Tag: butterfly

Collectanea 27.25 Atrophy-Monarchs-Garage

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 30, 2025

Cognitive Atrophy

“The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions [3]. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores [3]” (10).

—Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Haptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Zian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes (MIT, MassArt, Wellesley1Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?). (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv:2506.08872). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872 #cognition #debt #writing #LLMs #AI #frenzy #atrophy #performance #humanbrains #consequences

A prepublication version of the Kosmyna et al. article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” circulated a couple of weeks ago. At >200 pages, whew, it is long and ornately specialized at points. I’ve read enough of it to conclude a) it will, on the sunny side of review, be a landmark study, an important account leading to further research on the cognitive consequences of LLM over-reliance (notably, a developmental vortex fueled by enthusiastic, uncritical adoptions and battering-ram marketing efforts by boom or bust AI startups), b) the approach to writing essays at the center of the study is woefully reductive (i.e., timed for 20 minutes, AP-test-styled prompting without much context or purpose), c) the ability to quote one’s own essay shortly after writing it is a bizarre and not altogether persuasive indicator of cognitive performance, yet this was the greatest differentiator among the three participating groups (brain-only, search engine, and LLM), and d) there remains a vast gulf between cognitive neurosciences, rhetorical invention/eureka/epiphany studies2We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging., and reading and writing research as it is valued in the humanities, much less in Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies.

Visual Portmanteau: Monarch Butterfly + Mandala

Figure 1. “Monarchdala.”

Mature, blooming milkweed at the back of the holler is aflutter, buzzing with pollinators, including a small kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. And lately I had been exploring in Procreate various brush and palette customizations, watching a few tutorials, learning how to make stamps. What followed were experimental, exploratory pieces, like this one, which uses drawing guides for mirrored quadrants, then bending and combining selected elements, adding color from a custom butterfly photograph palette, and inlayering a gradient backdrop for a fade of center-to-periphery brightness.

The Standard Way into the Sheepfold

“What is the good of research ?
What is worth doing ?
Shall we be allowed to do it ?
Who will do it ?
In answering the first question, I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold” (17).

~

“Now, is there any reason, in this age when every other branch of human knowledge is being ruthlessly pulled to pieces and tested why our branch should be passed over?” (18).

—James Winans (Cornell U). (1915). The need for research. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335631509360453. #branches #research #orthodoxy #sheepfold #speech #communication #disciplinarity

From the Mail Bag 📭

Sadly, there was no mail from readers this week.

G-l-o-r-i-a

Figure 2. Summer 2025’s first morning glory bloom.

5ives

CCCC Covers and a Poll

Five years, five program covers from past Conferences on College Composition and Communication. Why these? Albeit somewhat peripheral to my current research project, they’re quirky with their idiomatic, time-spanning expressions of then and now: the phrase “composition and communication” repeated 53 times from 1960; warpy, nested Cs from 1962; an optical illusion from 1974; seven missiles soaring from left to right in 1977; and an earth-sized pencil from 1983.

1960
1962
1974
1977
1983

Walking as Artistic Practice Syllabus

“This workshop is designed as a brief survey of some of the origins, theories, processes, and manifestations of walking as art. We will read, watch, and discuss perspectives on walking-based projects. Using this information as a springboard, we will complete walking exercises, and execute our own original walking projects.”

—Ellen Mueller (Arts Midwest). (2021). Walking as Artistic Practice. https://teaching.ellenmueller.com/walking/.

I have been meandering in wide arcs toward a plan for this fall’s pair of online-asynchronous sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media. The course description mentions digital writing within “the context of business, organizational, and political practices.” It also mentions production, devices, data visualizations, videos, web design, “and more.” Sample syllabi I have been able to track down tend to outline three major projects, usually something related to podcasting or sound editing, something related to data analysis and visualization, and something related to video. The official, CUSP-approved outcomes are keyed toward ethics (“ethical design strategies”) with three bullets emphasizing visual, video, and web. I haven’t taught this particular class before at Virginia Tech. The online-asynchronous format adds complications to the kinds of engagement and interaction one can reasonably expect, of course. But I have been thinking more about short-form exercises paired with an anthologics-styled (perhaps ABCDEary format) assortment. Self-introductory account of digital mecology/technologies of self; microthemes prompted with alternatingly terrestrial (food, walking, fieldwork) and digital (photo, sound, hypertext, map, 4D/time, etc.). Inflections of Ashley Holmes’ device-mediated environs (writing on location), inflections of Ellen Mueller’s walking courses reframed as writing on foot, Geoffrey Sirc’s seriality, throwback maps of the imagination (e.g., what goes on in that building I walk past every day?), and more. “And more” as the inventive indeterminacy better fitted with digital writing than anything else I am finding or can think of as of yet, seven weeks or so from the start of classes.

Waiting There for Me

Figure 3. In the garage.
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the sixth in this series from Week 27 of 2025, or the Week of June 30). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

Buck moth larva, near posts at SW corner of the holler. #stinging #caterpillar #wonderhollow #rollcall
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Meal moth

Notes

  • 1
    Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?
  • 2
    We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging.

Butterfly Zag

/ Derek Mueller

Monarch Butterfly, El Rosario Sanctuary, Michoacàn-Mèxico.

Monarchs are “tough and powerful, as butterflies go.” They fly over Lake Superior without resting; in fact, observers there have discovered a curious thing. Instead of flying directly south, the monarchs crossing high over the water take an inexplicable turn towards the east. Then when they reach an invisible point, they all veer south again. Each successive swarm repeats this mysterious dogleg movement, year after year. Entomologists actually think that the butterflies might be “remembering” the position of a long-gone, looming glacier. In another book I read that geologists think that Lake Superior marks the site of the highest mountain that ever existed on this continent. I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it, to feel when to turn. At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. (Dillard, p. 258, 1974)

Before shelving Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of the small handful of books (at focus’s edge) I finished on this research leave, I flipped back to a couple of dog-ears to see if there were passages I wanted to keep, post, circulate, remember later. Remember when a blog was a good location to stash miscellaneous passages? In this one, mostly about monarchs and their migration, I must have taken as wonderful (i.e., wonderful enough to warrant folding the corner of the paper) the swarm’s seasonal navigation as it maybe? does it? draws on some faint memoria, a directional inheritance, passed along grid cells from every butterfly mother and every next one before her. Fascinating and strange to think of a group veer, much less over the open expanse of a great lake in summertime.

But of course reading the passage again–no same two ways through it twice–its emphasis on the veer, on turning, stand out. This, the sort of turn spotting that is more akin to following the turns taken by ancestors, those redirects inherited, a quietly encoded rule for monarchs next. So it’s a curious aside that extends turns–more than the multimodal turn, the archival turn, the digital turn, and so on–to that which is only remembered, ancient monuments, a mountain or a glacier. Turning, bending around figments; the butterflies know, but how would we regard such knowing? How would we judge it if we, too, were prone to such predictable and long-established path-following as this?

Toledo Zoo Wide Moth

/ Derek Mueller

Toledo Zoo Wide Moth

Visited a crowded Toledo Zoo Tuesday. The Ziems Conservatory was closed (I wonder if the cause was a slake moth infestation). These plywood cutouts were, for today, close enough to real butterflies. Come to think of it, props might be the best/wildest any zoo has to offer for how richly they stage a participatory transmography: you get to be the animal/human hybrid.