Hoi-Chung Laung “Seeing from the Brain”
ARS 390 Art+theBrain
Patricia Maurides
Anastasia Meleshko
10 March 2022
Our speaker is someone who has done a lot of research into the brain and our visual sense. We started off learning a little about how the eyes work, rods for low light seeing and cones for color and more light seeing. She spoke about how the signals get transferred from our eyes to brain and how those images are then intercepted and stored as memories. After that we talked about the different things that can affect the function of our eyes having to do with the brain, as well as the resulting conditions that different damage can cause. There are also certain differences in eyesight that can be due to genetics, like colorblindness.
One of the things that I learned from this speaker, which frankly scared me, is the fact that we have a blind spot due to where our nerves leave our eye and enter the brain. This is scary to think about because I have always trusted my eyes, and to think that there is a blind spot that my brain is automatically correcting without me realizing, makes me wonder if there is anything else that is happening that I am not realizing.
We learned some more about the physical structure of the brain, how our signals get crossed after an image is received by our brain. The left eye reports to the right side of the brain and the right eye reports to the left side of the brain. Also, the idea of color relativity. This is something that I’ve been learning about in my painting classes as well, color never exists in a vacuum, it all depends on what is around. I’ve had to keep this in mind when I’ve done different painting reproductions because the way that a color looks on my palette is not necessarily how it will look on the canvas. There’s also the ability or inability (visual agnosia) to see or identity shapes due to brain damage. This is oddly almost something we have to train ourselves to do as artists, when copying an image it’s important to be able to separate out the shapes and colors rather than looking at the object as a whole.
She also took some time to speak to us about dreams and the things we see in our dreams. Some studies have shown that women are more likely to see color in dreams, though this may not be as concrete. Dreams are often based on memory or bits and pieces of memory that our brain shuffles and processes at night. Due to the nature of those memories, they can be changed, either in subject or color. In general she spoke about how perception is suggestive and that what we see is really dependent on the individual doing the “seeing”. Overall I really enjoyed learning more about the visual sense, especially the physical structure of our eyes because that’s something that I’ve always found interesting yet obscure.