The Mandala and the Multi-Center Perspective

During one of our trips I told Gene that his talk about Alexander
and his theories that our visual field must have multiple centers
made me think about the mandala and Carl Jung. The mandala is
an Indian and Buddhist symbol that represents their view of the
universe. The words "multiple centers" resonated with my
recollection of the mandala because although the structure is a
regular composition of concentric circles and squares, it is
surrounded by local centers that look regular at a distance, but are
distinct at close range. The symbol is a mix of regularity and order,
as well as infinite diversity at the same time.

In the mandala above you can notice that each small concentric circle
is a different scene from Budha's life. I think that the purpose of this
kind of symbol is to fuse the minute personal perspective of our personal
experience with the larger cosmic scheme. During Gene's talk about
whether Alexander's ideas are universal or just his subjective opinion
the word wholeness popped up. This is what made me think of Carl
Jung, who studied the relationship between religious symbols and
psychology. One of Jung's main ideas is that regardless of the culture
we come from, we all possess the same archetypes. Jung studied
symbols across cultures similar to the mandala,;and thought that the
mandala represents the archetype of psychological wholeness or an
expression of the totality of the self. Wholeness is paramount for
Jung because he believed that the main task of psychoanalysis was
to counter the segmentation and compartmentalization of the self .
There is an uncanny similarity between the mandala and a diagram
of the Jungian self.

How do I link this back to photography? Well, from Gene's 

presentation I also remember the perfectly regular Nurenberg 

building, and from a different presentation of a previous class the 

tall glass buildings of le Corbusier. My personal reaction to both 

is a visceral horror at the rigidity and perfect symmetry of their 

lines. I like regularity but I react with disgust as it approaches 

perfection, as if the symmetry takes something from my humanity 

instead of enabling it with a modicum of order. A perfectly 

symmetrical mandala would not reflect the universe according to 

Buddhist, and a self rigidly ordered for Jung would be a sign of 

psychological sickness rather than health. Jung cannot prove that 

his diagram of the self is universal, but his ideas on the mandala 

are cannily close to Alexander's observations of images. 

Danny W Chang

Photographs of flight stroke

In my presentation of the wild duck, I brought a picture taken by Eadweard Muybridge of a bird in flight. From the picture, I jumped to a schematic of the upward and downward stroke. I found a better diagram that illustrates the flight, from a front view to a top view. 

Muybridge came to mind because before this class I never truly considered how hard it is to study the movement of animals. Without the ability to expand and contract the time scale of their movements, they can be all but invisible. The problem of bird flight fascinated minds as brilliant and Leonardo Da Vinci. But without photography, it proved simply too challenging to link the shape of the wings, which was known, to the movement that created flight. The motion of the bird wing is one crucial piece of the problem of bird flight. What also surprises scientists is the efficiency of bird flight. There are some migratory species that fly for weeks spending very little energy in their path. The problem boils down to figuring out how a bird wing and body reduce drag during flight. 

The picture above belongs to a starling flying in a wind tunnel. The starling is faced with an air flow that also contains traces of smoke. This is the same method airplane companies use to study the efficiency of their wings. The traces above are the currents of air traveling above and below the bird.  

A large part of the drag depends on the point where the vortices begin. Notice how the air flow is regular up until the middle of the body, only to expand in the second half. From this still image, we can derive measurements of the pressure along the body of the starling, as well as the wind velocity.

What the picture shows to use, which would be invisible otherwise, is how the starling pushes the 

air around and how the air in turn, creates the lift and drag on the wings. It surprises me again how a 

simple photograph combined with a few traces of smoke can help us break down a problem that is 

extremely difficult, into simpler parts, just as it was the case with the 

wing beat. 

Danny W Chang

Inspired by Jim’s Question: What what we choose to photograph has to do with Alexander’s ‘The Nature of Order'

Jim asked an excellent and penetrating question. For all the examples I’ve given of Christopher Alexander’s theory of ‘The Nature of Order,’ what is it really? What claim to truth does it really make — and is that claim scientifically testable?  Or is it, like insights of psychoanalysis, an interesting subjective vision of subjective experience that we can simply view as another of many possible ways of thinking about what makes things attractive, and to whom?

