As the brain dies, new artistry is born

[Android]

http://www.nationalpost.com/national/story.html?id=C37BFDB8-575C-4551-9BAF-59175119F4A8

[Lono]

thats wild.
we know more about the surface of mars than we do about the potential of the human brain.

im not feeling very creative this morning.
im gonna try holding my head next to my speakers and see if the magnets can get things mooving for me.

or maby ill go drink some coffie.

-Lono

[Bombesei]

Man, that's such cool stuff. I can't wait to read the rest of the series. I think everyone experiences the type of thing where thinking too much can get in the way, like freezing up during a test on info that you know, or if you're performing and you forget passages in a piece you know perfectly. I know that after drawing or playing piano for hours in a row, or right as I'm falling asleep, my mind is a bit "freed," and I can recall so much more information, like my thought processes are a lot different. I can listen to scores of music in my head or remember dates and artists and paintings or people's names so easily during those periods, the same things I had been "trying" to remember earlier when my mind was blocked. These kinds of studies of the brain are so awesome. Thanks for the link.


-Nick

[I.was.ink]

I say you go with the speakers.

THat was a great article Android. Thanks!

[N D Hill]

I don't know if I go for the term "dying."

[Beer Baron]

I wonder what Betty Edwards has to say about this?
:p

Cool article. Disturbing but good.

[incognito]

For some reason those horses didn't seam to be close to the quality of Rembrandt. But still, this is a very interesting and disturbing read.

[sparth]

a fascinating articles android.
the other fascinating factor is that apart from the fact autists are more capable of realistic representation, we non autists (who knows though), also have buried in ourselves most of these same capacities and empirical "techniques". it is a phenomenal concept, as is is certainly possible for a lot of us to open the right doors at the right times. many doors, many moments to discover one of these multiple truths.

quotes: "He believes all people have remarkable unconscious skills, such as math or drawing, which are blocked by our conscious mind"
"Buried deep in all our brains are phenomenal abilities, which we lose for some reason as we develop into 'normal' conceptual creatures"

when i talk to friends or net peeps about art, or give advice for their own art, i always have that same sentence in mind " free you mind"
odd to discover that sometimes our worst enemy is our own consciousness.

[God-Of-Zilla]

I saw a weird thing on "Ripley´s believe it or not".
There was a guy who had an accident when he was standing to close to a propeller aeroplane and got his left half of the brain chopped off. He survived and after a while he started to have crazy nightmares about old Native Indians.
I guess he somehow wanted to start to create something with the dreams in mind so he started to make small statues of highly detailed indians and all of this because of the lack of a left brain. He hadn´t been any artistic earlier and he was goin g to be a pilot if it wasn´t for the accident.
Sorry I can´t remember names and such but maybe there is a site or something about this.

I think this blocking thing is pretty interesting, I suck at mathematics and maybe I am blocking that thing cause when I feel I suck at math I feel that it is so boring and if something is boring you stop trying.
Well, anyway, I like Art so that is the thing for me.
Believe in the force and keep the Goodbrush Steady.

I am off for lunch. :)
see you
Matthew

[gekitsu]

wow, that was probably the most interesting read i had the last few weeks. thanks for posting the link, andrew.

sparth: any tips for freeing your mind?
the only time i managed to do this really effectively was getting drunk with absinthe. being drunk while maintaining a clear head (main feature of absinthe) makes it all too obvious why people like hemingway or van gogh nearly drowned in that stuff.

[rimwalker]

Wild. That article makes a frontotemporal lobotomy sound tempting.

[Behemoth]

I wonder if it works in reverse - if the right side was damaged, would the subject be more adept at left-side tasks? Does the right-side exert any influence at all and thus impede language skills etc?

[God-Of-Zilla]

hmm I wonder about that too, I didn´t thought anyone would survive without a left or right side of the brain before I saw Ripley´s believe it or not.
I also saw something more about a guy who inspired the movie Rain Man, that guy has two emerged brain halfes. He can´t forget anything, all things he read he remembers, that is pretty cool too.
But I wonder thou, with only a left side you would maybe be a mathematic genious.
I guess Einstein had two left sides maybe....

see you
Matthew

[Lono]

i doubt it,, because i think the reason they suspect that language handicaps the brain is because language is something we invented to attempt to express and communicate the overwhelmingly complex emotions and tasks of the human brain.. most importantly,, we use language as a vehicle to interprate the world from, and through the man made limitations of that vehicle we limit the potential of our natural facilities.
thats the theory at least.
it doesnt seem like it could go the other way though.

-Lono

[PhilHolland]

Good find Andrew.
I'm a believer of the human machine.
I believe it has many switches.
It's about knowing when to turn some on and some off.

That's my way of thinking.

When you're in that "creative zone" you can feel it.

Phil

[eli]

Damn Lono, why you got to go get all smart on us? j.k. Interesting.

Android: I have read similiar studies about this.. there was one on pbs recently that talked about autists and artistic talent being revealed when the left hemisphere is somehow damaged. Thank you so much for the article... I loved it!!!

[Tedsuo]

I think the conscious mind is a very flexible but blunt instrument. Not to bring up the old "talent vs training" argument again, but maybe "talented" people are people who more readily slip into that autistic space. Maybe the real core of training isn't academic learning, but training ourselves to "let go."

Also, I think tying it simply to language is a mistake. What about artists who work with laguage; poets, writers and rappers? I bet when asked they would also describe entering a similar autistic state when they're creating.

[Pencil Soldier]

What about people skilled at many different things?(renisance man is i the term i think)
Could it be they have a natrual tendancy to 'shut off' different parts of their brain at different times?

