Yesterday's presentation on Dymaxion geometries made me think of two things: The second thing is the way we have started to study the brain, modeling it into a flexible geodesic sphere, and then stretching it and moving it enough to make it look like an individual's brain. I can show you cool pictures of that in class, but I cannot post them here yet as they are lab property!! From there on, we seek to define the difference and the similarities and etc.
But the more important idea that popped in my head was the the work of Artist/scienceist Theo Jansen, a sample of which you will see below.
It is of course importatnt to see his "animals" (as he calls them) in motion.
His objective is to have these "beasts" survive in nature.
I highly recommend that we watch This video
Cheers
Naj
4 comments:
Hey Naj,
What a great posting! Thank you for sharing. Your lab work sounds intriguing but I can't figure out the purpose of your research and the need to model the brain into a (linked?)flexible architecture. Does it have to do with memory?
Of course I followed the link to the video on the TED site. As dymaxion is, dymaxion does and I ended up listening to Evelyn Glennie's talk. She's a deaf percussionist that demonstrates how to hear without hearing by using your entire body to listen... it's all here, Pete Tong: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/103
Felix, memory is only one aspect of researching the brain.
I work at the MNI, so we are all sort of offsprings of Penfield ;)
The reason for modeling brain using geodesics is to provide structural commonality between brains of different individuals, so they can study the differences, and that which modulates the difference.
Most of this in fact stems from Penfilds's work. Using his focal stimulation technique, he was able to spatialize where each of the senses were located on the brain. That was called somatotopic map. Nowadays, instead of looking at brain function by cutting up the skull, we do it with imaging techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation. Or we just do a source localization of where the electrical and magnetic brain activities originate from by methods such as EEG and its fancy new sister, magnetoencephalography.
All of these methods heavily rely on creating a geometrical model of the brain. And as technology and computational power is advancing, we are able to make these models flexible. A new wave of neuroscience research, is heavily investing on measuring the dynamics of these models, rather than treating them as static bases.
Hope this answers your question? I will give a presentation at some point, either in class or in senselab.
Hi Naj,
It must be cool to see the patterning in your work echoed in the work of Patrick Harrop and Buckminster Fuller!
I've been losing sleep on account of TED keeping me awake at night! I watched a video by a medical illustrator who is animating the workings of the cell and sub-cellular machine entites. Another researcher spoke about the lack of a unified brain theory in spite of there being oodles and oodles of research already out there... and about intelligence being about the ability to predict/intuit what is going to happen next ie create mental patterns or images that enable us to predict that which is about to happen. His approach was very meat and potatoes on account of hos background being in the design of hand-held computers and pda's. Thanks again for hooking me up with this site.
TED is an idea virus!
One catches it and transfects the rest!
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