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Mike, Terry, Gunnar and all I was away and missed this exchange so this is a bit delayed. First, it is nice to see someone looking more deeply into mental functioning as it may relate to design and imagery. In response to Mike's remarks, I am concerned that as designers we tend to focus too closely on perception and fail to adequately consider how it interacts with cognition, language, and design thinking itself. The most useful book relating visual perception to broader thinking that I have found is Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience by Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, especially their section on Visual Cognition. Kosslyn, a renowned authority on perception,identified some essential mechanisms such as attention shifting systems, property look up systems. etc. that have informed the modes of thought in A Theory of Design Thinking. I highly recommend it as a bridge from perception into neuroscience. Chuck On Sep 16, 2013, at 10:15 AM, Paul Mike Zender wrote: > Terry: > > <SNIP> > On the brain issues, I'm no expert but I try to keep up to date with brain region mapping and the neuro-cognition findings as they relate to design activity. > <SNIP> > > It took me a couple of days to respond because, probably like you, I am always tentative when I speak outside my domain. Neurobiology certain qualifies. There I am certainly no expert either. I'm at best an interested amateur. > > But here goes. > > Visual perception / visual thinking is a process. The first processing stage is the retina in the eye where center surround processes convert approx. 100 million receptor signals to 1 million optic nerve impulses. Data is processed in the eye. Developmentally, the eye grows out of the brain. > > The optic nerve passing through the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus arrives at the Primary Visual Cortex – V1 – where massive (several billion neurons), rapid, parallel process for specific pop-out features occurs. This large area, topographically arranged, is were different kinds of visual information are processed simultaneously. An interesting video of this happening in real time in a live monkey brain can be seen at: http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=11769 The monkey demo begins at minute 10:00. > > As you can see, this area is devoted to perception. > > Areas V2 and V4 receive input from V1 by processing features to define slightly more complex patterns. The outcome of these process ‘binding’ occurs in which neurons define regions in which the lateral occipital cortex is involved. Regions lead to object recognition. Object recognition moves to the prefrontal cortex from which signals are sent back to previous areas for task oriented action. > > Colin Ware (“Visual Thinking for Design”. 2008, p. 45) describes this process thus: “A set of mechanisms and processes produce intelligent actions as an outcome of interactions between processes operating in sub-systems of the brain.” aka visual thinking. > > I’ve probably made a mess of explaining this. David Hubel’s seminal book “Eye Brain and Vision” of course does a much better job because he truly knows what he’s talking about. Numerous papers since Hubel's book verify the devotion of various cortical areas to visual processing/visual thinking. > > All of this brings into question the definition of thinking. I am defining it as using one’s mind (leaving aside the whole brain/mind debate) to consider, identify patterns, make connections, and reach conclusions. I ‘think’ the processes above fit that perfectly well. Colin Ware (2008, p. 45) states: “In some ways, pattern finding is the very essence of visual thinking, and often to perceive a pattern is to solve a problem.” > > Visual thinking not only solves problems, but use of the visual language is I believe is connected to creativity. This year in reading about the neurobiology of creativity (Takeuchi, et. al. “The Association between Resting Functional Connectivity and Creativity". 2012) I found divergent thinking and connectivity are key factors. Sketching visually I think we will come to find, stimulates these processes, but that seems some way off from a science perspective. > > I’m happy to continue our exchange about this offline as it seems no one else is particularly interested. I'm particularly interested in a search for the things visual does better than math. Since my expertise is in what visual does, and you seem to have more expertise in math than I do, perhaps together we can help define what each does well, better than the other. Alone I can only tout how MY visual thinking is better than MY maths - an unfair comparison. One suggestion to get started is that visual sketching can express less defined, more vague thinking. It can do this quickly and easily. At the fuzzy end of problem solving this seems like an advantage over maths. Also, related to the processing above, much of visual perception happens before conscious thought (bottom-up), but is influenced by it (top-down). We can 'tune' our neurons to be more responsive by 'thinking about it.' This seems particularly well suited to rapid divergent thinking and connectivity of creativity as we first find patterns then shift our thinking to 'see' it differently, literally. All this in fractions of a second. This seems another advantage over maths. But I'm starting to ramble... > > Mike > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> > Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design > Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design > ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------