DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-028

Rodrigo Antunes Morais

Faculdade Cásper Líbero, Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo, Brazil

digo.morais@gmail.com

Antonio Roberto Chiachiri Filho

Faculdade Cásper Líbero, São Paulo, Brazil

prof.arcf@uol.com.br

Abstract

Transmediation in technological environments enables a semiotic equivalence in the translation process of languages in the technological aesthetic territory, thus demonstrating that the digital immediate object may be equivalent to the immediate object transmediated by advents derived by the convergence of telecommunications. So, digital advents for interactivity of gestural control (gestural interfaces) are becoming increasingly more accessible to different audiences, for example, kinetic simulators for the development of environments that assist robotics and its advances in biotechnology. For these reasons, many technologies called “touchless screen”, as kinect or leap motion, demonstrate the possibility of interactive immersion in three-dimensional environments that reveal the opportunity to understand a representative user immersion in technological environments. This demonstrates the possibility of using theses technologies in the treatment of schizophrenic people, because the possibility of creating an ubiquitous universe comprising an aesthetic of simulated environments from the intensification of subjective volatility of personality can help psychiatrists in the development of avatars derived from hallucinations of certain patients to assist in their treatment. This paper aims to show that there is a possibility to create visual avatars from hallucinated data based on a repertoire once auditory hallucinated by a patient. This process enables the interactivity of psychiatrists with their patients so that they can become possible the contact with the hallucinated narrative, demonstrating the quest for understanding the equivalence between immediate objects that are transmediated inside and outside the visual environment, highlighting places of experience from symbols representing something that is not visibly accessible. This study will have base in the avatar therapy by Langlois, which is engaged in treatment via virtual world using avatars, and in the matrices of language a thought by Lucia Santaella for demonstrating sound and visual matrices in contiguity through representation by analogy.

This present paper makes an explanation about a phenomenological proposal for the study of transmidiation and schizophrenia. It is divided into three parts. In the beginning it will be explored the main characteristics of schizophrenia, regarding the concepts of dynamic object, immediate object, percept and percipuum. In the second part it will be presented the avatar therapy developed by Julian Leff and its main features, what takes to the last part: a new proposal for the evolution of avatar therapy.

1. Characteristics of schizophrenia

To start it is necessary to explore the main features of schizophrenia that will form the basis for the proposal to be made in this paper.

Currently, for psychiatry, schizophrenia is regarded among the most serious diseases of the mind and can be characterized as a group of pathologies that denote changes in thinking through hallucination. Thus it is reasonable to understand that this analysis of schizophrenia raises the possibility of an understanding that initiates a strand of study that opens the doors to research the thought and language derived from hallucinatory events, i.e., it is taken for basis schizophrenic hallucinations, which in turn are taken here as a real perception of an object that has no external stimulus; it is still possible to say that the hallucinated object is real for the person who is passing through a period of hallucination.

To deepen the notions of this main feature of schizophrenia and to make possible to continue the understanding about perception and cognition in schizophrenic logic we have the words of Oliver Sacks:

When the word “hallucination” first came into use, in the early sixteenth century, it denoted only “a wandering mind”. It was not until the 1830s that Jean-Étienne Esquirol, a French psychiatrist, gave the term its present meaning – prior to that, what we now call hallucination were referred to simply as “apparitions.” Precise definitions of the word “hallucination” still vary considerably, chiefly because it is not always easy to discern where the boundary lies between hallucination, misperception, and illusion. But generally, hallucinations are defined as percepts arising in the absence of any external reality – seeing things or hearing things that are not there (2012:Introduction 1 – 3).

At this moment it is possible to understand that a hallucinated event participates in the repertoire of the hallucinating person, i.e., sciences that comprehend the structure and functioning of the human mind can show that schizophrenics bases language and thought from a repertoire that is not always given from external stimuli.

With this overview it is evident the tendency that studies about hallucinated events has in only consider the biological and medical scope, they do not notice that the characteristics of philosophy and communication – as well as a variety of other sciences – can help in the comprehension of hallucinated realities. Thus, it easy to find a necessity to approach perception and cognition through the “counterarguments to the theories that have to appeal to ‘sense-data’ for explaining the perception.” (SANTAELLA, 2012a:90)

Starting this contextualization it must be considered that all the analysis on sensory stimuli and sense-data performed until here has a much larger amplitude in Peircean theory; which qualify everything perceived as a percept.