This question, in fact, gets to the very heart of what Alexander is trying to do. The idea that all design choices are fundamentally subjective, are matters of taste, with none more valid than any other, has led, he believes, precisely to the world of more and more individualistic star architecture in which strangeness is competed for — and in which there’s no basis for saying one type of design is ‘better’ than another.

So, he is making a case that there are in fact fundamental design principles, ways of organizing space, that govern nature, and that humans can choose to follow, or choose to ignore, which have deep impacts on us.

The first proposition — that there are fundamental organizing and structuring ways of shaping space in nature — I think is objectively verifiable and measurable. The ubiquitous presence of fractals at all levels of natural organization is one example. There have been powerful scientific arguments that the results of evolution are fundamentally shaped and constrained by the limits of certain bodily plans and structures, not all types of evolutionary outcomes are possible.

The second question is whether Alexander has correctly identified these — e.g. are there a limitless number of potential ways of identifying such patterns and the geometric forces that shape them, and so Alexander’s list is just one of thousands of possible ways of thinking about this. I don’t know enough about design in nature to speak to the validity of his conclusions.  However the way he elaborates his ideas by showing the underlying connection between these forces and the patterns they result in, and how they are all forms of the same central process — how transformations in nature operate in ways that preserve structure — provides a common explanatory vehicle, much as Darwin did. In other words, it explains why natural forces should result in the patterns and products that we see.  In some cases, like his explanation for the split-electron field effect, he has put forth original and verifiable solutions to what have been fundamental scientific mysteries.

So I think it’s quite possible that with more or less refinement he is really providing a valid way to look at how space is organized by nature, and the idea that there are only a limited number of fundamental principles or forces that shape such patterns certainly seems valid or likely from what we know of thermodynamic principles for example.

The third question is whether there is a value in recognizing and using these principles in the way we design and organize space and in the ways we see the world. His argument is an empiric one and one that should be objectively testable: do spaces designed in a certain way predictably and statistically elicit certain types of reactions in people that result in their experiencing and behaving in ways that meet certain criteria?  This question of the psychology of design — of the study of the psychological impacts of design — is one I’ve been fascinated with since planning school. I worked with Kevin Lynch whose Image of the City, a pioneering analysis of the patterns by which city dwellers mentally map the cities they live in, seemed to me very powerful. But I’m not sure how far this has really led, and if there are agreed findings and they correspond to what Alexander is proposing.

So, what validity do I think you should give to the principles I’ve been laying out?  I don’t claim that they provide a fully valid set of principles that have been tested. Like Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, they provide what I think are actually a set of small, modest, organized ways of looking at the world that can lead to profound insights — precisely because the whole idea that there are such principles has been almost entirely dismissed by standard, Cartesian-based thinking.

We have operated under an intellectual set of assumptions that are in fact enormously wide-ranging, influential and dismissive, and based on what I think are highly arbitrary ways of separating objectivity and subjectivity. Valera’s book The Embodied Mind explores the fallacies of Cartesian thinking, of believing that a mind can see the world in ways that aren’t shaped by the mind being part of a flesh and blood body and therefore shaped in its thoughts and perceptions precisely by deep emotional and subjective reactions. Cartesian thinking assumes that the mind and the world are separable, as if the mind simply happens to exist in this world, rather than deeply belongs to and is part of and a product of it. This seems to me fundamentally impossible. But it then requires whole new ways of reconstructing and recognizing the ways in which — like the ways the cells of the eye construct the world of our experience rather than simply passively receive it — we construct the world we experience and that experiential world shapes us. This includes the ways and reasons we are deeply drawn by certain types of spaces.  There is nothing arbitrary about our responses, such as why we are drawn to the void and infinity of water in the midst of other surroundings, as I’ll talk about tonight in terms of Felt Lake. Such reactions spring from the fundamental connections between our nervous systems and the world in which they evolved.

