Visual Reasoning - Recently Updated Pages

Jayme test page

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:45:33 CST

here is a page as an anon person

Visual Reasoning Links and Resources

funkendub — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:45:54 CST

Examples

Movie box office charts - "inspired by stream graphs and the works of Edward Tufte." Very cool.
Wayfinding - here's a great example of how a designer thinks visually: "anamorphic words that only line up when you're correctly positioned." The photos are very striking.
Future Browser - here's a short video about what a browser of the future might look like and be capable of; not surprisingly, it's a case study in visual reasoning, as marshalling large amounts of information depends upon good visual design.

Resources

Visual reasoning - the Wikipedia entry is sadly neglected
Visual reasoning at Washington State University
andDesign Blog this just came through on my Google alerts and it looks like it might have quite a bit of interesting information and argumemts. It was a little slow and sticky when I tried to navigate around in the site and I'm not sure why.
Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design This is a little treasure trove of articles from a conference at MIT in 1999: Goldschmidt, Kosslyn, Tversky...
Cartography as a metaphor for Web design - the author suggests that we've been using architecture as the guiding metaphor for Web design, but that this metaphor views space as empty and in need of populating. Rather, though, space is productive and is better thought of something in need of mapping.
Optical Illusions - The Spinning Dancer on wikipedia with links to other illustions, e.g. the Decker Cube.
Sight and sound - a few articles on how hearing synergizes vision. "Sound Adds Speed To Visual Perception" - "A new study shows that, in monkeys, the region involved in hearing can directly improve perception in the visual region, without the involvement of other structures to integrate the senses." "Wired For Sound: How The Brain Senses Visual Illusions" - "In a study that could help reveal how illusions are produced in the brain's visual cortex, researchers at the UCSD School of Medicine have found new evidence of rapid integration of auditory and visual sensations in the brain. Their findings... provide new insight into neural mechanisms by which visual perception can be altered by concurrent auditory events." "How Ventriloquists Trick The Brain: Sight, Sound Processed Together And Earlier Than Previously Thought" - "The area of the brain that processes sounds entering the ears also appears to process stimulus entering the eyes, providing a novel explanation for why many viewers believe that ventriloquists have thrown their voices to the mouths of their dummies."
Eyes Evolved For 'X-Ray Vision' - This research supports something Arnheim says at the beginning of Visual Thinking (but I need to supply the quote!). "Humans and other large mammals — primates and large carnivores like tigers, for example — exist in cluttered environments like forests or jungles, and their eyes have evolved to point in the same direction. While animals with forward-facing eyes lose the ability to see what's behind them, they gain X-ray vision, according to Mark Changizi, assistant professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer, who says eyes facing the same direction have been selected for maximizing our ability to see in leafy environments like forests."
Red or white? - put red food color in a glass of white wine and guess what? You can fool even a so called expert wine taster. We have a saying, You are what you eat. Perhaps, but even more, We think what we see. One of many studies is described here.
Size doesn't matter - spacing, not size, is critical to recognizing an array of crowded objects.
Optical illusions - a series of article in Scientific American; here's the fourth.
3D perception - "higher-level visual regions of the brain represent objects as spatial configurations of surface fragments, something like a structural drawing. Individual neurons are tuned to respond to surface fragment substructures. For instance, one neuron from the study responded to the combination of a forward-facing ridge near the front and an upward-facing concavity near the top. Multiple neurons with different tuning sensitivities could combine like a three-dimensional mosaic to encode the entire object surface."
Emotion and vision - Facial Expressions Of Emotion Are Innate, Not Learned: "Facial expressions of emotion are hardwired into our genes, according to a new study. The research suggests that facial expressions of emotion are innate rather than a product of cultural learning. The study is the first of its kind to demonstrate that sighted and blind individuals use the same facial expressions, producing the same facial muscle movements in response to specific emotional stimuli."
Perception and motion - How We Make Proper Movements: "When you first notice a door handle, your brain has already been hard at work. Your visual system first sees the handle, then it sends information to various parts of the brain, which go on to decipher out the details, such as color and the direction the handle is pointing. As the information about an object is sent further along the various brain pathways, more and more details are noticed—in that way, a simple door handle turns into a silver-plated-antique-style-door-handle-facing-right.... These results indicate that there is a common mechanism which acts in both perception and movement."
Learned Motor Programs Directly Influence The Visual Perception of Movements - "When novel movements are learned--for example, in sports--visual and motor learning take place simultaneously. A karate master not only executes a kick better than a beginner, but he also perceives karate movements much more accurately. A variety of recent studies suggest that motor programs may influence the visual recognition of movements."
Speech perception - Scientists Watch As Listener's Brain Predicts Speaker's Words. This is a clear case of perceptual "thinking" or cognition. "Scientists at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that our brains automatically consider many possible words and their meanings before we've even heard the final sound of the word."
Autism and vision - "Joint Attention Study Has Implications For Understanding Autism": "A hallmark of human nature is the ability to share information and to comprehend the thoughts and intentions of others. This capability involves social cognition (the cognitive processes involved in social interaction) and makes a significant contribution to the foundations for language development, as well as social competence. It also sets us apart from other primates." "Children With Autism May Learn From 'Virtual Peers'": Using "virtual peers" -- animated life-sized children that simulate the behaviors and conversation of typically developing children -- Northwestern University researchers are developing interventions designed to prepare children with autism for interactions with real-life children. "Direct Gaze Enhances Face Perception": "As atypical emotional reactions to various social stimuli, for instance other people’s facial expressions, most likely play a key role in different types of mental disorders, the knowledge generated by the research project also provides an opportunity to develop efficient methods for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders."
Subliminal sex? Erotic Images Prove Useful In Coaxing Out Unconscious Brain Activity: " 'Selective attention helps us to quickly process what is important while ignoring the irrelevant,' the researchers write. 'In this study, we demonstrate that information that has not entered observers' consciousness, such as [invisible] erotic pictures, can direct the distribution of spatial attention. Furthermore, invisible erotic information can either attract or repel observers' spatial attention depending on their gender and sexual orientation.' "
Eye movement controls visual attention: "With so many visual stimuli bombarding our eyes -- cars whizzing by, leaves fluttering -- how can we focus attention on a single spot -- a word on a page or a fleeting facial expression? How do we filter so purely that the competing stimuli never even register in our awareness?" See also: Researchers Resolve 40-year Eye Movement, Visibility Controversy.
Mathematics - WSU prof Duane DeTemple talks about the beauty of math in this short video, and how he tries to get his students to thinking creatively about mathematics.
Brain: both sides now - musicians are better at divergent thinking and creative, "out of the box" solutions.

