ABSTRACT
Some years ago, I persuaded two students to talk to each other for half-an-hour while I was recording their moving faces on videotape, and their voices on audiotape. I have been working with these records ever since, at first by means of transcriptions of the movements of their noses and of the fundamental frequency of their voices, latterly by seeking to understand something of the neurological basis of those movements. In focusing on something so restricted—just the product of that half-hour—I would appear to have “caught the lot,” to have confronted the entire brain basis of interactive behavior as it was manifested in those fragments. We do not, of course, have a complete story, but must skim, hovercraftlike, over the surface of our subject, dipping down into patches where there is detail known, trying to cover the territory without losing sight of the two faces on the screen, flashing their eyes in their interactive dance. They were caught forever just at the advancing edge of time, leaving behind a story, a text which they had made together, controlling how it turned out by movements of voice, face, head, and eye; making the future into the past via the present, albeit the “specious present” of William James's description. Like two projectors, their brains through their eyes seemed to stab into time, putting form on the world just ahead, negotiating that form with their movements; leaving it organized behind them, irretrievably, as their shared text.
