Art is Wrong: How your Brain Tells you Beautiful Lies

Recognizing whether a photograph is of a person's face or a building is fairly trivial. It makes sense that our eyes scan the flat image in the same way they would the actual scene. How, then, does looking at a cartoon of a face still represent a human face, complete with expressions, empathy, and emotion? How can a line drawing of an angry face cause our heartbeats to quicken and our stress hormone levels to increase as though we're looking at actual pending doom? How do abstract shapes cause a person to react with a fight-or-flight response even if they don't consciously recognize they've seen anything at all?

This lecture is presented as a quick overview of some basic structures and interesting emerging research on the brain that help explain how we take a complex and varying visual field and parse it into rapid significant chunks before the mechanisms for rational, considered thought have a chance to analyze our perceptions. It also explores how art lies to you with color, how a brain eats a phantom limb, and why your brain is like a blender.

Matthew Borgatti ( http://twitter.com/gianteye http://har.ms ) is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in digital fabrication. He's built and designed everything from giant animatronic puppets for Hollywood monster movies, to monumental interactive sculptures, to musical instruments. His latest sculpture, the Anywhere Organ, is a digitally fabricated mobile pipe organ made from the discarded remains of old church organs. Most of his designs are released open source and he passionately teaches the skills he's acquired over the years to anyone who will listen. One of the tools in his arsenal as an industrial designer is his passion for neuroscience. Through the years he's been gathering research on how brains interpret designs and visual stimulus as a way of discovering how to design from the most fundamental perspective possible. He also writes for Geeks With Out Bounds.

Video shot by Dr. Kim Solez.

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[Theologikos]

Amazingly interesting subject. As a designer, this type of information is gold. However, that hairstyle really demands explanation.

[CapedSam]

What method/software did you use for your slide transitions?

[707947]

He's doing pretty good with this Discussion. Congratulations.