3 Ways We Make Meaning
3 ways the brain creates meaning - Tom Wujec, Ted Talk
How do visual entities create meaning?
How the brain visualizes
Cognitive psychologists tells us that the brain doesn’t actually see the world as it is but instead creates a series of mental models through a collection of aha moments or moments of discovery through various processing.
The processing begins with the eyes. Light enters, hits the back of the retina and is circulated, most of which is streamed to the back of the brain, at the site of the primary visual cortex.
The primary visual cortex sees just simple geometry, just the simplest of shapes, but it also acts like a kind of relay station that reradiates and redirects information to many other parts of the brain, as much as 30 other parts that selectively create more sense, make more meaning through the kind of aha experiences.
We’re only going to talk about three of them.
The first of is called the Ventral stream. It’s on this side (left) of the brain and this is the part of the brain that will recognize what something is, it’s the what detector.
Look at a hand, a remote control, a chair, a book. So that’s the part of the brain that is activated when you give a word to something.
A second part of the brain is called the Dorsal stream, and what it does is locate the object is physical body space, so if you look around the stage here, you create a kind of mental map of the stage.
If you close your eyes, you’d be able to mentally navigate, you’re activating the dorsal stream.
The third part is the Limbic system, and this is deep inside the brain, very old evolutionarily, and it’s the part that feels, it’s the kind of gut center, where you see and image and you go, oh, I have a strong or an emotional reaction to whatever I’m seeing.
The combination of these processing centers helps us make meaning in very different ways.
What can we learn about this, how can we apply this insight?
The schematic view is that the eye visually interrogates what we look at.
The brain processes this in parallel with figments of information, asking a whole bunch of questions to create a unified mental model.
So for example when you look at an image, a good graphic invites the eye to dart around and to selectively create a visual logic, so the act of engaging and looking at the image creates the meaning.
It’s the selective logic. So the act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning. It activates a different part of the brain.
The limbic system is activated when we see motion, when we see color, and there are primary shapes and pattern detectors. So, we make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation.
We use images to clarify what we are trying to communicate, second we make the images interactive so we can engage them more fully, and thirdly, we augment memory by creating a visual persistence, techniques that can be applied in a wide range of problem solving.