Examples in Literature

funkendub — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 01:16:31 CST

Bear, Greg: Anvil of Stars (1992, 2008)

In the distant future, the Earth has been destroyed by killer machine intelligences. Another advanced civilization, the Benefactors, have saved some of the survivors of Earth's destruction. As well, they've set the Children of Earth, as the young human volunteers are described on a mission to fulfill the Law: to destroy the destroyers. In order to accomplish this task, the Children are provided with a Benefactor Ship of the Law. Machine intelligences themselves, the Benefactors teach the Children how to use the technology now available to them, as well as how to innovate with the tech using Benefactor "math," which the Children name "momerath."

Momerath, as Bear describes it, is a visual-analytical method for solving extremely complex problems (such as calculating orbits and the simultaneous and interactive trajectories of many thousands of objects, for example). The story of the Children's odyssey is told from the point of view of Martin, a leader among the Children. Here's a description of momerath in use:

"Martin visualized the space of probability behind tight-closed eyes, hands opening and closing, seeing the numbers and the paths, making them converge and diverge" (39).

Chuang Tzu

A couple hundred years after Lao Tzu's saying were collected as the Dao De Ching, his follower Chuang Tzu (4th century B.C.) picked up and elaborated upon a number of Lao's ideas.

Lao had a saying: "The recognition of beauty as such implies the idea of ugliness, and the recognition of good implies the idea of evil."

Giles writes: "Following up this hint, Chuang Tzu is led to insist on the ultimate relativity of all human perceptions. Even space and time are relative. Sense-knowledge is gained by looking at things from only one point of view, and is therefore utterly illusory and untrustworthy" (Musing of a Chinese Mystic, 7).

Although an objective reality exists as the foundation "underlying the flow of phenomena," that hardly need concern us. The purpose of life, "true wisdom," "consists in withdrawing from one's own individual standpoint and entering into 'subjective relation with all things'" (Musing of a Chinese Mystic, 8).

Crowley, John: Engine Summer (1979, 1994)

Engine Summer is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are "truth speakers." Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that "they mean what they say, and say what they mean." One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush -- Rush that Speaks is his full name -- spends time with a "gossip," a wise woman, named Painted Red.