Therefore it seems to me that we have a great need for ways of recognizing such connections, of seeing across what has been divided by our intellectual heritage. Alexander’s work seems to me one positive and productive way of doing so. It is a bridge, as was Kevin Lynch’s or Jane Jacobs or Eric Kandel’s, toward connecting subjectivity and objectivity and not seeing them as existing on continents that have become separated by vast oceans and eons.

It thus offers a way of seeing, a way of opening up the possibility and the power of doing what I think we’ve been learning to do in this class. Namely to become attuned to really looking, at finding small patterns both in nature and in what makes us stop and recognize that pattern and thinking, ah, here’s a story, a subject, a photograph that will purely show it to myself and others.  This is the key, our recognition of a subject.

Therefore, ask ourselves what is that makes me stop and see a story in what is after all a wholly interconnected world in time and space, in which things stand out only because we engage in the act of noticing them. What makes us stop, both in the field or in looking at each other’s work, and say wow, yes, this connects to me?  If you recognize that there’s a truth involved here, that there’s a reason why you stop and frame and that what you photograph and process that the rest of us react to it so powerfully — if there’s a truth here, and there must be, since we all experience it and are using it, what is that truth?

That truth — what makes us see the story, recognize a subject — is at the heart of what connects our subjectivity with the world outside. We experience the moment of connection and we use photography to capture and record that truth.

But isn’t this precisely what Alexander is doing — isn’t he trying to identify, define, test, articulate the reasons and principles that enable us to see these things, to connect something inside our deeply emotionally based minds as being out there in the world. And vice versa perhaps even more powerfully, to recognize what we see out there in the world — what we construct in our vision of that world — as being inside us.

So I think my real response to Jim is to ask of him, of myself, of each of us, are our ways of finding a connection in our own and others photographs, an objective truth? Is the phenomena we experience and communicate and share real? Is it therefore useful and powerful to deeply interrogate that phenomena, to ask what are the patterns we are drawn to and why those patterns, and to find in our way of seeing the type of connections that Alexander is making.

I think his effort is parallel to our own and that he is providing a potential road map for us in asking ourselves this question. His ideas thus open up a way of seeing — into our own way of seeing.

– Gene Slater

What we are doing when we take our pictures?

With encouragement from Martha, I want to state more precisely the paradox that I think is at at the heart of what we are doing, esp. when we take our best pictures (the ones that so many of you showed last night, that make us go ooh or wow).

What is happening to the way we see the subject and the reality it’s part of when we make it into a subject or story?  (This same thing happens, I believe, when we take the picture in the field, choosing what frame and what to blur or focus on; when we are editing it; and when as viewer we are looking at our own or someone else’s image).

Here’s what I think is at the heart of this process:

1. We identify in our mind something that stands out from everything we are looking at. It stands out because it makes some connection to us (something that makes us react to us as being something more and special than its context). We have the sense of that connection, or sense of potential connection, whether we can articulate precisely what it connects to, what it leads to fire within us (this is a way of speaking but also literally in terms of neurons).

This act, this firing, is similar to the much simpler (but still incredibly complex process) by which rods or cones fire, triggered by the registering of a change, in color or motion, that lets us see anything in the first place. Seeing itself even in these most basic ways, as Eric Kandel argues, is not and — because of the incredible amount of information always available — cannot be a passive process, a simple registering of what’s visible. Rather it’s an active process of constructing a visual reality by focusing only on a tiny amount of that information. This visual reality is a construction in and of the mind, not simply what’s ‘there’.

The glimpsing of a subject or potential for a subject (to be more precise) involves far more of the mind including memory, imagination, emotions etc.  In fact since our minds are not abstract Cartesian computers but embedded in flesh and blood, emotion is a fundamental element or base in what drives us to glimpse a subject or potential subject; it is at the very base of our reaction.

