9/28

During class we had the opportunity to draw a nude model. It was the first time I have ever drawn a nude model and it was actually a lot less weird than i had planned on it being. I really didn't feel awkward or strange at all, it was just like I was drawing any other object. Also, my drawings came out a lot better than I would have expected. Drawing the human form was fun because the lines were flowing and curvy. It was nice to get away from the straight sharp lines of man-made objects that often surround us. It sort of resembles the drawing sound activity, the feeling i got when drawing the woman reminded me of how it feels to draw a relaxing song. In our last class we drew on photoshop using tablets. This was very cool to me because it was the first time I have ever drawn on a tablet and it was also very fun to draw sounds. Drawing with the tablet was hard at first but I started to get used to it, I think that it would take some time to get used to but would eventually be a very good medium to play around with. My biggest problem was that I found myself using the same color and line thickness over and over again because I was just too lazy to change it. It seemed like songs without words tended to be more flowing and make me think of slow wavy lines but songs with lyrics were more bold and defined. This may just be because it is hard to make myself think of the words as sounds rather than the english language. However, I have noticed that some vocalists do a very good job of making their voice seem like a musical instrument rather than a communication tool. They can make their voice flow which is a lot different that it would in a conversation.

Questions:

1. To the class: How was your experience drawing the nude model? Did you feel uncomfortable or did it just seem like you were drawing any other object?

2. What emotions did you feel as you were drawing the music?

In class I was very interested in the condition that we talked about where people can actually see sounds or hear scents. I have discovered that this condition is called Synesthesia. Not much is known about it but it may be hereditary and it also may be caused by strokes or blindness or deafness. One can also experience it while using psychedelic drugs or during a temporal lobe epileptic seizure. There are many types of synesthesia and they are as follows: Grapheme(letters or numbers) - Color Synesthesia, Sound - Color Synesthesia, Number form Synesthesia, Ordinal-linguistic Personification, and Lexical - Gustatory Synesthesia. The ones separated by hyphens mean that the first sense triggers the second one. For example, Grapheme - Color means that when someone with Grapheme - Color Synthesthesia sees letters or numbers they see it in color. Number form Synesthesia is when someone can create a mental map of numbers which helps them to remember them easier. Ordinal-linguistic Personification is when someone associates specific personality traits with certain letters or characters.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

9/21

During our last class we practiced drawing what we saw instead of what we thought. We learned that we need to ignore what the left side of our brain is telling us and we must draw with the right side. The left side tries to make us draw what we learned objects look like. For example when children draw people they typically draw stick figures. This is because that is what they were taught people look like. This is what we are trying to get away from in class. We used viewfinders to select a specific area of space. This let us see the space around the object as shapes and try to draw this instead of drawing the object. The object would then be drawn by the outline of the shapes.


For the reading assignment I read about the shift from the left to the ride side of the brain and did drawing activities to go with it. It was very interesting how I could actually sense my brain switching sides. I could feel my left side relaxing and letting my right side take over. It wasn't hard for my right side to take over, it actually seemed quite natural which was contradictory to what the article said happens for most people. It felt very good and relaxing. I did the drawings right after I got out of yoga class so I was already very calm. This probably helped the switch of my brain. The reading taught me about pure contour drawing and modified contour drawing. While doing my pure contour drawing i was very relaxed and actually really surprised myself with how well the finished product looked. However after my first pure contour drawing they started to get worse. I believe this happened because I got somewhat distracted because I was outside and after my first one a lot of people were walking past me. I was very impressed by my modified contour drawing. Since I was able to occasionally look at the page I was able to place details in the correct spots but I still made sure that I drew with my eyes instead of my mind. The finished product looks better then I would have ever thought it would. During my modified contour drawing I was still very relaxed and rather than feeling frustrated I felt very accomplished. 


Questions:
1. In class we all drew parts of the same object from all different perspectives. This produced many different views of the same object. Do you think that if we all drew the same thing from the exact same perspective there would still be a lot of variation in the final product or would they all be exactly the same?
2. How did the switch from left to right brain sides feel for everyone else in the class? Did it just feel natural or was it difficult? Did anyone get headaches like the article said may happen?