Storytelling allows for the creation of communal meaning; but by what cognitive means is that accomplished? In as much as Crowley's novel is a meditation on this question, he seems to argue that the means is through perception. For instance, the young Rush is being counseled by Painted Red while they are both in a heightened state of consciousness thanks to the use of a "rose-colored substance" dabbed on the lips:

What I did notice was that Painted Red's questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn't only being talked about but called into being. When she asked about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked my about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but -- it was the rose-colored stuff that did, of course, but I wasn't aware even of that -- though I knew that I hadn't left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life. (359)

To go "journeying up and down" one's life is, of course, precisely the novelist's (that vendor of rose-colored stuffs) goal. And novelists get us to journey so by hewing close to the perceptual. Indeed, it is hard to find a better example of this than in this metaphor of Crowley's that bridges from the aural to the oral, those perceptual domains, via the textual skills of the people of the List, who maintain literacy of that now lost language, English. Rush is in a large building, perhaps the remains of an office building:

...she took me up the wide flight of stairs that led to the big platform which covered the back part of the place -- the mezzanine, they called it (the List knew such words, words that rang like ancient coins flung down [on] angelstone--mezzaine). (469)

As a reader, I've always been insulted by the thought that I was somehow "suspending disbelief" when I engaged with fiction. Rather, it's been my experience that, by hewing close to the perceptual, writers gain our trust as we perceive the veracity of their observational skills. Although fiction is a textual art, its success depends on taking advantage of the brain's ability to mirror experience through a wide variety of domains and media. And so there has developed among writers a kind of cognitive folk science -- something that could probably be fairly said of most areas of creative service (design, commercial arts, musical performance, etc.) -- about what "works."

Rush's distant future remembers our civilization as that of "angels." When, in his wanderings outside Little Belaire, he first experiences a pictorial calendar (other than the seasonal one he lived by growing up), it's at a month-changing ritual among the people of the List. As the tribal elder turns the old, June picture down and the new July picture up, the people "all made a satisfied sound, like aaaah." Rush tells us:

That picture let me know, and laugh to know, that however strange and old the angels were, still they were men, and knew what men know, if they could make this. The same two children... lay on green grass darker than June's.... But what really made me laugh: the grass and they were at the top of the picture, and looked down into the clouds which floated below: and that's how it feels, in summer, to watch clouds. (472)

In other words, we know who we are, and are able to identify one another through perceptual experience.

When Rush first meets Painted Red, she tells him he is not a truth speaker. He acknowledges that this is so, and endeavors to learn to speak truly, for it is an acquired art. Later in life, Painted Red asks Rush, now a practice truth speaker, how speaking truly is accomplished. He thinks, then admits that he can't say. She laughs and whispers a secret: neither does she. The metaphysical quotient of truth speaking is heightened when we learn of saints in the folk culture of Little Belaire. Saints "learned to make speech -- transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly" (376). And later, as Rush sets out to learn how to be a saint: "Transparent: that's what Painted Red said the saints were, or tied to be...." (410). He remembers what Painted Red said to him more fully:

She said: "The saints found that truthful speaking was more than just being understood; the important thing was that the better you spoke, the more other people saw themselves in you, as in a mirror. Or better: the more they saw themselves through you, as though you had become transparent." (410)

The gossips, including Painted Red, have copies of an ancient psychological text, called the File System -- a vast database of traits, apparently, and the original intent of which has been lost -- that they interpret, having discovered knew knowledge in the text that it's creators, the angels, were not aware of. In the following, "Palm cord" may be read as "Palm tribe":

From the long box that was Palm cord, she drew out a second square of glass and out it in with the other. The board changed; colors mixed and become other colors; masses changed shape, became newly related to other masses.

"Do you see?" she said. "The saints are like the slide of the System. Their interpenetration is what reveals, not the slides themselves."

"It's like the saints," I said, "because they made their lives transparent, like the slides; and their lives can be placed before our own, in our remembering their stories, and reveal things to us about ourselves. Not the stories or the lives themselves, but their--"

"Interpenetration, yes," Painted Red said. "They're saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated.... And in transparent life, the saints hoped that one day we might be free from death: not immortal, as the angels tried to become, but free from death, our lives transparent even as we live them: not through a means, you see, like the Filing System or even truthful speaking, but transparent in their circumstances: so that instead of telling a story that makes a life transparent, we will ourselves be transparent, and not hear or remember a saint's life, but live it...." (412)

Thinking through doing

funkendub — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:48:28 CST

I found this gem about thinking with a pencil from Alexander Gerner's blog Gerner says that he is an artist & member of the CFCUL (Centre of Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon) where they, along with the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science are looking into the roles that writing and drawing play in the Sciences. (I have added the emphasis in the text.)

"The stylus is one of the simplest and most economical instruments of scientific practice. Apparently unsophisticated though ubiquitous, it plays a constitutive role in the production of knowledge. In the context of scientific research, both drawing and writing involve much more than the recording of what was previously thought or observed. Rather, they produce effects of their own that are connected to the particular techniques of their use. Stylus, pencil, and pen have the power to mediate: they translate observations into two-dimensional, and thus easily reproducible, texts and images; they concretize cognitive processes and in this way open up an interaction between perception and reflection, between the securing of phenomena and the formation of theses. Many objects and phenomena become available and comprehensible only through drawn and written records. Moreover, the activity of writing and drawing constitutes one of the most critical steps in scientific research: the step from (potentially) ambiguous data to stable facts."