In a 1970 article, R. F. Almender tried to demonstrate the consistence about Peircean theory of perception. He argued that this theory is sustained in a metaphysical realist stance theory and so it is epistemologically coherent. Peirce affirmed, without hesitation, that all we perceive is a percept. What is out of us and arrives to us, what is arrested in a perception act, is called percept. (SANTAELLA, 2012b:89)

Accordingly, it is possible to observe the percept as everything that forces itself to the recognition without using support, in other words, it is the object of perception. Santaella still presents an ambiguity found in Peircean theory about the exploration of the percept:

In one hand, […] percepts are not presented with a mental nature. They are not mental constructions. Instead of it they are compulsive initiators of thought, insistent and demanding, uncontrollable and precognitive. In the other hand there are some moments that Peirce gives to the percept a mental character.  (2012b:92)

Santaella demonstrated that there are moments in which Peirce places the percept independently; not tied to any interpretative mind. But, in other moments, there are reports in which Peirce elects the percept to a mental product, as can be seen below:

Notwithstanding its apparent primitiveness, every percept is the product of mental processes or, anyhow, of processes that are mental for every intensive purpose. (PEIRCE apud SANTAELLA, 2012b:92)

It can be seen that there is a moment in which the percept is taken as a product of cognition. For this situation Santaella present a solution elaborated by Richard Bernstein in which he says that Perice solved this ambiguity about the two meanings for the percept when he created a third term, the percipuum. So, the percept remains independent and external to mind, while the percipuum is in the perception judgment, i.e., the percept can be understood as any stimulus that still did not have contact with any sensory receptor, while the percipuum is the percept at the metaphysics moment when it is processed by an organism.

Considering the hallucinations it is possible to conceive that the analytical differentiation is not related only to the percept, but also to the percipuum. This indicates that the percept, even if it was not propagated by external stimuli, is the same in a mere psychological evaluation about sense-data, both for hallucinating people and for any other person who has not any mental disorder. Thus, the beginning of hallucination happens in the fast moment when the sensory interpretation starts, i.e., in the transitory fugacity from the percept to the percipuum.

Therefore, when the perceptual irregularity embody in the mind of a hallucinating person – already in the cognition – it is accentuated an interpretative duality, because the object that propagated the stimulus is not real; while the percept insists in its reality. This is what makes the cognition of this person not apprehend this judgment of perception as something wrong. In example, Peirce says:

… judgment of perception only can refer to a simple percept that will never exist again; and if I judge that it seemed to be red, when, in fact, it did not seem red, it must at least to be recognized that it seemed to be red. (PEIRCE apud SANTAELLA, 2012b:108)

This explanation demonstrates the emergence of subjective thinking and the need to study the importance of the signification given to these percepts in the mind of schizophrenics; what is constantly discussed in the avatar therapy currently worked by Julian Leff.

2. Avatar therapy

Avatar therapy is a kind of therapy developed by Julian Leff, Emeritus Professor in UCL Mental Health Sciences, that tries to create an avatar of the voice hallucinated to make possible people with schizophrenia control what they hear. This three-dimensional computerized system allows a kind of new therapy that is not based on pharmaceutical treatments and its objective is to reduce the frequency and severity of episodes of hallucination.

The first step is to help the patient to create the three-dimensional computerized avatar of the voice heard, i.e., the patient is instructed to create a face of the entity heard translating a sound matrix into a visual matrix. When this face is created the computerized system synchronises the avatar’s lips with therapist speech, so the therapist situated far from the patient can speak through the avatar in real time. Thus, the therapist can pretend to be the voice heard by the patient and stimulates the patient to resist or even fight the voice making possible the patient starting to control the hallucinations.

Julian Leff says:

Even though patients interact with the avatar as though it was a real person, because they have created it, they know that it cannot harm them, as opposed to the voices, which often threaten to kill or harm them and their family. As a result the therapy helps patients gain the confidence and courage to confront the avatar, and their persecutor.[1]

This makes it possible to think about a new proposal for the evolution of the avatar therapy.

3. A new proposal for the evolution of avatar therapy

According to Julian Leff the avatar therapy do not achieves higher results because the avatars have no longer realistic features. It is what hinders the spatiotemporal reality immersion of the schizophrenic.

