Central Images

I recommend watching the movie 'Solar Max'. Only a half hour or so long, the film captures many stunning images of the sun. Watching the movie, I found myself thinking back to an important theory in psychology, known in various forms as 'Instance theory'. The idea is simply that memory consists of multiple instances of previous experience. The implication is that currrent experience is a reconstruction, made on the basis of these stored instances, and that current experience is constantly being shaped by our history of instances. With this idea in mind, it is intesting to wonder about the role of particular instances in mediating the problem of communication: namely, given that we have many different instances of experience that are not common, how do we so often arrive at a point of common understanding. At some level, we are always sufffering from the illusion of succesful communcation. At the same time, although our experiences are idiosyncratic, the world is kind and regular and usually offers similar vantage points that facilitate communcation. The image of the sun is one of these potent regularities that people have shared throughout history. Solar max does a nice job of presenting these images for our indulgence. Google earth does the same thing. And, more recently, Google video is out there providing hords of 12 second clips of experience that we can all share (type in 'lady punch', or 'springboard', or 'tom cruise kills oprah', or see ' the best of google video project'. Won't the future be nice. Once the best experiences are all posted on Google video we can just sit around watching them. Aaa Google video. The centralizing frontier of common experiences.