2. Making something into a subject, both in that initial glimpse and in each of the actions we take from then on to literally make it the subject of a photographic image, involves a paradoxical process that moves in two directions at the same time.

a. We are separating the subject from the unified world it exists in, both in space and time, and making the rest of that world into the subject’s surroundings or background. (This is true whether the subject is closed and simple or as Bob mentioned last night, the subject is the complexity of the demonstration with the police in Buenos Aires. The subject need not be an object — in fact it’s rather the status that object takes on which is precisely what makes it a subject.)

b. It’s an illusion (a simplifying illusion that our photographing draws on and utilizes) that what we see in the world are separate, independent objects; that they can exist in their very form except by virtue of the relationships with everything else. This is true of course of the golden barrel cactus with its needles drawing and pooling drops of water from the atmosphere as Danny so graphically showed us. But it’s equally true of the sandstone rock that Sapna had us look at an image of, a rock shaped and being shaped by the action of water and wind, of people climbing on it, of Indians creating hollows in its surface for grinding acorns. Nothing exists outside its past or present connections with everything else.

  What is really there, whether we see it that way or not, are systems and processes, and relationships between those processes. The photo I showed of the electrons of krypton atoms jumping each 150 billionths of a billionth of a second, in the fastest equivalent to a shutter speed we now have, illustrates precisely this. There are actions and processes, not objects.

c. When we identify and thus, in potentiality, create a possible subject, we utilize this illusion — that this fraction of instant and fraction of space shows us something that is ‘separable’ in this sense. Another way of saying this is that we exclude everything else as ‘background’, whether we let portions of it remain in the frame or not.

d. The strongest photographs are the ones, I’m learning from the class, that — in the word Bob uses so powerfully — that are the purest, that is where the subject or story is the most purely separated from its background and context so that we as the viewer can see and feel its power most intensely.

e. So, when we see and record and share so others can hopefully see the power of that purity we are most making the subject visible as subject. All the steps we take in framing, focusing, setting aperture levels and ISO’s, in editing, in cropping, in changing light levels, and then in looking are all aids in creating and preserving this sense, this status.

f. Yet, what draws us to a subject in the first place, what elicits our reaction that moment when we’re walking around, camera at the ready, and the reaction that we then intensify, share and participate in, is precisely not the isolation of the subject but its connection to thoughts, feelings, sensations that go beyond that subject. What is this ‘beyond’?

When we look at Bob’s photo of the echo of the two birds, one in focus and the other behind it a little blurred, we have a powerful reaction that is what gives the subject the energy it has for us. The image, of this particular moment of time and space, connects us to a sense of replication and duplication in nature, of echoes and rhythms within our own mind, of feelings that draw on many parts of us.

g. Thus in taking these photographs we:
1) identify, frame, intensify and purify a subject by removing it from its actual context (from the moments before or after when those two birds won’t be in that precise physical relationship, from all the space and sights around them, from the world they are part of), and
2) instead, and by this very action, connect it to a broader set of linkages within the mind of the photographer and the viewer.

    There is thus a movement away which is part and parcel of this movement toward, from one set of contexts and linkages to another, from a world that is unified to a set of linkages within the mind where subjects and stories exist and glow for us.

3. It’s this double process, this paradox as it were, that I think lies at the heart of the best of what we do in taking effective photographs.

This same process is at work whether a child is taking a snapshot of a friend for Facebook, making that face into a subject, or it’s Cartier-Bresson or Edward Weston distilling a great vision. It’s true in all photographing, even if done seemingly entirely by a machine such as a programmed space telescope or when the images created in that way are evaluated, even if by a machine, to identify differences in the sky the night before. Because there is a human being who is creating and determining the settings of what will be defined as a subject or story.

The more powerful, the purer the photograph, the more successful this double process has been — of making some aspect of visual reality into a subject or story that transcends by excluding it from its surroundings and making it part of a mental-emotional discussion within one person’s mind or a discussion between many, reacting to that photograph.

