Category Archives: object handling

Published! An object handling paper.

Posted on October 7, 2018 by Bruce Davenport

It’s been ages since I posted in my poor, neglected blog. In large part, this is because I’ve been doing lots of reading for research at work that is really interesting but nothing to do with objects. (It’s one of … Continue reading →

Posted in object handling, Objects | Leave a comment

A plethora of perspectives

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Bruce Davenport

It’s been a while (10 months!) since I last posted on this blog. I’ve been studying, and writing a dissertation for, a MSc in Psychology. There were some fascinating potential tangents to explore along the way but it was too … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, embodiment, object handling, Objects, qualitative methods, research methodology, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reaching out (daunted)

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Bruce Davenport

One of my intentions, when I began this blog, was to draw on the available literature to piece together a neural geography of object handling. That personal project has taken a variety of turns since then, to the point that … Continue reading →

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Some nuggets from ‘The Deepest Sense’

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Bruce Davenport

Birthday reading this year included ‘The Deepest Sense’ by Constance Classen. It’s really good; academic whilst still being eminently readable. The aim of the book is to trace a cultural history of the senses in Western Europe, starting from the … Continue reading →

Posted in museums, object handling, Objects, touch | Leave a comment

Haptic primes

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Bruce Davenport

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the idea of ‘material primes’ as explored in David McRaney’s book ‘You are not so smart’. Chapter 38 of the book, on Embodied Cognition, deals with ‘haptic primes’ which are at least as … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, embodiment, metaphor, object handling | 1 Comment

Muscle memory – an exercise in carriage wit

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Bruce Davenport

Last week I became embroiled in a conversation about ‘muscle memory’ via the medium of Twitter. I don’t really do pithy at the best of time so the conversation was, for me, deeply unsatisfactory and I spent the rest of … Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, memory, Motor control, object handling | 4 Comments

Imagining pathways to impact

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Bruce Davenport

The previous entry was based on some speculative ideas; this one leaps into a speculative/imaginative domain in order to work through some ideas that have been niggling me. I have various bug-bears… I find the rhetorical insistence on the centrality … Continue reading →

Posted in cultural participation, dementia, measurement of impact, memory, museums, object handling, wellbeing | 1 Comment

Space

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Bruce Davenport

In their book on managing the symptoms of dementia, Ballard et al. (2001, 93), included this schematic to illustrate the ways that the different environments affect people with dementia. Schematic of different environments that affect the symptoms of dementia (from … Continue reading →

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Shopping in the 18th Century

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Bruce Davenport

A colleague passed on this paper regarding the sensory skills required of genteel, female shoppers in the 18th Century. The author makes a series of interesting points about the haptic experience of shopping at that time… Smith argues that despite … Continue reading →

Posted in memory, object handling, Perception | Leave a comment