“In “Nature by Numbers,” filmmaker Cristobal Vila presents a series of animations illustrating various mathematic principles, beginning with a breathtaking animation of the Fibonacci sequence. Then it moves on to the Golden and Angle Ratios, the Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations. This would be math-class gold, and it’s awfully sweet even if math class is years behind you.”

a must look and read. Video link is attached

LINK

Then theres Feynman playing bongos

Campbell Soup’s Labels Redesigned Using Neuromarketing

Can you introduce yourself and  tell me a little bit about your field of study ?

My name is Kuba Glazek. I am a 4th-year Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Temple University. Generally speaking, I am interested in exploring the cognitive and neural underpinnings of creative thinking. To clarify, the working definition of creativity involves novelty and appropriateness to a domain, which may be art, science, food, etc. There are definitions of creative people, creative thinking, and creative products.

How did you come to study brain cognition?

I became fascinated by cognitive science during my undergraduate career; I was an English major who had incidentally taken a number of Psychology courses. When I took cognitive psychology, that was it for me; it became clear to me that whereas literature creates subjective and elusive demonstrations regarding the human condition, the science of cognition explicitly lays things out. Soon thereafter I discovered the potential of studying the brain using imaging techniques such as fMRI and EEG. I volunteered in a neuroimaging lab, worked as a substitute teacher, and at that point it was clear that academia was my calling.

What about the artmaking process interests you as a cognitive scientist?

There are several ways to answer this question. If you asked me this a year ago, I would have given a completely different answer than now and, as I learn more as a scientist, critical thinker, etc., my answer will change. Currently I am interested in very fine-grained temporal dynamics inherent in perception and their implications for creative insight. Many creativity researchers over the last 40 years have been looking at the concept of divergent thinking as a mechanism for the generation of creative ideas. For example, Archimedes noticed a connection between something that had been on his mind for a while (how to test the gold content of a crown without mangling it in the process), and something ostensibly unrelated that he just saw (that his own body submerging in a tub displaced a certain amount of water). Making the connection between two distant things (submerging the crown in water was the key) serves as the basis of a creative outcome. My research on this topic is starting to show that expert visual artists are able to fully encode a novel visual stimulus in about one tenth of a second (a bit more if you increase stimulus complexity), whereas novices need another tenth of a second to achieve the same level of encoding. In terms of brain function, that extra one tenth of a second can make all the difference between making a creative connection or not. While a non-artist is still encoding visual information, an artist is already working on other cognitive operations, heightening the potential for a “eureka!” moment. The question that arises from this is: So what if a novice takes a few milliseconds longer? There is a fascinating body of work that discusses the modality-specificity of mental representation. If you wait too long after visually encoding something, your brain transcodes that information into an abstract code. The creative products visual artists make are by their very nature composed of visual features, so they sooner they are connected to other ideas, the better the outcome for creative visual media.

Can you speak more about what might actually be going on with the “Eureka” moment for an artist? Is it similar to the reward you feel when jiggling a key in the door and it finally unlocks. Are Artist just quicker at jiggling the key to a lock on the door that is visual perception? What do you think the artist is tuned to? ( I mean “artist” as merely someone who is tuned to work these locks faster).  For me It brings up a lot of evolutionary questions.

It is difficult to know how how long a eureka moment “incubates.” An unanswered question, fascinating problem, etc. may be milling around in the back of one’s mind for a long time. The actual key fitting in the lock takes place as though instantly in comparison. The incubation phase may be conscious, subconscious, or unconscious, but when a particular combination of thoughts and/or environmental stimuli (visual, auditory, tactile, or other) combine, the door may finally and instantly unlock. It is becoming clear that the way that artists process the environmental part of the combination faster than non-artists. The knowledge base regarding the incubation of ideas is much sketchier, though, as it is based on logically contradictory self-reports (e.g., “I was sitting in the park not thinking about a particular problem, when the insight hit me”, implying subconscious incubation, but then three pages later: “I had my notebook with me in the park that day”, implying that in fact the incubation was taking place at a conscious level). Another potential pattern is that the incubation phase is not present, and instead you have two streams of environmental stimuli competing for attention. It has been shown that artists are able to attend to two streams of stimuli, whereas novices are not. If a novel creative idea comes out of such a process, then certainly artists have an advantage in terms of how efficiently they are able to process novel incoming information. I would say that as far as evolution goes, the key to successful divided attention is linked to mental illness, especially the conflagration of symptoms referred to as schizophrenia. As the theory goes, if you are just a little schizophrenic (sometimes referred to as schizotypic), you can effectively attend to multiple streams of stimuli (the brain regions responsible for putting blinders on attention are not working the same way as in “average” individuals), but if you are fully schizophrenic, the system is unable to deal with the information coming in at all, and normal functioning, let alone creativity, are sacrificed. Thus, those who are able to be creative get to pass on their genes (arguably at an above-average rate), and the ones who are unable to cope do not.