Because a photograph provides a specific (if highly and valuably partial) visual record, captures the actual light recorded from a specific scene in a specific moment, and makes that record or its results available, it’s easier to see this process at work than when a poet creates a subject out of some scene (Mary Oliver of honking geese) but I expect the same two-way process is at work, both for the creator and each viewer or reader.

That, at least, is how I can best discern what I think is going on after a week of this very excellent class.

I’d love feedback on where you think I’ve gone wrong or that can further push these insights toward deeper truths.

– Gene Slater

World's Largest Marine Reserve

See article: "Obama to Create World’s Largest Marine Reserve Off Hawaii," by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Aug 26, 2016. New York Times.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/us/politics/obamas-action-will-create-largest-marine-reserve-on-earth.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0>

Aerial view of Midway Atoll, June 2007. Credit: Burl Burlingame/Honolulu Star-Bulletin, via Associated Press

Article cites Obama's decision to quadruple the size of the Midway Atoll marine sanctuary at the Papahanaumokuakea monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.  This is a commendable act; an example of the type of action by world leaders that we need more of. But within the vastness of the world's oceans, it is a small token. The sea life that is threatened, damaged and destroyed by human actions has the disadvantage of not being seen on a daily basis by most people.  Out of sight, out of mind? Not for the people of island nations.  I highly recommend the documentary film: The Island President which tracks Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean and his monumental efforts to positively effect global climate change. It is available on iTunes for $0.99.

– Martha McDaniel

Sonoran Desert

Above are photo's of the two interesting plants being discussed in the article below. The vegetation in the Sonoran Desert is changing with climate change. The Palo Verde are increasing in number while the Saguaro Cactus numbers were decreasing. Many new smaller Saguaro plants  will eventually restore the population. However, It was interesting to see the complexity of nature and man's impact on everything around him. 

Sonoran Deserts changing vegetation

Marfatia

Backlighting: Starlight Shade Reveals Planets

See article:"Made in the Shade," by Steve Nadis, 31 March 2016, Discover Magazine online.
<http://discovermagazine.com/2016/may/14-made-in-the-shade>.

Using a giant, flower-shaped shade, scientists hope to block out the glare of stars that obscures the view of exoplanets.  In the following simulated illustration, the idea is to enhance the visibility of other worlds with a perfectly placed screen.

Photograph by Jay Wong

I found this article fascinating on many levels: from a photographic perspective, the mechanics of setting up a 30- to 50-meter diameter 'starshade' in outer space, and the daisy-like shape that was found to be best for cutting down star glare. Innovator, Webster Cash, experimented with a number of shapes to determine what was best for cutting down on the problem of light diffraction, or "it's tendency to bend around the edge of an optical barrier." 

Photo by Matt Nager with starshade designer Webster Cash 

Cash "experimented with 100 different equations, each associated with a different flower-like shape, to see how they did in combating diffraction." Initially, all of his flower shapes originated from a center point, then he added a central disk shape from which the "petals" fanned. The article does not explain how this made a difference, but I suspect it causes a wider diffraction of the star light? so we see what is being illuminated by the star without being blinded by its light.

– Martha McDaniel

Florida Algae - Beauty in Disaster

See article: "Miles of Algae and a Multitude of Hazards," by Les Neuhaus, 19 July 2016. New York Times.   http://nyti.ms/29QHJBn

The algae blooms in Florida's coastal waters, now moving into the headwaters of the Everglades have been growing over the past several months. Although algae blooms are a natural occurrence, it is believed that human activity (e.g., runoff from farms and city sewer systems) exacerbate them. Climate change and resulting phenomenon such as El Nino and warmer ocean temperatures may also encourage algae blooms by "making conditions more favorable for phytoplankton growth — both toxic and nontoxic algae — in more regions and farther north." (Quotation in article by Kathi Lefebvre, a biologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.)

While the impact on sea life (not to mention fishing industries and tourism) in Florida are disastrous, some of the images documenting the bloom are stunning.

