Movement created information

The title of  the chapter to which this Post is linked is,“Information created by movement”. It comes from my book, “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”, which is divided into four Parts.

  • The “First Part”  introduces ideas (a) to artists, who are not familiar with the science, and (b) to scientists, who lack a background in art.
  • The Second Part is called “The Evidence”.  It includes chapters on (a) traditional artistic practices (b) my “drawing experiments“, (c) the importance of “movement” to visual perception (this Post), (d) “colour” related phenomena (all but one already posted) and (e) other aspects of vision with profound consequences (already posted).
  • The “Third Part” presents images of neural processes and lists relating to regions of the brain that participate in visual perception. Even though these are hugely simplified and very far from complete, they suggest that something amazing and seemingly unimaginable must be going on in our eyes and our brains.
  • The “Fourth and final Part” goes deep into theory with a view to gathering the disparate strands presented in the preceding chapters into a coherent whole

As indicated above, the link provided in this Post gives access to a chapter that focuses on the role of  “movement” in visual perception.  As in other Posts, I include below a slightly edited version of the “Introduction”, in the hope that it will encourage you to click on the link situated below it, which gives access to the chapter as a whole.

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movement
Read the chapter to which this Post is linked to find how a few milliseconds of  movement can catapult these points of light into two outlined figures at play.

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Introduction to Chapter 11

The studies of blind-sight and unilateral neglect discussed in the last chapter show that visual perception is not the kind of thing that can be understood by introspection alone. Rather, it is the fruit of a labyrinthine concatenation of neural processes, involving activity in large variety of locations within the brain. The same message can be derived from the diagrams to be shown later (in chapters 14 and 15). These provide glimpses of a massively complex system containing a wide variety of neural structures, hundreds of millions of neurons and untold billions of connections between them. This chapter is grist to the same mill. It concentrates on the work of James Gibson, Nicholas Bernstein and Gunnar Johansson, three scientists who extended our understanding of the experience of seeing.

Although many might suppose that movement-generated perceptual cues could have little or nothing to do with drawing static objects from observation, they would be wrong, as made clear in my book on drawing. However, their usefulness in drawing practice is far from the only reason for devoting a whole chapter to them. Thus: Gibson created a new interest in the power of movement-generated cues, Bernstein used elegant mathematics to demonstrate the interdependence of top-down and bottom up influences in the control of visually guided movement, and Johansson produced a demonstration that blew away a multitude of misconceptions.

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CHAPTER 11- GIBSON-JOHANNSON – INFORMATION CREATED BY MOVEMENT

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Other chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

These deal in greater depth with subjects that feature in the other volumes

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Go to list of all other contents

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2 thoughts on “Movement created information”

  1. Thank you these latest insights Francis. Sometimes we need to go against what may seem like common sense when drawing from observation. Fascinating!

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