Growing up as the youngest, and only daughter in my family, it was common for my two older brothers to find ways in which to torment me, as any typical siblings do. However, when I was 10 I figured out a way to get back at one of them. My middle brother is completely red-green colorblind. I knew this about him for my entire life, but for some reason when I was around that age, I became interested in understanding what that actually meant. After asking my parents for details on the limits of my brothers color vision, and getting the very simplistic response of “he can’t see any difference between the colors red and green,” I came up with a genius plan to mess with him. I decided to write messages to my oldest brother in green colored pencil very lightly on red construction paper. As we passed the sheet of notes back and forth, my middle brother tried his hardest to make out what we were saying, but just couldn’t differentiate between the two colors, growing more and more frustrated even after figuring out what we were up to. Eventually he had no choice but to give up trying to understand our essentially coded conversation, and I dropped the charade with the satisfying feeling of a job well done.

Because my brother is red-green colorblind, I know that the photoreceptors in his retina responsible for color vision –his cones– do not function properly. This means that the necessary signals that need to be transmitted for the eye to perceive those colors either send corrupted signals, or don’t send any signals at all. In order for someone to be able to perceive all colors, it is pertinent that they possess functioning red, blue, and green cones in their eyes. Though the other photoreceptors are important –the rods– they are not responsible for color perception, and are relatively insensitive to wavelengths. This means that my brother may have perfectly functioning rods, and the issue with his red and green cones is completely independent from the rest of the functions of the photoreceptors in his eyes.

Aside from this little episode, my brothers colorblindness has never significantly negatively effected his life, and it shouldn’t hold him back from accomplishing anything that he hopes to accomplish.

I was looking for things outside to write this blog on when I realized I had a picture on my wall that was perfect for this project.  First I want to go into a little bit of the rule that this picture goes with.  The global superiority effect causes us to see the whole object that a picture is portraying rather than the small parts of it that make it up.  The properties of the whole object take precedence over the properties of parts of the object.  This is also referred to as the con figural superiority effect which says that for any complex visual stimuli such as faces, they are easier to be recognized than the individual parts presented in isolation. How far away you are from the object has a lot to do with the way that you perceive it.  One example we saw of this was the picture of Marilyn Monroe, but if you were up close it looked like another person.  The picture that I have on my wall is a photo mosaic of Bob Marley.  The picture is made up of thousands of tiny pictures of different events that happened over his life in order to make up the whole picture which is a poster of his face.  If you are standing right against the picture you can see all of the tiny little pictures and have no idea that it actually makes a big picture out of all of them.  If you stand back you can’t really even tell that there are thousands of tiny pictures, but it just looks like a photo of Bob Marley.  You can find examples of these on google images, but I couldn’t really see the smaller pictures inside of the big picture on the computer screen.

Over spring break I experienced an example of the Pandemonium model. Before describing the experience first I want to address what exactly the Pandemonium model is. The Pandemonium model is part of how humans group what they see into pictures and meaningful objects based on perception. While some aspects of grouping help humans to distinguish one object from another, others confuse the brain. The Pandemonium model consists of demons that represent certain neurons. Of those demons they express three different aspects of perception. Some of the demons are feature demons which build off of one another to form letters. For example one demon may code for the leg of the letter “A” which also might code perfectly for half of the letter “X.” Next there are cognitive demons which encode for certain letters after the feature demons have built one. And finally decision demons are what our brain actually sees based on the decision of the neurons or all the demons as a whole. The reason why this model is important is because humans can be fooled by their own perception. And in the case of the pandemonium model the way certain letters are coded in the brain based on their feature demons will activate the wrong decision demon. Therefore, humans are seeing an illusion because of the similarity of feature demons. This being said, over spring break as I was sitting at dinner with my friend’s parents when his mother began talking about her eyesight and how she was unable to see across the room. She then asked us if we could look across the room at the television and see what was written on the screen. At the time we were using the television to watch the music channel so there were words posted on the screen instead of a series of moving images. And as we looked across the room certain people were unable to read the words on the screen. At that moment the song title was “Home is where the heart is.” I then began to explain to his mother why she might not be able to read some of the letters from far away. For example the letter “E” has feature demons that could easily code for another letter. The letter “C” in fact, has all the same aspects of the letter “E.” This could easily explain why some of us who were looking at the same image were unable to read it. The people who could read the words were able to see and make the right decision demon activate. Thus the Pandemonium model is accessible in real life and can affect the way certain people perceive certain objects.

Dark adaptation occurs initially within the cones by convergence and loss of inhibition. However, the lower bound of sensitivity is still set by cones. As time goes on, the cone sensitivity increases, the threshold falls, but then levels off. The rods will also begin to adapt, and then increase sensitivity as the time proceeds. Photopic vision occurs when there is a higher light level, like daytime. It is has cone photoreceptors, low light sensitivity and very high acuity and color vision. In the other hand, scotopic vision occurs at nighttime with very low light levels. It has very high light sensitivity, poor acuity, no color vision but exhibits the use of rod photoreceptors. When shifting from photopic vision to scotopic vision, or vice versa, we need certain amount of time to adapt. I’ve always enjoyed going to the theater for movies. And I’ve discovered that if I see a movie during the day, it will take me longer to adapt  than seeing a movie at night because during the day when there is higher light level, our visual system operates in photopic mode which is opposite for the scotopic vision when inside the cinema. However, the rate of adaptation also can depend on the length of the movies, how long my eyes have been exposed to the brighter light in the darkness.

I am a huge fan of Mind Mapping. I always start with drawing a Mind Map when I am preparing for exams, brainstorming for assignments, and when if there are too much going on in my head. The way Mind Mapping works is that in a Mind Map, information is structured in as way that mirrors exactly how the brain functions – in a radiant rather than linear manner (Buzan, 1993). A Mind Map helps to categorize informations that are related to each other and also maps out your thoughts, using associations, connections and triggers to stimulate further ideas. They extract your ideas from your head into something visible and structured. Research shows that the brain likes to work on the basis of association and it will connect every idea, memory or piece of information to tens, hundreds and even thousands of other ideas and concepts (Anokin, 1973).

After I learned about the Gestalt grouping rules, I realized that there is a connection between Mind Mapping and Gestalt grouping, especially with the principle of proximity. According to Wolfe (2012), the principle of Proximity is a Gestalt concept that refers to the visual tendency to group shapes together if they are close to each other and which makes us to perceive those groups as single units. The principal of Proximity is related with Mind Mapping in the way that they are categorizing. In the Mind Map, major categories radiate from a central node, and lesser categories are sub-branches of larger branches. By viewing a whole picture of Mind Map, we perceive the keywords first, which are either highlighted or written relatively bigger than subcategories and can assume that related key points and contents are grouped together under each the keyword bubble. This perception process is working under the process of proximity. Because process of proximity works naturally in our brain, we can create the Mind Map which is the most effective tool in many fields.

Reference

Anokhin P.K. (1973). ‘The forming of natural and artificial intelligence’.Impact of Science in Society, Vol. XXIII 3.

Wolfe, J. M. (2012). Sensation & perception (3rd ed.). Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer

Buzan, T. (1993). The mind map book. London: BBC Books.