Therefore, it is possible to start a strand of study which understand that the transmediation in technological environments enables a semiotic equivalence in the translation process of languages in the technological aesthetic territory, thus demonstrating that the digital immediate object may be equivalent to the immediate object transmediated by advents derived by the convergence of telecommunications. So, digital advents for interactivity of gestural control (gestural interfaces) are becoming increasingly more accessible to different audiences, for example, kinetic simulators for the development of environments that assist robotics and its advances in biotechnology. For these reasons, many technologies called “touchless screen”, as kinect or leap motion, demonstrate the possibility of interactive immersion in three-dimensional environments that reveal the opportunity to understand a representative user immersion in technological environments. This demonstrates the possibility of using theses technologies in the treatment of schizophrenic people, because the possibility of creating an ubiquitous universe comprising an aesthetic of simulated environments from the intensification of subjective volatility of personality can help psychiatrists in the development of avatars with more realistic features.

Allied to this technological environment, to create an avatar it must also take into consideration its graphic construction. So this process enables the creation of visual avatars for hallucinated data that formerly were part of an only auditory hallucination. This process enables the interactivity of psychiatrists with their patients so that they can become possible the contact with the hallucinated narrative, demonstrating the quest for understanding the equivalence between immediate objects that are transmediated inside and outside the visual environment, highlighting places of experience from symbols representing something that is not visibly accessible.

This contiguity between sound matrix and visual matrix can be understood through the theory of representation by analogy made by Santaella:

These symbolic forms in Peirce’s sense means conventional but they are at the same time motivated by maintaining ties of resemblance to what they represent. Although these forms are structured in a system and represent their objects by general laws, established by habits or convention, there is however, between both (sign and object), a relation by analogy that is characterized by a certain content of apparent or diagrammatic similarity. (2005:248-249).

These forms, a Third in the Peircean theory, bring the possibility to represent more faithfully the hallucinated voices of schizophrenics, demonstrating a spatiotemporal immersion that can more effective in creating a reality from advents that enable the interaction with technological environments. Such reality for Peirce is not independent of the previously hallucinated thought:

Peirce’s “reality” is not “independent of thought”, just like Scotus’s realistas is an ens rationis, or mental entity, in the sense that we make the distinction in our mind (but still has a basis in the existent thing). Reality for Scotus has a basis in the existent thing, a Second. Peirce takes Scotus’s notion of reality, frees it form the “idle” and complicated distinctions which burden it (like non-adequate identities and such), and recycles it, after adding the notions of the scientific method and synechism, defining it as the object of final opinion. As a result, the basis for the notion of reality for Peirce is a Third. (MAYORGA, 2007:153)

The proposal presented here shows that the junction of applied sciences with theoretical sciences is accentuated for the infinite and necessary contiguity for any use in research. What is evident, then, is the need of applied sciences such as psychiatry and neuroscience seek sources in theoretical sciences. Thus showing the possibility of working with Peirce’s semiotic in studies that previously were taken into the walls of the biological area.

The aim here were to show the possibility of joining the study of matrices of language and though with studies of technology environments for the evolution of the treatment of schizophrenia, leading patients to have the freedom to insert themselves into a harmonious spatiotemporal hyper-reality without assumptions on individual characteristics; made in an universal consciousness original content.

References

MAYORGA, Rosa Maria Perez-Teran. 2007. From realism to ‘realiscism’: the metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Lanham: Lexington Books.

SACKS, Oliver. 2012. Hallucinations. E-book. Canada: Random House.

SANTAELLA, Lucia. 2005. Matrices of language and thought: sound, visual, verbal: hypermedia applications. São Paulo: Iluminuras.

SANTAELLA, Lucia. 2005b. Applied semiotics. São Paulo: Pioneira Thomson Learning.

SANTAELLA, Lucia. 2012. Perception. Phenomenology, Ecology, Semiotics. São Paulo: Cengage Learning.

WESTON, David. Avatar therapy helps silence voices in schizophrenia. London: UCL Mental Health – Science Unit, 2013. Available in: < http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/ 0513/29052013-Avatar-therapy-helps-silence-voices-in-schizophrenia-Leff> Accessed: 2014/05/04.