The photo above is by Rhona Wise and shows water in the St. Lucie River, FL covered by algae bloom, July 5, 2016. I particularly like the multidimensionality of the image with the rippled reflection of the sky adjacent to, seemingly above, the green algae of the river. It seems to say "the earth is an organic whole" and what happens at one level impacts the rest.

– Martha McDaniel

Lioness Protects Bat-eared Fox in the Kalahari

africageographic.com/blog/the-lions-and-the-fox/
lion vs fox kalahari

This photo story of a lioness protecting an injured potential "meal" is an amazing example of motherly instinct overriding the instinct for hunting and killing. I like the way the photographer documents each step of the lions' interaction with the fox.

In a Smithsonian.com story on "What Animal is the Best Mother?" states lionesses "make especially benevolent mothers. In fact, each lactating mother in a pride will allow any offspring, including other females' cubs, to nurse from her." This makes me wonder if the mother in the photo-story above was benevolent to the fox because she was lactating and / or sated. If her cubs had been weaned, or if she was hungry, would she have killed the fox?

– Martha McDaniel
___________
Gambino, Megan. "What Animal is the Best Mother?" Smithsonian.com, 3 May 2011. Web. 25 August 2016. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-animal-is-the-best-mother-158591597/?no-ist>.

Invisible Visual Perspective of Life

As we left the cactus garden last Sunday I had a small talk with Jim
about electron microscopes. I was surprised to hear that the resolution
of these instruments could be as small as nanometer (1X10e-9 m).
After talking about the turkey tail mushroom, I wondered how a
different scale of photography on the subject I had just presented might
look. Below is an electronic picture ofthe spores of the Turkey Tail
(Trametes Versicolor).

The small dark bar on the lower right side is 1um (1X10e-6 m). This
is almost at the limit of visible light photography; the limit of their
resolution is 0.2 um. With visible light, the pictures above would look
grainy, and would certainly loose the definition possible with the electron
microscope. In my presentation, I also mentioned that the extract of the
Turkey Tail is going through medical trials for possible applications in
cancer treatment. I could not find the compound under study
(polysaccharide-K), but I was able to find an electron microscope
photograph of a crystal of a different polysaccharide:

Looking at pictures at the boundary of visible light did not feel
unusual. After all, I could imagine taking ever more potent lenses
to see smaller pictures. But then I also realized that as the pictures
got finer and finer, I was crossing a boundary. The electron
microscope offers a picture of something no combination of lenses
can offer to the human eye. In that aspect, the electron microscope
is akin to a new sense, and the pictures although they look real and
objective, are really one step removed from our idea of reality. In
other words, the instrument is helping me see a structure to which
hitherto I only had access to in an abstract way. After all, the
picture above is a group of the molecule below, which is really
just a symbol to describe a molecule, and with the electron microscope,
this symbol becomes almost visible.

Danny W Chang


https://www.researchgate.net/figure/261284779_fig3_Figure-3-Chemical-structures-of-ginsenoside-Rg3-i-Rh2-j-and-polysaccharide-k
http://www.ijpsonline.com/articles/immunostimulant-activity-of-a-novel-polysaccharide-isolated-from-lactarius-deliciosus-l-ex-fr-gray.html
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=miami1250269099&disposition=inline

180,000 forgotten photos reveal the future of Greenland’s ice

In searching for an interesting topic to discuss on the blog, I came across this article.  I found it fascinating that scientists can utilize a collection of random snapshots to piece together the history of the behavior of ice in Greenland since the early 1900s.  It is even more intriguing that this information can then be used to forecast patterns of the ice melting. 

Other parts of this article that I appreciate include how the authors and scientists presented the information.  The slide feature that shows the old and new photos further makes the point of the changes in ice.  The article doesn't rely strictly on side by side comparisons as has been done in traditional articles as shown below.