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."-- Confucius

Einstein

funkendub — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:42:58 CST

This was reported in an article in India Today, "India's only brain bank needs more grey matter" Should we try to run down a primary source?

"Brain scientist Sandra Witelson in Canada is believed to have the world's largest collection of non-diseased human brains. She also got to dissect the Nobel laureate Albert Einstein's brain in 1999 and reported some new features overlooked by fellow neuroscientists in the US: that the father of relativity's parietal lobe, the region responsible for visual thinking and spatial reasoning, was 15 per cent larger than average, and it was structured as one distinct compartment, instead of the usual two compartments separated by the Sylvian fissure. For over ten years, the professor who has her lab at McMaster University in Ontario is carrying on her analysis of Einstein's brain."

From "A Mathematician's Mind, Testimonial for An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field by Jacques S. Hadamard, Princeton University Press, 1945." in Ideas and Opinions.

"(A) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought--before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

(B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

(C) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.

(D) Visual and motor. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage, as already mentioned.

(E) It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins)"

Outline

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:20:29 CST

A hook - a dramatic example of how much trouble can come from breakdown of visual thinking - this might be a medical thing (e.g. from Sacks, Ramachandran, etc.)

We need to look in Damasio: The Feeling of What Happens, Descartes Error, even Looking for Spinoza for a description of someone who has lost brain function, or memory, but can still retain a measure of control when they perform skills that they had mastered. I am thinking of the music conductor/pianist with severe hippocampal damage resulting in loss of all long-term memory—his life became a nightmare of continually thinking that he had just awakened. The only relief was when he was performing music. This is (or is it?) procedural memory. He still maintained his full procedural intelligence for music.

So what is the nature of procedural memory? We tend to associate it with the mundane, like being able to drive but could it not be integral to mastery? This is intelligence that goes into “automatic” level to free up the conscious brain for more activity. How can we break that out – studies on expertise? We need to make a case for how the parts of the brain work in concert with each other to maximize conceptual thinking. There was the case of the man who couldn’t identify objects but could draw them laboriously and cases where people can’t identify object by sight but can do so by touch. We need to focus on the integrated nature of sensory inputs that we take for granted. What happens when those get “trained” to a high degree?

And also in Damasio – what we scorn as emotional turns out to be a huge component of decision-making,

The other place we need to look is in Frank Wilson’s, The Hand: How it shapes the brain, Language, and Human Culture.

The entire body of perception, is perceptive, therefore intelligent - the distributed brain; it's not all between our ears

Because we share a cultural illusion splitting mind from body we address our collective teaching efforts at "mind" stuff, pretty much everything but PE, the shop and the kitchen. We are wasting a pedagogical opportunity, all because we took the wrong epistemological train.

One of the seven habits of successful and/or creative people is surely that they are of keen perceptual intelligence - need fascinating, dramatic examples (Karl Rove?) A teacher who could draw on the fruits of pedagogical and related research in perceptual intelligence would produce more successful students. - need interviews with teachers? draw on the material on tape from the brown bags?

The research needs to be done - the scattered studies and experiments synthesized, perhaps as a new discipline - continued, coherent programs of research are needed

The possibilities - our vision

Visual Reasoning Home

funkendub — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:13:13 CST

Definition of visual reasoning

The so called "sense organs" are parts of the brain. Bodies are, in fact, perceptual brains.
Visual reasoning is an analytical method that employs human perception in order to communicate, problem solve and create.
Drawing is thinking, in the same way (though likely not through the same cognitive means?) writing is thinking.
According to evolutionary epistemology, biological adaptations are one form of knowledge, and science is another; both are produced by the processes of blind variation and selective retention (Campbell 1975 [in American Psychologist¸ 30, 1103-26]).

Uses of visual reasoning

Problem solving; examples include engineers who sketch a solution on the back of an envelope.
Visualizing the behavior of complex systems over time.
Metaphor.
Education, especially for interdisciplinary and critical studies

Neglect of visual reasoning

Visual reasoning is, well, visual; if there are different perceptual-epistemological domains -- different ways of knowing, as in visual and verbal -- then neglect of visual reasoning is a violation of civil rights.
One of the problems we've noticed is that visual reasoning appears to be dominated by engineers and architects. Even designers, who think visually for a living, rarely analyze what it is they do in ways that would enable others to use their techniques. Exceptions abound, of course; consider the example of Edward Tufte.
While scientists use visualization technologies (pencils, computers) all the time, rarely is the art of scientific visualization investigated scientifically. Rather, the knowledge that could contribute to a pedagogy of visual reasoning is locked in separate "silos," at best, or left completely untheorized (graphical skills are a talent). In other words, graphic artists may work for scientists but scientists rarely work for graphic artists--or the graphic arts.

