in there, out here
09.28.07 • comment (1) • trackback
So, I’m in a graduate psychology program. This means that for the past several weeks I’ve thought of little else but the brain and the things it does. Have you ever heard of the superior colliculus? I have. I hadn’t before. To spare you the overwrought Wikipedia link, the superior colliculus is a primitive visual processing center that our brains have refurbished for lesser uses. Frogs get all their vision from something like the superior colliculus, but we humans relay all of our visual data to the hierarchically organized wonderland that is the occipital lobe, which is, paradoxically, in the back of the head. So much for intelligent design. The superior colliculus has been relegated to the less glamorous function of coordinating your eye and head movements, or at least it seems that way. Give it ten years, and we’ll discover six or seven more of its jobs.
We know a lot about the neuroanatomy of the brain, but not too much about how that translates to the vivid experience that we call The Mind. Minds are subjective. I can count the firing of the rods and cones on your retina that initiate sight, but I can’t point to your Red. How do I know that my Red is what you’d call Red? The answer is that I don’t, and at present we have no way to check on it.
But I didn’t come here today to talk to you fine people about the brain. I get enough of that on campus. I came to exercise the other half of my brain, and talk about art.
So, what makes good art? Art, I think, is the only method ever developed by which humans are able to share their subjective experiences with each other. Good art evokes a feeling, another one of those hard to quantify states of the brain/mind. Good art allows the viewer to experience what the artist was feeling during the creation of the art. The first time I ever watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I though to myself, “See, that’s how all movies should be.” Sure, Cuckoo’s Nest is a brilliant meditation on identity, rebellion, institutionalization, and all that, but it goes deeper. When you watch that movie, you come away with a feeling that’s hard to put into words, hard to quantify. From Münch’s screaming lithograph to Pixar’s highest tech animations, all good art is doing one thing, broadly stated. It takes the thing in there, and brings it out here, for everyone else to see.
10.02.07 #
Color perception is something I have to deal with all the time. I recall the T.A. in my color correction class being much more sensitive to warm tones than myself (either that or much less sensitive to cool tones), so everything I turned in always came back with “add blue,” or “less red.” Very frustrating, because I thought my work looked like crap when I would make her suggested changes. But yeah… color theory is fascinating. Color is the brain’s interpretation of a narrow band of wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. And what’s really great is that the science that modern color theory is based on was done in the 20’s & 30’s with these really small sample groups… updated in the 60’s, with slightly less small sample groups. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the exact numbers in the Wikipedia page on the CIE 1931 color space (also known as CIE XYZ color space).