Book ID: CBB530072118

The Helmholtz Curves: Tracing Lost Time (2014)

unapi

This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of "lost time" by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust. Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the context of pathbreaking experiments on the temporality of the nervous system in 1851. With a "frog drawing machine," Helmholtz established the temporal gap between stimulus and response that has remained a core issue in debates between neuroscientists and philosophers. When naming the recorded phenomena, Helmholtz introduced the term temps perdu, or lost time. Proust had excellent contacts with the biomedical world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and he was familiar with this term and physiological tracing technologies behind it. Drawing on the machine philosophy of Deleuze, Schmidgen highlights the resemblance between the machinic assemblages and rhizomatic networks within which Helmholtz and Proust pursued their respective projects.

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Review Laura Otis (2016) Review of "The Helmholtz Curves: Tracing Lost Time". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 191-192). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB530072118/

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Authors & Contributors
Schmidgen, Henning
Lazar, J. Wayne
John J. Stuhr
Chátal, Alexandr
Wade, Nicholas J.
Ueda, Risa
Concepts
Nervous system
Neurosciences
Physiology
Psychology
Philosophy
Neurology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Germany
United States
France
Naples (Italy)
Czechoslovakia
Paris (France)
Institutions
Salpêtrière, Paris
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