In the language of the brain, words and thoughts are defined relative to narrative frames and conceptual metaphors. “The very fact that we recognize these cultural narratives and frames means that they are instantiated physically in our brains. We are not born with them, but we start growing them soon, and as we acquire the deep narratives, our synapses change and become fixed” (Lakoff, 2002, pp. 33-34).
Published in Chapter:
Fostering Psychological Coherence: With ICTs
Stephen Brock Schafer (Digipen Institute of Technology, USA)
Copyright: © 2013
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3986-7.ch002
Abstract
As we experience a paradigm shift into a media age, ICTs are altering the psychological parameters of human reality. The premise of this chapter is that the psychological dynamics of interactive images projected as Media Dreams correspond with the psychological dynamics of dream images as defined by Carl G. Jung. (Jacobi, 1973). If this is true, images in media dreams mirror patterns of energy and information in what Jung called the collective unconscious. Jung calls images archetypal representations or projections of archetypal energy patterns that are structured as metaphorical narrative. The most recent cognitive research (Lakoff, 2008) verifies that—indeed—the cognitive unconscious has the framework of metaphorical narrative and that these story patterns correlate with energy patterns in the nervous system. Jung also knew that dreams “have a purpose,” and that the purpose is “compensation” or harmonization of conscious and unconscious psyche. Jungian compensation is essentially the same thing as coherence, and recent research on coherence confirms that coherent states can be evoked with specific feedback technologies. Moreover, coherent psychological states increase emotional and perceptual stability as well as alignment among the physical, cognitive, and emotional systems. The authors’ hypothesis is that the images projected by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)—the media dreams of a population—are subject to psychological analysis in order to disclose unconscious sources of psychological stress in contextual collectives.