i=1000w AND 1000i=w

The next question I faced was how Frank's ideas were communicated. One of the reasons I created Frank was to examine how one's life is conveyed to others. I tried to keep Frank's psychological experiences consistent with my understanding of how the brain functions. In the last chapters I introduced the idea of the internal representation, which is the principle mechanism of perception and cognition within the brain (Kaplan, Cognition 32). From the neuron up these perceptual mechanisms are built by embodied experience and also from exposure to representations like stories or images. The neural assemblies within Frank's brain, let's say, are actual physical structures. Each small bundle of neurons literally represents an object, feature, idea, quality of his senses, or pattern of thought. They serve both as his memories and his perceptual templates. The same internal representations are activated when he perceives and when he imagines something.

But if these bundles are called “representations”, it changes the way “representations” are defined in shared cultures like art and science (ie text and images). The usual definition is called into question with the introduction of the “internal” kind. I will refer to the other kind, then, as external representations. This specification is more inclusive of the idea of internal representations. By saying “representation”, I now mean both the internal and external kind. The senses act as the threshold between them. Frank's external representations would be his drawings, messages, or audio he uses to build more detailed internal representations. This clarification between the two helps to make sense of the way that different kinds of representations impress upon one another across the threshold of his senses, from the mind to the page and back.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a word is worth a thousand pictures.

The page is Frank's space for accumulating external representations. But they have a variety of functions within its boundaries. His text and writing, for example, is used to convey information in an economic way. The economy of text helps it to be more communicable, because words activate internal representations that have deeper associations with sensorial details than are not included within a word. Pictures, though, have an inverse affect on symbolic internal representations; one image triggers a wide variety of textual references. Frank's representations stimulate in both textual and pictorial directions, allowing the reader/viewer to test their interpretations of one external representation against the other.