Dirty secrets

Abstract

The Slave to Sense Simon J. Cropper The brain is a slave to sense: its job is to decide whether what comes in from its sensory apparatus is useful or not, and combine that with its ongoing activity with a result that is adaptive and functional. In this talk, my slave will talk to your slave about making sense. The kinds of visual and audio textures created by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Brian Eno have a great deal of similarity to those textures we see and hear in nature; clouds, waves, forests and soil. These are the stimuli the brain has evolved to deal with, to make sense of. So when presented with such a texture the extraction of some meaning seems to be so much easier. How o..