both through presenting thoughts of society and inspiring future technological advances and ideas (in this case, the quest for immortality). While humans are still far from achieving eternal life, the mentioned screen narratives portray the growing stream of ideas that deal with mind uploading in the age of the internet and social media.

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Third Taniguchi Foundation Symposium on Visual Science: Neurobiological and Psychophysical Aspects of Color Vision

Color Research & Application ◽

10.1002/col.5080060414 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 247-249

Keyword(s):

Color Vision ◽

Visual Science

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Investigating students' similarity judgments in organic chemistry

Chemistry Education Research and Practice ◽

10.1039/c7rp00055c ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 774-784 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

N. Graulich ◽

G. Bhattacharyya

Keyword(s):

Organic Chemistry ◽

Undergraduate Students ◽

Scientific Inquiry ◽

Driving Forces ◽

Chemical Properties ◽

Direct Perception ◽

Critical Attribute ◽

Visual Science ◽

Similarity Judgments ◽

Lewis Structures

Organic chemistry is possibly the most visual science of all chemistry disciplines. The process of scientific inquiry in organic chemistry relies on external representations, such as Lewis structures, mechanisms, and electron arrows. Information about chemical properties or driving forces of mechanistic steps is not available through direct perception, and thus looking beyond the respresentation is challenging for learners. In this study, we investigated the categorization behavior of undergraduate students enrolled in an organic chemistry course when engaged in various categorization tasks involving electrophilic addition reactions to alkenes. The critical attribute a student chose to make a category out of a set of reactions was classified as perceptual or relational and gave insights into how students process and store information about reactions at an early level of expertise. Our results support the notion that students are prone to the surface level of representations and make sense of reactions depicted in a very minimalistic fashion. Implications for approaching this phenomenon in teaching are discussed.

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