Month: October 2006

The latest edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just arrived on the net with plenty of musings on the mind and brain to keep you occupied.

Favourites include an article on the balance of activation in the cortical hemispheres and the link to paranormal experiences, and a discussion of a recent critical article on the cognitive neuroscience of education.

Assuming all goes well, I should be on Radio 3’s Night Waves this evening talking about the neuropsychology behind the Gallery Space Recall project.

UPDATE: What an odd experience that was. I sounded like a robot and got vastly outclassed by a poet. Story of my life.

A new issue of Scientific American Mind has arrived on the shelves with a couple of freely accessible articles on microexpressions and communication through gestures available online.

Microexpressions are like any other facial expression, but they are very subtle and occur incredibly quickly, coming and going in several hundred milliseconds.

Paul Ekman, largely known for his discovery that many facial expressions of emotion were universal, has been particularly keen on researching microexpressions in recent years.

It is thought that these fleeting expressions give away the inner emotional state (and maybe whether someone is lying), because they are under less conscious control than more obvious facial expressions.

The other freely available article is on the gestures we make when talking, that potentially give an insight into the hidden psychology that belies our words.

Our body movements always convey something about us to other people. The body “speaks” whether we are sitting or standing, talking or just listening. On a blind date, how the two individuals position themselves tells a great deal about how the evening will unfold: Is she leaning in to him or away? Is his smile genuine or forced?

The same is true of gestures. Almost always involuntary, they tip us off to love, hate, humility and deceit. Yet for years, scientists spent surprisingly little time studying them, because the researchers presumed that hand and arm movements were mere by-products of verbal communication. That view changed during the 1990s, in part because of the influential work of psycholinguist David McNeill at the University of Chicago.

Link to contents of October 2006 SciAmMind.
Link to article ‘A Look Tells All’.
Link to artice ‘Gestures Offer Insight’.

Looks like the story about Gallery Space Recall has been picked up by a few places (see previous post on Mind Hacks).

Probably the best coverage is from The Independent which attempts to look at both the context and content of the work, while BBC News has a short piece, and The Mirror and The Daily Record have even shorter pieces.

I arrived in Cardiff on Friday to give a talk with artist Simon Pope on our art / science collaboration Walking Here and There to find the exhibition made the front page of the South Wales Echo with the headline “It’s an empty room… So why on earth do they think it is art?”.

The exhibition, entitled ‘Gallery Space Recall‘, is indeed an empty gallery, with nothing but the words ‘You are invited to recall from memory a walk through a gallery space’ written on the wall.

The only other component is that we’ve trained the gallery assistants to use a few psychological techniques to encourage people to expand on the impact and significance of their memories while they take visitors around the gallery. Vistors are encouraged to recall a previous gallery space they’ve visited, as if their remembered exhibition were in the space of Chapter Arts Centre.

With all credit to Simon, while the work is part of Walking Here and There, the wonderful idea for this part was all his.

The exhibition aims to highlight the role of memory and location in how we understand and appreciate art, and relate to our environment.

Artists aim to convey meaning with their work, communicating concepts and invoking ideas in new and challenging ways. However, psychology and neuroscience has known for over a century that meaning is something which is constructed and reconstructed by the mind and brain (Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts‘ experiment is a famous example).

The perception of everything from the simple visual world to complexity of visual art is directly dependent on our past experience. This is known as ‘top-down’ processing [pdf], and is obvious in the brain where the visual system is massively connected to memory areas.

Also, the personal significance of art depends on your memories. A piece might invoke strong emotions because it connects with past experiences, in turn making it more memorable, as emotionally arousing events are recalled better than others.

So where does the meaning in art actually lie? In the object itself, or in your interpretation of it?

Gallery Space Recall removes the object and relies entirely on your memory. So where does the art exist here? In the visitor’s mind? In a past gallery recalled by the visitor? In the mind of the gallery assistant who is listening to the visitor reminisce? In Simon’s idea? Or, perhaps, all of them?