The Perceptual Economy

We see things all the time we don't believe, and accept as truth images we know are lying.

Language and Perception

funkendub — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:22:16 CST

From Hand and Mind by David McNeill
"Thus one theme of this book is that language is more than words, that a true psychology of language requires us to broaden our concept of language to include what seems, in the traditional linguistics view, the opposite of language--the imagistic, instantaneous, nonsegmented, and holistic. Images and speech are equal and simulataneously present processes in the mind." (2)

Where Is the Brain?

funkendub — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:24:34 CDT

“The motor system extends throughout the body, from neurons in the spinal cord to neurons in the brainstem and cortex” (Ratey 155).

In an article on suicide and its causes, the author writes about serotonin, mentioning that “Serotonin is only one molecule in the intricate biochemical network named the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, in which the hypothalamus and pituitary glands in the brain communicate with the adrenal glands atop the kidneys” (Ezzell 50).

Shulgin writes of one of his compounds: “We saw DOB go directly into the lung, not into the brain. There are neurons in the lung...” (quoted in Pinchbeck 209).

“Nicotine,” says Sergei A. Grando, a dermatologist at U.C. Davis who studies nicotine, “isn’t just a drug that stimulates neurons. It does the exact same thing to cells outside of the nervous system” (Kendall Morgan, “More than a Kick.” Science News, March 22, 2003, 184).

“...our immune systems are... known to work by selection. The British psychologist Henry Plotkin ([Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge, London, Penguin] 1993) refers to both brains and immune systems as ‘Darwin machines’...” (Blackmore 16).

V.R. Edgerton, a neuroscientist at UCLA, “theorized in the early eighties that the spinal cord could function independently of the brain. This was at odds with the prevailing view that the spinal cord was merely a cable connecting the brain and body. ‘When scientists think they know how something works, it becomes difficult to get new ideas accepted,’ Edgerton told” Jerome Groopman (The New Yorker, Nov. 10, 2003, page 85: “The Reeve Effect”, about Christopher Reeve and recovery from paralysis).

Brain-body in science fiction: “‘Downloading the brain’s patterns isn’t enough. Everything you know and think is embedded in your neurons, but your consciousness is in the cells of your entire body. Your mind is really a complex of brains, with major contributions from the nervous and immune systems. The flesh is intelligent, all flesh, and all of it contributes to your personality at one level or another. Take the body away, and you become near-beer, bitter without the kick’” (Bear, Vitals, 26). “ ‘The Little Mothers [bacteria] watch over us all.... Sever the connections between the body and their ministrations, and you block far more than the path to old age. Have you ever felt fit and in tune? Life is good? Perhaps you have a mystical feeling of connection with Nature, with something higher? This is the voice of the Little Mothers. All the stresses and rewards of life are balanced, you are doing well, and they approve. To be judged and found wanting, that is painful. But take those voices away, and you soon lose all balance. We are far more than just brains encased in bone. Larger and older minds live inside our bodies and all around us, speaking in languages I have worked all my life to interpret.... Perhaps we are only a dream the bacteria are having’” (Bear, Vitals, 342).

For Therese Schroeder-Sheker, a musician and “professor of thanatology,” “hearing is not confined to the ears alone; instead, the entire skin is an organ of perception bathed in what she refers to as ‘tonal substance.’ Music functions within the entire body rather than being confined to a direction link from ears to brain” (Blackwing 191). Any deaf person could tell you this.

Emotion, Perception, Cognition

funkendub — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:21:19 CDT

Notes from the Motion Book

“There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) The soul, that moving body.

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), in The Guide of the Perplexed, writes that “The faculty of thinking is a force inherent in the body, and is not separated from it” (quoted in Book of the Cosmos 82).

“We cannot separate emotion from cognition or cognition from the body” (Ratey 223). “The term ‘emotion’ is derived from the Latin movere—to move. It is important to realize that emotion is movement outward, a way of communicating our most important internal states and needs” (Ratey 227). “The brain mechanisms that evolved to display emotion are the same as for all of our sensory and motor input. The difference is in the intermediate state of processing information. Input from a person’s face that will lead to identification is channeled via different pathways from the information about the emotional expression on the person’s face. The emotional information goes directly to the amygdala and the insula, which then send directions to act to our motor systems in the brain. So there is a splitting of information, and you can identify a face and have no emotional confirmation about it and claim that the person is an imposter, which happens in Capgras’s syndrome” (Ratey 227).

