Thursday, July 23, 2009

How the Brain Creates Meanings? -- Tom Wujec on TED Talks



Tom Wujec gave a presentation about 3 ways the brain creates meaning by vision on TED talks.

I tried to combine the 6 ways of seeing, proposed by Dan Roam in the book: the Back of the Napkin, with Tom Wujec's 3 ways here in the following summery of the presentation.

There are thirty parts of brain in relation to making visual senses. First of three major parts in the brain is called the ventral stream, which detects “who” and “what” the objects are. That's the part of the brain that is activated when you give a word to something. The second is the dorsal stream, which detects “where” and “when” in the scene. You'll create a kind of mental map of your surroundings. The third one is the limbic system where people have an emotional response to what they see. It is to say that the connections and the pattern of objects trigger the limbic system to augment memory by creating visual persistence. The process to create visual persistence can be the ways to understand “how” and ”why” attributes in the scene.

Tom Wujec also present a real case to describe how visual thinking took place in a business meeting without using power point slides in two days. For people, it is just naturally, biographically evident that visual thinking happens spontaneously even before we start to think.
Making of good use of the visual support is simply that natural for people.

2 comments:

  1. very clear talk... could not stop making visual notes!
    tanx!

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  2. Thanks, Dennis!

    It's also nice to talk to you about these reflection, too. I will summarize them later on.

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