Language and Form Recognition

How is language wired to form recognition. I found this image on Mark’s facebook profile.  Try and guess what the image is… because once I tell you what it is you cannot not see it any other way.

(Spoiler Warning: The answer is in the COMMENTS)

Parts of the brain involved in form recognition

Researchers indicate that the pre-frontal and parietal areas may come into play when naming objects seen from an unusual point of view. Tests were conducted with 2 levels of naming complexity by 2 kinds of stimuli, that is objects viewed from a conventional viewpoint and when seen from an unconventional viewpoint with subjects aged between 20 - 80 years. Test subjects showed normal recognition when shown conventional viewpoints of an object, but the older subjects showed a marked difference when it came to identifying unconventional viewpoints. There seems to be a marked deterioration in recognition with aging. Read more about it here.

The Book of Optics

Somewhere between 965 -1039 lived Ibn Al-Haytham (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham) a visionary. He is known for his theories on visual perception and Optics. More about Al-Haytham here…

Read the english translation of Kitab al Manazir - The book of Optics, here.

You may also visit this page by Bradley Steffens. He is the author of the book Ibn Al-Haytham - First Scientist.

Psychology: Past, Present, and Promise

A video by the Annenberg foundation on psychology. Phillip Zimbardo attempts to explain if the mind is trained by nature or nurture.

and from the same series…

Discovering Psychology’s - The Behaving Brain. Phillip Zimbardo explains the structure of the brain and it’s associated functions.

How the mind edits what we see

A video featuring Susan Greenfield as she explains how the brain edits and manipulates information and offers the final edited view as ‘perception’. I couldn’t embed it, so go here to see it.

Selective Attention - An update

While selective attention has long been studied about in psychology, not much was known about it’s associated neural activity. Now scientists at the university of Helsinki claim to have identified activity in the auditory cortex that corresponds to the subject’s signals. Read more about it here. and some more… here.

An Introduction to Psychoanalysis

An introduction to the Psychoanalysis movement as well as the practice with notes on key players and sample applications one on a Durer woodcut, here.

“Don’t hurt my baby…”

Why do we anthropomorphise? Maybe with animals, it’s understandable, but why do we do it with objects? A group of researchers at the University of Chicago and Toronto are asking these questions. Read about it here.

Free Will - The Storyteller Video

An explanation of how free will as such does not exist. We are offered a perceived image which we feel we are deciding upon. More about this in a previous post here…

Go here to see a video (couldn’t embed it) on free will, the one below makes more sense after you’ve seen it.

mindbind

An optical illusion that shows how the mind projects what it THINKS it sees. The Ames room has been a classic when explaining the nature of optical illusion and perception.