“…when meditation is used to induce a calm mood, or we go jogging to make ourselves happier…. It is the bodily movement that causes emotion, not the emotion that causes the bodily movement [as with flight from fear]” (Evans 105).

“In his book on rhetoric, Aristotle noted that ‘feelings are conditions that cause us to change and alter our judgements [sic]’” (Evans 112).

In “Funes the Memorious,” Borges writes that Funes’ “memories were not simple ones: each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc…” (quoted in Evans 118).

Herbert “Simon proposed that emotions [are]… interruption mechanisms” (Evans 162). The attention of the mind must be disrupted if, say, a rock is observed to be hurling at you: you need to interrupt the task at hand to dodge the rock. See Simon, “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition.” Psychological Review 74 (1967), 29-39.

One of the arguments against artificial intelligence is that computers have no bodies. “One of the few good ideas about consciousness that has gained some measure of agreement is that subjective feelings depend very much on the kind of body you have” (Evans 173). In other words, consciousness is a kind of proprioception.

Emotion is the body electric, the mind in motion. Mind is the awareness of motion. Organic chemists are students of the metabolism of mind, just as evolutionists are students of motion. Bacteria are mindful of all sorts of movement: of the sun, the moon, the tides and currents of ocean and air. Bacteria respond not in “simple” but rather in fundamental ways. Bacteria are not “mindless” reactors to stimuli (their masses have considerable influence on the homeostasis of the Earth); rather, bacteria are emotional. Emotion is the fundamental condition of organic life as we know it.

What separates rocks from bacteria is the same thing that separates mind from matter. Rocks, like life forms, are all ultimately recombinant; that it, rocks at some point communicate and combine with other rocks (volcanoes, subvention). Bacteria are specifically recombinant, and DNA is the archetypal consumer. You want to eat, you got to work. Even sitting zen is work. Reproduction is the gothic cathedral of biological architecture; reproduction is the chronic condition of organic life. But rocks are only ultimate recombinants. While they’re waiting for the Big Magma they’re completely lazy. And heavy besides. Rocks, as daunting and weighty as they are, are merely gravity’s handmaidens.

The universe is a living breathing swap meet of signs. Life is semiosis—the exchange of signs.

William Carlos Williams is “a member of the sanest line of development in our history, those thinkers and artists who insist on the integrity of the human organism—thought and feeling, sense and intellection, mind and body” (Williams EmbKnow xxiv). Heraclitus “also knew that ‘To take thought thickens the blood around the heart’” (xxv).

“Shakespeare took the print, it became fixed. But he had, unknown to him, or any of them, what the city gallant and the scholar were divorced from, a country man’s sense of the fastness of the world of things, the moods of natural phenomena” (Williams EmbKnow 15).

“...there are two main cortical areas that are critical for language, Broca’s area which is responsible for speech production, and Wernicke’s are which is responsible for language understanding. Interestingly, these two areas seem to have evolved from the motor cortex and auditory cortex, respectively. Most sounds made by other animals, from grunts to calls and birdsongs are produced in the midbrain, by areas closely connected to those controlling emotional responses and general arousal levels. Some human sounds, such as crying [?] laughing, are also produced by midbrain areas, but speech is controlled from the cortex” (Blackmore 72). We hear movement. “...recent brain scan studies of living humans show that Broca’s area is also active during skilled hand movements and so cannot be definitive evidence for language. Its development might be connected more to the stone tools made by [Homo habilis]” (Blackmore 89). Blackmore may not be the best authority on the evolution of language and brain however; on p. 93 she ignores Bickerton’s evidence and claims (with Pinker and Bloom) that there are no intermediary forms of language.

“Our most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep, and dreaming is accompanied by frequent activation of the brain’s motor systems, which otherwise operate only during waking movement. Fortunately, most movement during REM sleep is inhibited by two complementary biochemical actions involving neurotransmitters, the chemicals that physically carry signals from one neuron to another at the synapse (the contact point between two neurons). The brain stops releasing neurotransmitters that would otherwise activate motoneurons (the brain cells that control muscles), and it dispatches other neurotransmitters that actively shut down those motoneurons. The mechanisms, however, do not affect the motoneurons that control the muscles that move the eyes, allowing rapid eye movements that give the REM sleep stage its name” (“Why We Sleep” by Jerome M. Siegel, Scientific American, Nov., 2003, p. 93).