After doing some reading I have discovered that the left side and right side of our brains are connected by the corpus collosum, a thick cable of nerves. As I already knew, the right side of your brain controls creativity while the left side controls logical thinking. Many children rank highly creative before they enter school but much of this creativity is lost during grade school due to emphasis on left brain functions. In adulthood only 2% of the population remains highly creative. Our left brain constantly fights our right brain because it doesn't understand the thought processes that the right brain uses. Typically during day to day life one side of the brain controls our consciousness. This is usually won by the left side of the brain. There are ways to eliminate thought processes from the left side of the brain such as meditation and blocking sensory input. This lets our imagination wander until the left side wakes up.




Source:
http://viewzone2.com/bicamx.html

9/14

During the previous class we watched a part of the movie Memento.  This movie is unique in that the progression of time is shown differently than it typically is. The main character of the movie lost his ability to make new memories so he only remembers things for a few minutes. The director shows us events similar to how they are occurring for the character. The sequence of events moves backwards so at the beginning of the movie we know what happens at the end of the story while the beginning remains unknown. There are also a series of film clips shot in black and white that we don’t know where they belong in the storyline. However they do help us separate the parts in color which makes the movie make sense. Without this separation the movie would just all be jumbled together and we wouldn’t know how time is changing. We learned that every time a black and white clip was shown time was moving backwards. I predict that the last scene of the movie will be the main characters last memory that is brain has maintained. I also predict that this last memory will be the last memory of his wife.

Questions:

1. I would like to ask the class what would change in your life if you had the condition that the character in the movie has and what you think would stay the same?
2. My second question is, besides writing everything down, do you have any other ideas that one with this condition could use to cope with not being able to make new memories?

I would like to know how the brain stores short-term memories. I took AP Psychology in my junior year of high school but I really don’t remember much from it. I do remember that most of the time when your brain recalls information it changes the memory a little bit each time. I also remember that quite often when your brain is storing information if something doesn’t make sense it will alter the memory so that it does make sense. I did some research and concluded on the following ideas:

• We store sensory information being received by our brain from our eyes, ears, and nose for less than a second.
• Some of this information then gets sent to our short-term memory.
• With short term memory we can usually recall around 7 pieces of short information without rehearsal for about a minute.
• Some of our short term memories then get sent to the sensory cortex, where they were originally received, and then become long term memories.
• Long term memory can usually store larger quantities of information for a potentially unlimited amount of time.

 I believe that the human brain is capable of much more than we have discovered. It is very complex and we really don't use as much of it as we should.

Sources:

Memory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory

How does human memory work? By April Holladay

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2007-03-12-memory-first_N.htm

first post

This class has been the first class that I have ever analyzed time in. It has made me think differently than I typically would. I find it fascinating how time feels like it goes by very slowly at some times and very quickly at others. Yet, the time that we spend on earth is so small compared to the total time that earth has existed. In class we analyzed art which was created hundreds of years ago. To us, this seems like an extremely long time but in the history of earth this amount of time is extremely insignificant. Also when we are young we feel like we live a really long time but as we age we feel like our time on earth will never be enough. As time progresses our concept of it continually changes. The part from the reading assignment, What is time?, where it talks about how humans see time was very interesting. No other living creatures see time the same as humans do, although some animals display memory they cannot display any specific image from the past. There is also no evidence that animals have a sense of future, many actions that would indicate a sense of future are usually purely instinctive (Whitrow,3). It has been shown that even man before Homo sapiens had a sense of future by the way that they buried necessities along with the dead (4).

I would like to impose a question about the beginning of time. Has time always existed or does it only exist since humans think about it? If humans didn't exist would there still be time, since we are the only beings that consciously think about it? I would also like to ask, if time would exist regardless of human beings when did it start? Can something really exist forever? Doesn't there have to be a beginning to everything? Even before the earth was created there were other planets and things in space so where does time really start? Personally I have reached my maximum thinking capacity. It is extremely hard to try to think about where everything started because there is really no way we will ever find out where outer space came from and how it was made and when time started and if there was anything that existed before space. Or if anything could exist before space because if you don't have space then you have blank existence.

I would like to understand more about the travel of light through time. I understand that light travels extremely fast and it still takes a very long time for it to travel all the way to earth from stars or planets. As a photographer I am continually learning about light and how it travels. My favorite pictures are night time landscapes. I love how when doing timed exposures at night you get light that your eyes could never pick up. This is because the camera is putting all the light it picks up into one image but when we see we are constantly creating new images in our brain so we will never see all the light that is traveling through space.