This is exactly where Simon’s work and my work overlap, as we’re both interested in how memory and its distortions affect our understanding of the world.

It’s interesting that none of the artists interviewed for the outraged South Wales Echo article actually objected to the idea (in fact, they seemed to quite like it), but just to the fact that an empty gallery got funded.

I think we can confidently say that this is the cheapest exhibition that the gallery has ever put on, actually leaving more money for other artists. Consequently, it’s probably the cheapest publicity they’ve ever had too.

Further stages of the collaboration look at how the breakdown of memory, in delusions and psychosis, highlight the importance of remembering in our perception of reality.

The slides from the talk are online [powerpoint format] if you want more information, or keep tabs on the Walking Here and There website to see how the project progresses.

We’ll also be discussing the project at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, this Wednesday at 4pm (details here) and the exhibition is on until November 5th.

Link to Walking Here and There website.
Link to description of Gallery Space Recall.
Link to photos of opening.
Link to ‘Art? Or just an empty room?’ from the South Wales Echo.
ppt file of powerpoint slides from gallery talk.

For those wanting to catch the vibe from the recently ended 2006 Society for Neuroscience annual conference in Atlanta, the latest edition of The Synpase psychology and neuroscience writing carnival is an SfN special.

There’s also been some good coverage on reanimated Nature Neuroscience blog Action Potential if you want an alternative slant on proceedings, and some photos of the event have been put online by Neurocontrarian.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are being published online, free for anyone to read and search. Among his many works, perhaps the one of most interest to Mind Hacks readers will be The expression of the emotions in man and animals, published in 1872.

Link to Charles Darwin online.

For those wanting their fortnightly hit of studies from the British Psychological Society Research Digest, a new edition has just been released and is welcoming eager readers…

During the coming week, artist Simon Pope and I will be giving a couple of talks on Walking Here and There – an art / science collaboration project that aims to investigate the interaction of place and memory in psychosis, and particularly reduplicative paramnesia, the delusional belief that a place exists in two or more locations simultaneously.

The first will be at 4pm this Friday (20th) at the Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, as part of Simon’s solo exhibition Gallery Space Recall. The discussion will be followed by a participation event in the gallery where you can experience a tour through a remembered exhibition.

The second will be at 4pm, on Wednesday 25th of October at Goldsmiths College, University of London, as part of the 2006 Whitehead Lectures on Cognition, Computation and Creativity. This talk will take place in the Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Ben Pimlott Building on Goldsmiths campus (location details).

I’ll be talking about the science and neuropsychology of reduplicative paramnesia and we’ll both be discussing how we’ve found trying to combine our disciplines to better understand space and location, as well as unusual states of mind.

Unfortunately we didn’t got much choice over timing, and we realise 4pm isn’t the most convenient time for most people to attend a talk, but we hope to do some more in the future during more accessible slots.

Plus, there’ll be a chance to participate in the experimental stage of the project for anyone who wishes to volunteer. More on this when the time comes!

Link to Walking Here and There website.
Link to details of Goldsmith’s talk.
Link to details of Gallery Space Recall at Chapter.

The Washington Post asked one of their journalists to test-drive several of the increasing number of ‘cognitive fitness’ websites that have online games and puzzles specifically designed to increase mental performance.

Although there isn’t a massive amount of research on the subject, the little research there is suggests that staying mentally active, particularly during later life, can increase or maintain mental abilities.

The success of Nintendo’s Brain Age cartridge has spawned an industry of ‘mental workout’ computer games, many of which are now available on pay-for-use websites.

The Washington Post article gives a brief run-down of some of the science that motivates these companies, and tries out several of the websites for size.

Interestingly, the Post also got research psychologists to comment on the sites to see if their tasks were likely to be doing what they claimed.

Link to Washington Post article ‘Pumping Neurons’.