urbrainondrugs's blog

Entering any art museum, you will walk down many white washed walls with brightly colored canvases mounted upon them. In the abstract section you will most likely pass a canvas that consists of only two or three large blocks of intense color painted upon it. Looking at these colored blocks, you may or may not experience a sense of sunniness, coolness, tenseness, or relaxation. This is a typical reaction to the works of Mark Rothko[1]. Rothko’s art, using alternately radiant and dark colors, is distinguished by the sustained concentration on pure pictorial properties such as color, surface, proportion, and scale, in order to inspire in his audience profound themes such as tragedy, ecstasy, and the sublime. His images are known to provoke raw human experiences, or what we have learned are primary experiences. Not only do his paintings evoke emotional states, they will not evoke the same emotion in everyone. How is Rothko able to achieve such a reactions and why do the reactions vary? I wish to look at this question from a biological and color-centric point of view, disregarding the I-function’s affect on creativity and variability in the brain.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Book critique by Tiffany Ngan

How Do We Lie?

Tiffany Ngan

What’s in a lie? That which we might present as truth our brains would show just as false. A horrible horrible pun on Shakespeare, however it brings us to the subject: lying as a variable function of the brain.

I like the idea that Eden expresses in an earlier thread, How much of “me” is my choice?” It reminded me of something I read about child development. There are many theories on child mental development. Of these theories there is one theory by a man named Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. His theory illustrates development as being largely influenced and shaped by the culture and society that a child is living within or exposed to. Vygotsky views development as a process of inevitable acculturation.

The first few years in child development are precultural, but at 2 years of age, a child will begin to learn semiotic tools it will need to develop. At 2 years a child will begin to grasp language and symbolic thinking. With these tools a child will develop higher consciousness and take in the world through the onslaught that is verbal society. This means that a child’s exposure to language will cause acculturation and the child will assign meaning to words and concepts as they are used and viewed within the society he is living in. These concepts become concrete ideas and allow the child to build upon that foundation with other things that he experiences. No matter what the activity, when children observe the world about them, they will learn and develop values that will later determine his thoughts and actions. Such values are learned unconsciously and can be as little as the usage of the word “cup” and the actions associated with the word cup: “we share cups, we clean up after ourselves when we spill, we must be careful not to break cups.” This type of development allows younger minds to be guided by more knowledgeable individuals.