Overall, this article makes great use of photography to convey important lessons about nature.

http://www.nature.com/news/180-000-forgotten-photos-reveal-the-future-of-greenland-s-ice-1.20335

Article Here

- Brenna Rowe

At the Bottom of a Whisky Glass, a Beautiful Experiment - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/science/at-the-bottom-of-a-whisky-glass-a-beautiful-experiment.html?_r=0 there’s a beautiful image in this, about what you can see and learn by looking closely at the bottom of the glass.

- Gene Slater

images of bear walking upright in new jersey and how we see

Debate in New Jersey: Is Bear That Walks Upright Suffering, or Thriving? - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/nyregion/pedals-walking-bear-new-jersey.html

the opening line of the story is: OAK RIDGE, N.J. — The first time Greg Macgowan’s wife saw the bear near their home, the upper half of the animal’s body was obscured by a neighbor’s deck. “She said, ‘Come here — there’s a guy in a bear suit,’” he recalled.

this story and its images reveal how differently we see the same animal, depending on whether we see in the bear what resembles ourselves. That vision allows, indeed forces, us to project ourselves onto and inside the animal. This is a process we do in countless ways, so that the world, like this moving bear, becomes (indeed can’t be separated from) a mirror of ourselves. The neurons that fire up with linkages, surely, to the part of the brain where neuronal linkages evoked by self are located, are no more or less ‘subjective’ or ‘interpretive’ than the ones which are fired by rods or cones in detecting motion or change or color. 

From the other direction, V.S. Ramachandran argues that it’s from the mirror neurons generating empathic reactions from observing others that the sense of oneself is created — from others inward. When the wife looks out over the deck, what she sees is intimately linked to her sense of her own body and her own movements and what they feel like from inside. 

https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-neurology-of-self-awareness.

A terrific book on how we react to what we see around us and in art, integrating neuroscience and aesthetics, and focusing on the role of the unconscious in what we see, is Eric Kandel’s  The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 100 to the Present. New York: random House, 2012.

We can see these connections in what we find compelling in what we choose to photograph, or see in others photos. On the first night, you showed photos containing an echo (of the bird in the background, for example) and suggested how powerful those are for viewers. Of the fifteen properties, that Christopher Alexander argues we are drawn to in our surroundings, is the property of echoes in nature. What appeals to us and seems a subjective experience in reacting to a particular aesthetic image isn’t only aesthetic or subjective. Rather it reflects a fundamental organizing quality of the ‘objective’ world. 

I think the reason the bear story attracts me is that it makes us lower the thresholds and barriers we usually use to separate these realms of the objective reality out there and our reaction inside.

 - Gene Slater

Shrinkage-mediated imaging of entire organs and organisms using uDISCO : Nature Methods

For imaging as a method of scientific discovery, this seems like a fascinating next step in seeing organisms in a transparent ’tissue-clearing’ way (I like that phrase).  There’a a brief squib in today’s New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/science/transparent-mouse-udisco-glow.html

For the more detailed description with fascinating images, see the article below:

 

http://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.3964.epdf?referrer_access_token=1R7EkvOhHa_4t-QlBGL8HNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MW4nbmfYGDvrPgEGaKdd0fuXdvAs0WOjQrw_8ApqZIykFbnrbKahM7xtgd8u08ciIn5D2Tau8KJ9zSwcAI2q0ba5_Rb8Mqwa7UiGTiS-_ShnP4AZWQAK2-YoxtfAOYK2xqZQTZEvAosH7nJQRPGebjoIYg3rMquq6V5-UNGu81eHJuExnUxB09L_oQArXQun0QqA1Mtef-w1tCfJmORlKMIH12_XPGQUX2lcca4qSQMH8xO32gA1UpNZWHdt4w-wihPzCPnYHXXRiX2NRnLtdVHRZGBA9ohNZ-9tmcrB1z04SCbw9QmpKRTCIiLyvEzya_fKSQWSWgdrF99Bq0Zz7_MZ7wxGC380FminIjlCE9320vlv0y1mZZ3RFbr5EZmNA=&tracking_referrer=www.nytimes.com

- Gene Slater