That was a very intrestign article. I cant wait for the next.:)

[Behemoth]

I suspect this is what Huxley mean when he went through the Doors of Perception - I guess thats why hallucinogens have the effect they do - obviously they can't give you insight or talent but they might just remove the blinkers...

[Prometheus|ANJ]

I read a book about perception once... well parts of it anyways. I think it said something about the 'raw images' from the eyes being disected, cencored, simplified and formulated into understandable parts by a special gland in the brain (something AI researchers are trying to do with computers now btw.). This is what makes it so hard for us to draw, cuz what the aware part of our brain percieves is NOT what the eyes sees. For example if we see a cube we imagine the planes unwrapped and 'feel' the shape of it in our brain. This makes it hard for us to draw the cube on a piece of paper, cuz the brain wants the sides of the cube to be unwrapped and not distorted by perspective. Same thing goes for all types of foreshortening I guess.
This way we can recognize an object from several different angles. We store a wierd 3D mental image of the object and not just a flat image. If there's any missing information on the 2D image coming from the eyes, the brain simply guesses and fills in the gaps with info from previous experiences.
Anyhow, what we're doing as artists is to formulate a filter that counteracts what the gland does, which we all know is a tedious task...

Perhaps miracle artists have some sort of 'error' in that gland that makes it easier for them to see what the eyes sees and then copy it.

That's my thoughts on it.

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Oh yes, I read in the same book about a man that had lived in a dense jungle his whole life, and thus never seen anything more than like 10-20 meters away. Some explorer took him out in a jeep on the savannah and they watched some buffaloes 1 km away in the open, and the man thought they were strange insects sized animals, but as they drove closer he thought they were growing...

[Fipse]

I just tried to produce some stuff in experiment involving masses of german beer and italian grappa. Didn´t wort ... in fact it was crap. Anyway I better get to bed and work out a new experiment ...

Fipse

[mcotie]

Prometheus: I guess our mind does a natural UVW unwrap:D (too much 3D work)

fipse, the only thing i've ever created mixing TOO much beer and food together is turning myself inside out over the porcelain god.

I know this dude that remembers all of his dreams when he wakes up in the morning. He then writes them all down and binds them in hardback books. He's got a frickin library of years of doing this crap. Most of it, to the reader, is totally wacked out abstract and not cohesive at all. But at least he remembers them. I have just a handful of dreams that I have remembered from my lifetime. wierd shit.

mitch

[Avetice]

It's so funny how in my sociology class they praise language as the saviour of man.One of man's great abilities is to communicate the way we do with language in society. The teacher showed us videos about two cases of children who didn't learn how to speak. Then at the end of the movie they stated that one died young and the other became delinquent and kept moving from foster home to foster home and eventually died. If you want to look them up one was about Genie.

Of course the fact that she was tied to a potty chair and and locked up in a room for most of her child years has the most influence but they make a big deal about how language was one of her major missing skills. She pretty much grew up with scientists experimenting on her though. They try to make a connection that her lack of language and social skills meant primitiveness and therefore less intelligence.

The same thing with the other child which could be looked up as the Victor Experiment "The Wild One". He wasn't bound to a potty chair though, he just lived without parents till someone found him. He wasn't raised socially so he was "wild" or you could say free but then you can get into an arguement about what free is. Anyway the professor seemed to be for language as a major tool. While a useful tool, it is merely a tool. If you let it define everything, the whole world becomes symbols instead of objects. Its good for letting others have an idea about what your thinking. You can tell someone your thinking about an apple, and that's enough for someone else to know, but you could be thinking about an apple that looks nothing like what the other person thought an apple looked like. If you rely mostly on the words though, the object your defining with the word becomes just a word and nothing more.

...what was i getting at.....

damn i don't remember, but anyways i find it funny that it seems like some people feel like you have to talk most of the time

oh and freeing the mind, that's so fun but .......dammit must not get into it must get sleep! yeah freeing the mind is something that happens to different people at different points in their life. Some good movies that are good examples of that are Dead Poet's Society (damn i love when he tells them to rip out that scale that supposedly measures the quality of a poem.) and Educating Rita.

....ok ok ok sleep i must go have a chat with my bed

[Bombesei]

Here's another article about this stuff. It's long, but really cool. The drawing and painting parts are on pages 4 and 5.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/genius.html?tw=wn_tophead_4


-Nick

[bRyaN]

Fascinating read...

THe less knowledge you have the more intelligent you are...

or something like that:D

[sic1]

Android's article: "This story is no longer available"

WAHHH! I am really interested in this stuff (or what it sounds like from the posts...)

Funny you should mention that prom, about the artists seeing easier - I vaguely remember a DaVinci quote (at least I think it was DaVinci, where he said something along the lines of, in order to see you must work on your visual perception. or something or other... i really want to find that quote again, it was quite inspirational.

--edit--

I just read Nick's article on Wired - that is scary - "...artistic and musical proficiency, mechanical aptitude, and feats of memorization. These tasks draw primarily on the strengths of the brain's right hemisphere, indicating that, in many savants, a healthy right hemisphere is overcompensating for damage to the left."

mmm the right side of the brain's operations sound soo fun and exciting. Perhaps some of the great minds in history have been born into some sort of autism. Take Beethoven, and Da Vinci for example.

"Many savants are left-handed, and most have deficits in language - additional clues that something is amiss in the left hemisphere."

I am left handed, although after reading Betty Edward's book (Drawing on the right side of the brain) i feel more left brained in what I do day to day.

It surely is amazing what humans are truly capable of. What we're doing now may seem so primative compared to what we can actually accomplish, pardon the pun - if we put our mind to it.