Home-made Brain Hacking tips

Why just neuroscientists? Home users can hack too. Here’s how.

What design isn’t

What is graphic design really? I recently asked a client this during a negotiation session on our rates. I asked him that by some freak accident if the world lost all it’s graphic design and advertising professionals overnight how badly would world economy be hit?

On the face of the traditional accepted view of graphic design you’d have to agree that nothing much would change on the surface. It’s not like brand and product managers are illiterate or cannot make basic graphical decisions on branding. So you can still expect packaging, hoardings and newspaper advertisements aplenty, Just not as aesthetically pleasing, perhaps. So it seems as though a graphic designer’s job is merely value addition to a process that can easily run without one. Many people seeking graphic design services certainly seem to think so. I’ve seen this for myself way too often. You would not hop from one mutual fund to another without checking antecedents. The same goes for banking, surgery, cruises or haircuts. All these are services and as is already well known the service is only as good as the service provider. Except this does not seem to hold good in graphic design. Some people hop from one design house to another as though there were no difference in the final output.

This perception of design is entirely wrong and mostly it is the designers who are to be blamed. Next, the art colleges.

In India design is generally related to art and aesthetics, other than at certain specialist design institutes across the country. In the late 50’s several art institutions began offering ‘applied art’ courses which continues to the present day, except it’s now posturing as advertising. The concept of applying the arts to commercial areas is not new. Artists were constantly required for making anything from posters to painting hoardings. While this certainly can be applied to what our modern understanding of branding and advertising is, aesthetics is just a tiny part of the picture. The issue is not in Applied Art in general, but in who is doing the application, and to what effect.

Design itself is a much larger part of the overall system. The very term itself signifies the difference between art, even applied art.

Art is subjective to the person creating it, design is an objective view towards solving a defined problem.

The Art process is experiential, the design process is based on acquired and applied knowledge

Art belongs to the mystical experience, design can be explained in scientific terms

By merely pointing out to the finished product which can only be appreciated in terms of it’s surfacial qualities, art colleges have bred designers who are just good artists. Someone who can draw good pictures or can rig decent compositions and layouts is not a designer! One is still an artist. Not that this is lesser in any way or wrong, it’s just that he or she is in the wrong line of work.

A real honest to goodness designer is worried less about the aesthetics and more about problem solving. Good design has always been judged by how well it is recieved by the market and how practical it is to use. The same applies to graphic design as well. Designers then, are much more than artists in this respect. They also have to study behavioural science, business, systems level thinking and organisation. The bigger picture is far more important. An objective view because the design is made to communicate to the masses, as opposed to Art’s subjective view designed to communicate individually.

A Familiar experiment

. Ain’t life grand? Same questions, different applications

An experiment at Carnegie Mellon by Dr.Gary Lupyan

An experiment by a design student at Chitrakala Parishad

Year’s Best Optical illusions

Check out this great compilation by the Neural Correlate Society. The year’s best visual illusions.

BCI – Report Available

The International Assessment of Research and Development in Brain-Computer Interfaces, published in October by the World Technology Evaluation Center, Inc., of Baltimore MD is available for download. This is a milestone study mapping the nascent area of Brain Computer Interfacing. Download the report here at the WTEC website (PDF file).

The Golden Ratio – Inherent or Learned?

Running hard on the heels of a previous post on Neuroesthetics, I started looking around for more studies on the effect of art on the brain. Is the recognition of beauty inherent or is it learned. I always assumed that I picked up my sense of aesthetics from the environment that I grew up and was trained in. I’m slowly learning to think different.

Some new research data is coming in from the department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy, where researchers are discovering human cognition of ancient rules of proportion like the golden ratio (1:0.618). Most design or art students come across the golden ratio somewhere in their studies, though how many consciously adopt this into their work is questionable. Researchers are now finding that there are perhaps rules that apply to our appreciation of art. There are proportions that we find naturally pleasing…

In a study to determine if the human brain can indeed distinguish between such factors, the researchers hooked up subjects to fMRI machines to map the brain areas that correspond to art appreciation. The subjects were picked from a group of ‘naive’ art critics, or people with no apparent history of art-appreciation and the images shown were those that correspond to the western concepts of aesthetics such as renaissance sculpture. The images themselves were doctored forming three different image types with only one of them remained unaltered. They were changed subtly so that the bodies were not deformed yet there was a perceptible difference. The parameter that they were pursuing was proportion, in respect to our appreciation of the Golden Ratio.

Subjects rated the original sculpture significantly more than they did the altered images…

Read and see the images here…

rofl!

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From Bash.org

Brain Computer Interface – TI conference

I just saw an ad in the times for a Texas Instruments Developers conference. From what I make of the ad I think they will be showcasing Brain computer interfaces (BCI) for the control of external devices directly through the brain. This procedure is non invasive and has recently created a storm of interest worldwide. See my colection of videos on BCI here.

The event is scheduled between the 29 – 30th of this month at the Leela Palace Bangalore (Airport Road). Tickets are being sold at Rs. 3500 per participant. Last day to register is the 23rd of Nov. Go to www.ti.com/tidcindia07 to register or call Vijitha at +91 98807 87651 (Reproduced from the ad /TOI/ 22-11-2007.)

Neuroesthetics – The brain-aesthetic correlate

Does appreciation of aesthetics come from upbringing or is it inherent? If it is then what are the corresponding neuronal connections? At what point is beauty perceived? Welcome to neuroesthetics, a study of aesthetics from a neurological point of view. New research indicates that artists have an inherent sense of the spatial schema and other measurable image statistics found in nature, and artists ‘apply these insights’ in their work!

Speaking from the artist’s point of view, we do learn certain spatial rules and applications such as the golden mean and the grid as a part of art study. But what is of interest is the softer learning. I mean this in the sense of conscious-tactile (I’m aware of my bodily sensation of pressure of pencil on paper and the immediate recognition of a line I prefer over one that I don’t when i’m ‘moulding’ the rough drawing.) Any artist will tell you that such learning occurs during those years of constant sketching and drawing. You pick up minuscule bits of information (as feedback from when you’re drawing) that no art school can teach although it’s difficult to verbalize these learnings.

In a charcoal life study for example there are the obvious perspective and foreshortening errors that we consciously correct.  There are other decisions we make but there are split-second decisions and therefore go largely unnoticed when we re-tell or document the process later. An example may be how we choose lines when we scribble out a form. While the art teacher teaches line delineation, we are also learning a subtler skill. We are learning to introduce ‘character’ into the sketch. This occurs through not just recreating natural features of the subject’, but also the body language, facial expression and then something more. Often the more experienced artists are able to catch subtle nuances that beginners can never get.

There was an urban legend floating around Malleshwaram that the cinema hoarding painters near Malleshwaram, Bangalore never taught their chelas how to infuse life into the painting until he is completely initiated. The legend is that the guru then teaches the chela how to paint the iris and get the character to literally look into you.

The Institute of Neuroesthetics has some papers on the subject.

The VODPOD resource

Work has been killing what with the holiday season and all. I haven’t been able to blog much, but there is tons of stuff you can look at. My vodpod account now has a collection of over 75 videos on brain-mind sciences. I’ve tried to categorise it so use the tags on the left to pick a subject.