From: Helgi Schweizer <jon.helgi@web.de>
Date: December 9, 2009 4:07:34 PM EST
Hi Satinder.
It is a real a christmas surprise gift to get this message from you. I hope, you are doing well in the UK. The topic Xin Wei has come up with is not only very exciting, but it is in a certain way also historically connected to me. The relation of memory and learning to the experience of space, to body movement and emotion was central to all the experiments my doctor-father Ivo Kohler invented and carried out in his very peculiar fashion. I was involved in some of them.
As you might know, Kohler was in very close contact to James G. Gibson and admired his ecological psychology. Kohler became most famous for developping further the experiments of George Stratton, especially wearing prism-glasses that inverted left and right for several months. I think Kohlers experiments are worth being thought over anew, this time with emphasis on his notions aside, that he did not publish because he thought they were too strange or counterintuitve. Most of them were related to changes in space perception, but could only be described in a more or less qualitative way, that would not seem scientifically appropriate, at least not for publiction.
As to my present work, I am at the moment immersed in a somewhat different work, applying my fundamentalistic theory to a number of fields of practice. At the moment I am writing a book on Theater (in a very broad sense). It is my book number twenynine. The focus is now, approaching the end of the book, on interachtive media and computer games. (Actually, my younger son is successfully running a browser game). As soon as I shall have finished this work, I would love to take part in Xin Wei's project. I think, I am still good for the one or the other weird idea when it comes to design experiments.
Dear Satinder, could you give me an idea, what are your fields of interest at the present? Although I am retired, I am still doing research on interpersonal synchronisation and rhythmic interaction, on manipulation of subjective time by music and especially by application of Ganzfeld. We have done a lot of work developping further the so called colour-light- music. This was a joint-project with the philharmony in Luxemburg. (Thats where the money is).
With warm regads.
Helgi