In a study cited in the 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away, “Andrew Newberg… and the late Eugene D’Aquili found that when Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, their brain scans show strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region the authors have dubbed the orientation association area (OAA). The OAA provides bearings for the body in physical space; people with damage to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house, for instance. When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly, there is a sharp distinction between self and nonself. When the OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation or prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between feeling in body and out of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who discern a sense of oneness with the universe, or nuns who feel the presence of God, or alien abductees who believe they are floating out of their beds to the mother ship” (Michael Shermer, “Demon-Haunted Brain.” Scientific American, March 2003, 47).

Artscience Edwards

funkendub — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:56:13 CDT

Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
David Edwards (review of Artscience by Amy Ione in Leonardo)

Edwards espouses the cross pollination of science and the arts with a strategy he calls "artscience." His book is a portfolio of lectures, though more a collection of cheers and anecdotes than of thought out methods and illustrative examples, but he gets close to perceptual thinking in a few of his examples. Edwards suggests that "scientific revolutions" (a la the inevitable Kuhn) come from what we call perceptual thinking, as when Kepler "made his breakthrough scientific discoveries in astronomy by optimizing what he viewed as the harmony of celestial bodies with musical notes" (4). Again, though, Edwards is sitting in the art vs. science box playing mashup when both art and science need an education in the biology of perception.

What Kepler did was look at the motion of heavenly bodies with a set of perceptual schema in place. The ability to recognize, mark and utilize perceptual schema across domains is a hallmark of perceptual thinking. Rhythm and harmony are such schema and the idea of the dance of heaven is ancient and colorful. Edwards may be overstating the importance of music to Kepler's work, but then Edwards lumps writing in with art, reasonably enough, since his divisions of knowledge fall along institutional lines. While good writing, especially fiction and poetry, rely upon perception for engagement, it is not directly perceptual the way listening to music is. (This is actually wrong, as the design of books has a great deal to do with the way we read them.) Writing is mediated in a way that a group of people finding a shared rhythm on a bunch of pots and pans is not.

In any case, while scientific revolutions are great, there are more fundamental problems that could be addressed with pedagogies designed to exercise perceptual thinking. Web pages, zines and clumsy design (webpagesthatsuck.com ?)...

Edward's definition of "art," which comes close to ours? - "a process of thought that is guided by images, is sensual and intuitive, often thrives in uncertainty [Keats' "negative capability"], is 'true' in that it seems to reflect or elucidate or interpret what we experience in our lives, and is expressive of nature in its complexity, a basis of entertainment and culture" (6).

"Among the most formidable of conceptual barriers standing in the way of idea translation is that between the arts and sciences. Those who cross artscience territory... sometimes experience loneliness, institutional discouragement, and even fear; but having overcome the resistance and explored this novel territory between the arts and sciences, they often find it so much to their liking that they never leave" (10). These are "conceptual" barriers? Emotional, more like; these barriers, if challenged, cause revolutionary upheaval. That's why there's so much apathy, mostly, but resistance, too. What we're talking about here may in some ways actually defy our "genius" (Hoffman) for perceptual thinking because it's, initially at least, so messy.

But Edwards is right, I think, that something like artscience is needed. "The consequence" of not practicing artscience, he claims, "is that we're not expressing what we are actually thinking and we're not teaching what we need to learn!" (13) As a flat statement this doesn't wash because, as Arnheim says, there's no thinking without perception. We don't need classrooms to teach perceptual thinking; we need them to harness it and apply it to problems.

If, however, artscience could in ways be institutionalized, barriers could be moved aside, if not removed completely (13).

Edwards has tried, founding "idea accelerators": "The goal of an idea accelerator is... to find ways to move ideas more readily over interdisciplinary barriers, which... are generally artscience barriers" (17).

Dianna Dabby - at Olin College - electrical engineering - chaos theory - strange attractor (28). Dabby was a concert pianist who studied electrical engineering at an advanced level in order to compose new music.

Edwards' artscience ideas strike me as a rich man's game. And Edwards, as he makes clear, can afford to bring together prodigies, geniuses and whiz kids of all ages. Which is great, and more power to him. What we really need are strategies that might work on the budget at a state university.

The example of Julio Ottino, artist and mathematician. He was interested in the math "of how certain fluids mixed," and through his painting came to a breakthrough insight. Mixing fluids was like mixing paint: "Mixing needed to be understood in geometrical terms. Chaotic stretching and folding of fluid elements--like definable pieces of dough--led to effective mixing. Juilo saw this first through his painting--then did a fluid experiment to prove it" (36).

Institutionally, Ottino was hired to teach fluid mixing; "he was not asked to teach his creativity" (38). Perhaps creativity is not so much taught as nurtured. I think it passes on by mimicry. Mimicry trains the senses. (Could that be true?)