Just a moment ago you said “The creative products visual artists make are by their very nature composed of visual features, so the sooner they are connected to other ideas, the better the outcome for creative visual media.” I personally feel like I’m writing code when i conceptualize a piece. I think a lot of art fails when it appears coded to the observer. Almost like its built behind a firewall. From your studies what is the line between merely illustrating perceived shared code between multiple visual stimulus or actually making something that is transcendent of the code it originated from while still building a new intelligible code of visual images?

This ties in with my comments on the last question. My research doesn’t implicate creativity to the extent of combining visual stimuli into something that transcends the original stimuli themselves. What I am showing is that the potential for such transcendence exists in artists. That being said, there is the idea that the “code” of one object in the environment can potentially map onto the code of another, resulting in a found commonality among them. In my opinion, if an artist cannot explain what a particular piece is all about, what it’s code is, then that piece has failed. Part of a successful piece is a viewer’s ability to pick up on the code contained within and/or communicated by a piece. The code starts out as visual or imagined, and is translated into visual in the product. At this point I am suggesting that the cognitive processing necessary to quickly carry out such transcoding is easier for artists, again, based on their short-term encoding advantage. As my research progresses, I plan to carry out more elaborate tests.

Tell me more about “modality-specificity of mental representation”

Modality specificity refers to the way that a person imagines or remembers something they saw, heard, felt, etc. There are competing theories of perception that say either a) the brain translates sensory information into a modality-independent code that it can store and manipulate more effectively, or b) that a memory is experienced in the same way as it was encoded (i.e., remembering something in your mind’s eye, in that it looks the same in your mind as it did when you actually saw it) or c) some combination of a and b. Specifically, option c states that in the short term, representations are modality-specific, but with either time or extensive manipulation, the representations lose their original sensory properties and become abstracted.

Do you know much about Glenn Gould?

Not really, but he was an “eccentric” pianist, right?

I was listening to and comparing  his 1955 recording to his 1981 recording of Bachs goldberg variations. The link i sent you also has a portion of an interview in which he responds to his 1955 version. I think Gould grasped what his mind was doing as he played. He  understood or was open to the code of artthink. I know that sounds hippiesh but thats the only way i can express the mindset at the moment. This ” speculative premise” reminded me of something i was listening to NPR about a study that was just done on how humans perceive time. I.E. why does time seem to speed up the older you get. Why does my birthday seem to happening more frequently  each year? They found that younger people actually did experience time quicker because they had quicker synapses etc…. They then asked a group of seniors to tell them when they believed a minute to be up. Then asked a group of young people to do the same action. The older people were always over by around 30 seconds and the younger were always under by 20-10 seconds

Yesterday I attended a lecture by H. Branch Coslett, who spoke about time perception in humans. Fascinating stuff. Even funnier: How did I just read this email from you and just yesterday was involved in the same kind of question? The work he described is very tentative, and not a lot of science exists on the topic, but it might be the case, although he admitted himself that it’s unlikely, that there are specialized neurons that simply fire at a rhythmic rate (like a quartz crystal), on which the rest of the brain picks up, the end results being that we can tell that time has elapsed.

Then i thought about our conversation about computation speed being the difference in being “artist” or not. What are we processing quicker? Its not just pure processing power of the brain is it? It seems to be a specialized ramping of processing power focused at something. But why? What are we tuning ourselves to in your opinion?

That’s a good question. I am planning on carrying out an experiment to that effect in the future. Basically, artists have an advantage at encoding novel stimuli. Since that has been tentatively established, the question remains whether this effect holds for familiar stimuli. This is a very broad distinction, but one that has not been explored before. I imagine that artists have an advantage in visually perceiving all stimuli, which is why I use the distinction between novel and familiar, regardless of the content of the novelty (some stimuli that I have used in a prior study include a wine glass, an envelope, etc.; familiar objects, and comparing artists’ and novices’ performance on those compared to novel stimuli; Chinese ideograms, which are also the basis for the encoding advantage we have been talking about). I don’t think that artists are better at all kinds of processing, though. The advantage may be limited to vision-based perception. A good comparison is between visual memory and verbal memory. I am currently collecting data on two memory tasks, one which taps visuospatial memory, and the other that taps verbal memory. It’s actually looking like–in terms of these two specific tasks–that artists have lower verbal memory than novices. I’m still looking into this, though. It’s kind of counterintuitive, because I was expecting to see no differences in verbal memory, but superior visual memory in artists.