One sunny afternoon in March 2024, I walked into a flea market in Chengdu, China — a labyrinth of book stalls, shadowed corridors, and a handful of solitary customers. The vendors were largely absent, or perhaps stationed on stools in darkened corners, their faces illuminated by the glow of mobile screens. Each stall overflowed with dust: old magazines, documents, books, and well-worn notebooks that formed towers of forgotten knowledge. I pulled one volume after another from these stacks, hoping to find archival materials about a forgotten episode in the history of information technology in China. For a moment, I found myself yearning for some extraordinary sensory gift that would allow me to scan and locate relevant archival materials in this sea of information with greater precision and speed.
A similar feeling of “information overload” (Blair, 2010) — an overwhelming sense of being submerged in vast bodies of knowledge — motivated historical actors in 1980s China to investigate the limits of human bodily capacities. From elite scientists, technologists, medical professionals, and policymakers to ordinary citizens, the country was fascinated by the possibilities of human life: how to better memorize and relay information through the body, how to cultivate seemingly unusual sensory capacities, and how to sense and feel properly in order to resemble, and thus match pace with, the complexity of a technological world increasingly characterized by rapid advancements in information technologies (Liu, 2019). Central to this endeavor was a desire to reimagine the very possibilities of human body and experience. How might human potential be redefined in a new “information age” that was emerging across the globe?
Medical anthropologists and STS scholars have examined the epistemic roles of biomedical practices in creating future-oriented narratives of life’s “potentiality” — visions of life that could and should be (Taussig et al., 2013). This space of potentiality, while unknown, becomes filled with moralist claims and actions about human futures. While scholars have largely focused on biomedicine as the site of promise, desire, and control, in this post, I offer a historical glimpse into how information technologies—and the sociopolitical anticipation of their potential impacts—produced embodied forms of futurity in the context of reform-era China, shaping intellectual and popular practices around humans’ bodily sensory and cognitive capacities as sites of optimization and enhancement.
The “Living Dictionary”
In 1989, during the annual Spring Festival Gala hosted by China Central Television (CCTV), a performance titled “The Living Dictionary” captivated audiences across the nation. Two self-proclaimed “memory experts”—a teacher and his student—stepped onto the stage with an audacious claim: they had discovered techniques that could transform anyone into a human encyclopedia. The woman announced she had memorized China’s entire Xinhua Dictionary—all 11,000 entries of the nation’s most trusted reference book. Her teacher went further: with just four months of training, he insisted, even a fifth-grader could accomplish the same feat.
The female “memory expert” articulated a specific vision of human quality that resonated with broader national anxieties about technological and economic competitiveness in post-socialist China.
Drawing by author.
The gala’s host turned to the studio audience with theatrical skepticism. He asked, “Do you believe this?” When someone nodded, he shot back with a grin: “You are very gullible—I don’t believe it.” What happened next would captivate the room. Audience members grabbed copies of the dictionary, flipping to random pages and calling out entries. Without hesitation, the woman began reciting—character by character, definition by definition—the exact text from each page. The studio erupted, and the audience’s eyes were filled with amazement.
Beyond mere entertainment, this performance articulated a specific vision of human quality that resonated with broader national anxieties about technological and economic competitiveness in post-socialist China (Anagnost, 2004; Greenhalgh, 2008). The memory experts framed their demonstration not as a spectacle but as scientific interventions. “Memory, as humanity’s capacity to store knowledge and information, serves as an important indicator of intelligence,” they wrote. Leveraging the national importance of their approach, they argued that improving one’s memory had become “people’s urgent desire” in an information society. Their prescription was precise: “If an individual’s memory has broad scope, high speed, high precision, and strong consolidation, this lays the necessary foundation for present learning and future creativity.” Here, humans’ cognitive capacities became a quantifiable process to be optimized and compared. It pointed toward the gap between an inadequate present and an enhanced future, where cognitive capabilities became the site of improvement.
