The Invention Of Morel (New York Review Books Classics)

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Maravita A., Spence C., Driver J. (2003). Multisensory integration and the body schema: close to hand and within reach. Curr. Biol. 13, R531–R539 Born into a wealthy family, Bioy Casares was encouraged in his writing, publishing (with the help of his father) his first book in 1929. In 1932 he met Borges, a meeting that resulted in lifelong friendship and literary collaboration. Together they edited the literary magazine Destiempo (1936). Bioy Casares published several books before 1940, including collections of short stories (such as Caos [1934; “Chaos”] and Luis Greve, muerto [1937; “Luis Greve, Deceased”]), but he did not win wide notice until the publication of his novel La invención de Morel (1940; The Invention of Morel).

The scientist considered that “ we have no valid reason to deny consciousness to the persons created by his machinery” (Casares, 1940, p. 71). The protagonist of “Invention of Morel,” becoming aware of the forces that this machine can have, proposes that it should be enhanced with the capacity to describe the thoughts, emotions, and other brain states of a subject any distance away from him/her (Casares, 1940, p. 82). This enhanced machine would offer the ability to describe consciousness, as “ one's thoughts and feelings during life will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience” (Casares, 1940, p. 82). Although Morel's machine was not such a brain reading machine, and Casares' idea may have seemed naive and totally fictive until some years ago, astonishing progress in several facets of cognitive neuroscience, functional neuroimaging, and computational neuroscience, now permit us to wonder if decoding perceptual reality and mental states from brain activity is possible. Dondi M., Messinger D., Colle M., Tabasso A., Simion F., Barba B. D., et al. (2007). A new perspective on neonatal smiling: differences between the judgments of expert coders and naive observers. Infancy 12, 235–255 [ Google Scholar] Schwartz S. (2004). What dreaming can reveal about cognitive and brain functions during sleep: a lexico-statistical analysis of dream reports. Psychol. Belg. 44, 5–42 [ Google Scholar] Domhoff W. G. (2011). The neural substrate for dreaming: is it a subsystem of the default network? Conscious. Cogn. 20, 1163–1174Curia, Beatriz. La Concepción del cuento en Adolfo Bioy Casares. Mendoza: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Literaturas Modernas, 1986. Kay K. N., Naselaris T., Prenger R. J., Gallant J. L. (2008). Identifying natural images from human brain activity. Nature 452, 352–355 In this article, a literary source (The Invention of Morel) has been the inspiration for an integrative model of consciousness. The combined binding/brain reading approach of Casares would sufficiently describe the main attributes of consciousness: unity, subjectivity, and qualitativeness (Searle, 2000). With current technologies, this approach would correspond to a combined virtual reality/multimodal decoder, which could manipulate subjective conscious states (virtual reality component) and decode them (brain reading component). This approach could simultaneously gather first-person data with third-person data. The association of virtual reality technologies and decoders seems necessary, as brain reading techniques alone offer insufficient description of consciousness. Indeed, brain reading informs us accurately and with reasonable temporal resolution about the neurophysiological correlates of conscious states, but not about subjectivity. On the other hand, virtual reality technologies, already used to explore self-consciousness (Sanchez-Vives and Slater, 2005; Lenggenhager et al., 2007), offer a promising and sophisticated methodology for investigation of subjective experience.

Nofzinger E. A., Buysse D. J., Miewald J. M., Meltzer C. C., Price J. C., Sembrat R. C., et al. (2002). Human regional cerebral glucose metabolism during non-rapid eye movement sleep in relation to waking. Brain 125, 1105–1115 Bekinschtein T., Leiguarda R., Armony J., Owen A., Carpintiero S., Niklison J., et al. (2004). Emotion processing in the minimally conscious state. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 75, 788 Alec: He is a shy oriental wool dealer with green eyes. He could be the lover of either Faustine or Dora, or just their confidant. As with the rest of the people from the group, he sees Morel as a messianic figure. "Péle", Pelegrina Pastorino, Lady's Fashion Catalogue, Spring Season Harrods editorial, March 1925Jorge Luis Borges wrote in the introduction: "To classify it [the novel's plot] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." Mexican Nobel Prize winner in Literature Octavio Paz echoed Borges when he said: " The Invention of Morel may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel." Other Latin American writers such as Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez [1] have also expressed their admiration for the novel. Maquet P., Ruby P., Maudoux A., Albouy G., Sterpenich V., Dang-Vu T., et al. (2005). Human cognition during REM sleep and the activity profile within frontal and parietal cortices: a reappraisal of functional neuroimaging data. Prog. Brain Res. 150, 219–227 Dora: She is a blonde woman with a big head, she looks German but speaks Italian and walks like she is at the Folies Bergère, she is a close friend of Alec and Faustine. The fugitive hopes that she, and not Faustine, is Alec's lover. He later considers her as Morel's love interest when he suspects Morel might not be in love with Faustine after all. Dora's character is inspired by Bioy's friend, the model "Péle". Inspired by his fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel is on one level a stoic evocation of the pains and frustrations of romantic love and on another level a profound metaphysical mystery story. Along with his friend and mentor Jorge Luis Borges, Bioy Casares (1914–99) believed that the mission of the 20th-century writer was to react against the effusiveness of 19th-century realist and psychological novels and their representations of human experience. Against the notion held in the previous century that the production of a voluminous novel with a condensed or nonexistent story was the height of skill, Bioy Casares sought to redeem the overlooked centrality of plot, inspired by the adventure, mystery, and science fiction of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and Edgar Allan Poe. With The Invention of Morel, he achieved his most successful synthesis of metaphysical speculation and taut and suspenseful plotting. Mitchell T. M., Shinkareva S. V., Carlson A., Chang K. M., Malave V. L., Mason R. A., et al. (2008). Predicting human brain activity associated with the meanings of nouns. Science 320, 1191–1195