The case of Wolf Peter Fehlhammer, organo-metallic chemist who became director of the Deutsches Museum, a venerable science museum. He brought artists into the museum "to challenge and disturb, to show the complexity of art and science and the dialog that must take place between the two" (63).

In The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mandelbrot writes, "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, and bark is not smooth" (71).

Tensegrity and Don Ingber - taking an architecture class, learning about "tensegrity" (tensile integrity) and applying this idea to cell structure, about which he was creatively wrong. Tensegrity is the opposite of compression integrity, where buildings press down on themselves to hold themselves together while tensegrity uses the tensle force of the materials to hold itself together. Buckminster Fuller; artist Kenneth Snelson.

Arnheim Weaving

funkendub — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:58:12 CDT

Arnheim was a rare bird in that he could speak both art and science fluently, and translate equally well from either language. He may have come form a school of gestalt physchology but his gestaltism made him bust out of all boxes. Or almost all: he was committed to rational investigation and demanded material explanations. His was a scientifically pragmatic and philosophically phenomenological approach to questions that haved proved perennially intractable: how is it that we know the world? what makes consciousness?

Arnheim argues that because perception gathers concepts, "perceptual material" is used in thinking and, therefore, perception is thinking; that is, perception is the stuff of cognition, its material base being in a network comprised of the sensory systems, the brain, the nervous system and an exaltation of neurotransmitters. (Visual Thinking 1)

[[Association, either because it's similar or opposite to what the 2nd-century Taoist philosopher Wang Bi said about the hexagrams of the I Ching: the hexagrams suggest images, and the images lead to ideas. Arnheim perhaps alludes to the I Ching on page 4 when he mentions the "taoistic and yin-yang schools."]]

In Visual Thinking, Arnheim is critical of education: "The arts for which the bachelor and master are certified do not yet include the creative exercise of the eyes and hands as an acknowledged component of higher education." (3) Indeed, beyond kindergarten, such exercise is almost completely absent from all education.

"What is most needed," Arnheim says, "is not more aesthetics nor more esoteric manuals of art education but a convincing case made for visual thinking quite in general." (3) In Arnheim's view, we prejudicially bracket perception as inferior to thinking when in fact thinking would be impossible (Arnheim would likely temper that by saying "certainly diminished") without perception. Perceptual thinking is dismissed as mere intuition. Certain domains of human inquiry notoriously eschew intuition, but intuition is not the sum of perceptual thinking. Engineers and designers use perceptual reasoning to solve problems but we do not think of bridges as intuitive. We think of bridges as safely engineered (or at least hope they are); aesthetics is somehow a byproduct, however desirable.

It's time for designers and engineers to start arguing otherwise (in addition to Arnheim, we talk as well about other pioneers): perception isn't just raw material transformed by "mind." Cognition is alchemy in as much as perception enables solving problems creatively and arriving at novel solutions.

Arnheim points out that there is a history of prejudice against perceptual thinking, as in the Mosaic ban on graven images. Indeed, if there aren't several such studies, there should be. That we are dealing with an ancient bias is also clear from the ancient Greeks; see Ong on the contested alphabetization of Greek. Arnheim cites Democritus, who "had the senses address reason scornfully as follows: 'Wretched mind, do you, who get your evidence from us, yet try to overthrow us? Our overthrow will be your downfall."

Related is Lakoff and Johnson, and all manner of thinking on materialism, e.g. Oliver Sacks. Lakoff and Johnson study at 30,000 feet what Sacks explores clinically (and then soars when reflecting): that our consensual realities (e.g., language) are based and infused, and indeed are essentially permeable, on the material stuff of the world as we perceive it.

Aristotle: "the soul never thinks without an image." (12)

"My contention," Arnheim says, "is that the cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. I am referring to such operations as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstration, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as combining, separating, putting in context. These operations are not the perogative of anyone mental function; they are the manner in which the minds of both man and animal treat cognitive material at any level. There is not basic difference in this respect between what happens when a person looks at the world directly and when he sits with his eyes closed and 'thinks.'" (13)

"As I open my eyes, I find myself surrounded by a given world...." The "world" is "given" by the retina, Arnheim says visiocentrically. But awareness of this world is not all there is to perception. To the contrary: "That given world is only the scene on which the most characteristic aspect of perception takes place. Through that world roams the glance, directed by attention, focusing the narrow range of sharpest vision now on this, now on that spot.... This eminently active performance is what is truly meant by visual perception. ... The world emerging from this perceptual exploration is not immediately given. Some of its aspects build up fast, some slowly, and all of them are subject to continued confirmation, reappraisal, change, completion, correction, deepening of understanding." (14-15)