Feeling Information from the Body
Memory optimization, however, was only part of the story. For another group of physicists, engineers, and medical professionals, the human body harbored potential as an information processor—one that could rival or even surpass technological systems. Their research focused on what they called “forgotten” sensory abilities: reading texts through the ears, moving objects without physical contact, and transmitting foreign languages without comprehension. If the memory experts had reimagined the brain as storage device, these researchers envisioned the entire body as a sophisticated communication system, managing its sensory input and output in real time.
In one experiment from 1990, researchers arranged two participants – one “sender” and one “receiver” – in different cities, eliminating all possible means of communication, including sound, visuals, smells, or any kind of contact. To their surprise, participants were able to relay information over distances, even transmitting foreign languages like Japanese, Korean, and Russian, despite the research subjects not understanding the words. For researchers, this wasn’t paranormal phenomena but practical technology: the human body offered a cheap alternative communication channel that was simple, secure, resistant to interception, and immune to electromagnetic interference.
What did it feel like to become a living “information processor”? Researchers designed sensory training sessions to enable participants to develop correct ways of feeling. The training invited participants to enter what researchers called “extraordinary states” through silent recitation and attention exercises. Participants learned to visualize a “screen” projected onto their foreheads where transmitted information would appear. The experience was intense and carefully orchestrated. Participants were supposed to experience a sense of isolation from external sounds, heightened visual awareness, mental fuzziness during peak concentration, floating sensations, and an “indescribable sadness” that vanished when the forehead screen activated. Afterward came exhaustion, headaches, and a swollen feeling in the head. The body entered something resembling a meditative trance, channeling all attention toward building connection with its surroundings.
This cultivation of bodily sensitivity echoes what Evelyn Fox Keller identified in biologist Barbara McClintock’s practice: the need for patience to “hear what the material has to say to you,” the openness to “let it come to you,” and above all, developing “a feeling for the organism” (Keller, 1984). There was a similar entanglement between the affective and cognitive in making embodied knowledge possible (Myers, 2015). Just like where McClintock’s feeling facilitated understanding between scientist and subject, these Chinese researchers sought to transform human subjects to bodily and sensorially get closer to the information environment around them. Through this embodied training—this cultivation of what I call “a feeling for information”—participants learned new ways of inhabiting their bodies, new forms of sensory attention that reconfigured the relationship between self and environment, individual and collective, human capacity and national potential.
Human Potential in a Technological World
These cases illuminate how information technologies generated their own distinctive forms of potentiality—visions of what human bodies could and should become in an emerging technological order. The embodied techniques I describe reveal how people actively worked to reconfigure the boundaries of human possibility through careful attention to the felt dimensions of information processing. This also suggests how our embodied ways of being with information technologies predate the digital moment, as these earlier encounters with information processing technologies revealing the shifting boundaries between the biological and technological (Haraway, 1990; Suchman, 2007). In asking how human bodies might serve as storage, sensors, and transmitters in an information society, these experiments posed lingering questions—what it means to feel, sense, and be with information as the boundaries between nature and culture, the biological and technological, human and machine, continue to blur.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Andra Sonia Petrutiu.
This post was recorded for Platypod by Elexis Williams Gray.
References
Anagnost, A. (2004). The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi). Public Culture, 16(2), 189–208.
Blair, A. M. (2010). Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press.
Greenhalgh, S. (2008). Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. University of California Press.
Haraway, D. J. (1990). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1st edition). Routledge.
Keller, E. F. (1984). A Feeling for the Organism (Anniversary edition). Times Books.
Liu, X. (2019). Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China. U of Minnesota Press.
Myers, N. (2015). Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter. Duke University Press.
Suchman, L. (2007). Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Third Edition.
Taussig, K.-S., Hoeyer, K., & Helmreich, S. (2013). The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine: An Introduction to Supplement 7. Current Anthropology, 54(S7), S3–S14.