Slater M. (2009). Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 364, 3549–3557 We could say that Bioy Casares was ahead of his time, due to his gift of being able to mix everyday elements with science fiction. In his novels, we can see very realistic characters in a not so realistic environment. Morel: He is the scientific genius who willingly leads a group of snobs to their death. The fugitive dislikes him out of jealousy, but in the end justifies his actions. His name is a salute to the analogous character of The Island of Doctor Moreau. In Georges Perec's 1969 experimental novel A Void, insomniac Anton Vowl hallucinates an abridged and misremembered version of the plot of La invención de Morel. In the text the book is given the name La Croix du Sud ( The Southern Cross) by Isidro Parodi/Honorio Bustos Domaicq - respectively the protagonist and pseudonymous author of Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, a book written by Casares in collaboration with Borges.

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Studying dream states can potentially contribute to the investigation of some of the neurobiological, representational, and functional aspects of self-consciousness. Lenggenhager B., Tadi T., Metzinger T., Blanke O. (2007). Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science 317, 1096–1099 Before he finds out the truth about the island, the fugitive cites Cicero's book De Natura Deorum as an explanation of the appearance of two suns in the sky. Herling J., Broll W. (2010). Advanced self-contained object removal for realizing real-time diminished reality in unconstrained environments, in International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (Seoul, Korea: ), 207–212 [ Google Scholar]

Stoever: He is the one who guesses they are all going to die. The other members of the group prevent him from following Morel when he leaves the aquarium. He calms down and the group's fanaticism towards Morel prevails over his own survival instinct. Milh M., Kaminska A., Huon C., Lapillonne A., Ben-Ari Y., Khazipov R. (2007). Rapid cortical oscillations and early motor activity in premature human neonate. Cereb. Cortex 17, 1582–1594 In The Invention of Morel, while the narrator thinks that he has been alone on the island for months, he suddenly sees people and begins to watch them from afar. While contemplating where these people came from, the narrator sees beautiful Faustine at sunset. Sitting alone against the sea, Faustine soon becomes the only thing the narrator expects to see on this strange island. After a while, he sees Morel next to Faustine, and after that, the narrator decides to follow this group of people more closely. Until they discover Morel’s invention, neither the narrator nor the reader can figure out what they are up against. Dehaene S., Sergent C., Changeux J. P. (2003). A neuronal network model linking subjective reports and objective physiological data during conscious perception. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 8520–8525The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is about a writer from Venezuela who has run away to an uninhabited island in Polynesia to escape a prison sentence. He learned about the island from a merchant, who told him both that it was uninhabited and that there was a mysterious disease on the island that causes death. Nevertheless, the man goes to the island to escape a sure prison sentence, and he begins to write a diary after tourists arrive there unexpectedly. As time goes on, he witnesses events that repeat themselves, and he starts to question his sanity and wonder whether the tourists are actually there at all. Kamitani Y., Tong F. (2005). Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. Nat. Neurosci. 8, 679–685 Dreams also share common features with virtual reality, as they are characterized by misinterpretation of the perceptual input (the dreamer considers the sensory stimuli as incoming), and by perceptual distortions, such as alterations in spatio-temporal integration, bizarreness, and out-of-body experiences ( heautoscopy). Most of these features may relate to changes in regional brain activity and in functional connectivity between brain regions (Maquet et al., 2005; Massimini et al., 2010). The ability of the brain to accept a fictional reality it creates as an actual one (adhesion), and thus alter the state of its own perception, is related to activations of the left ventral inferior frontal gyrus and left posterior superior temporal sulcus (Metz-Lutz et al., 2010). Interestingly enough, both regions display increased activity during sleep compared to wakefulness (Braun et al., 1997; Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2002; Kaufmann et al., 2006). Perceptual experience in dreams, contrary to waking experience, is a genuine representation of subjective idealism (see chapter “Morel's Invention as Inspiration of an Integrative Description of Consciousness”), because all sensory stimuli exist solely as perceptual brain products. Therefore, by studying perceptual and cognitive subjectivity as represented in dreams, dream research could contribute to the theoretical understanding of first-person data. Metz-Lutz M. N., Bressan Y., Heider N., Otzenberger H. (2010). What physiological changes and cerebral traces tell us about adhesion to fiction during theater-watching? Front. Hum. Neurosci. 4: 59 Cox D. D., Savoy R. L. (2003). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) “brain reading”: detecting and classifying distributed patterns of fMRI activity in human visual cortex. Neuroimage 19, 261–270