done and done

This past Saturday, I officially graduated from the University of North Texas! It was a long, hard fight, but it has been pretty great to be finished.

I had a great party with my family this weekend and have moved on to figuring out what's next until I head off to Lake Buena Vista, FL for the Disney World College Program in late August. Gotta move out by the end of the month, so it's time to make some decisions!

Colored Thinking

Do colors make you think differently? I was reading up on Jonah Lehrer's blog and am just intrigued by this article:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/02/the_color_of_creativity.php

When we talk about design and branding, or the use of color in design and art, we rarely realize the actual effects. We assume that there are effects, because certain colors make us "feel" a certain way. But how much evidence do we have of all of that? Lehrer cites a study that has the evidence, or at least the beginnings of some. And I think his insight on having ideas in the shower is absurdly relevant to my current project-- and absolutely fascinating.

Gesturing Concepts

I ran across an interesting article from Yahoo news regarding the development of vocabulary in children, and how gesturing to them to illustrate concepts might be an indicator of a more sophisticated vocabulary comprehension as they begin to speak and read. It might be that they are able to create connections and form better understandings of words. Maybe the visual aspect of seeing the meaning of a word is a significant factor. Interesting!

http://health.yahoo.com/news/ap/med_gesturing_toddlers.html

Anyone who's ever watched a tot perform the arms-raised "pick me up now" demand knows that youngsters figure out how to communicate well before they can talk. Gesturing also seems to be an important precursor to forming sentences, as children start combining one word plus a gesture for a second word.

Lateralization- do musicians hear and artists see differently?

In my biological psychology class today, we started talking about lateralization and how the brain understands input, especially from separate sides of the body.

To make things brief, our professor discussed a study where it was shown that most ordinary people generally enjoy listening to music in their left ear as opposed to their right. Because the input is on the left side of the body, the information is directed to the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere is responsible for our emotional understanding and expression, so it makes sense that we would find the most initial pleasure by listening with our right brains.

However, professional musicians enjoy listening to music in their right ear. That means it is being heard by the left, and more analytical, hemisphere of the brain. It is suggested, then, that professional musicians may actually listen to music differently than the rest of us. Maybe what appeals to them the most are the technical aspects of the music, the things that they understand and spend a lot of time thinking about... like rhythm, harmonies, syncopation, etc.

So what does that say about professional artists? No studies have been done, that I know of, and it's not quite as simple as music.

Theoretically, artists would enjoy analyzing the technical/intellectual aspects of a work of art while giving less attention to the emotional content. Seeing with the left brain would mean that the image hits the left visual field, or the right side of the retinas. Which means that the image is actually on the right side of what is being seen; the right side of a painting, for example.

There's a catch: because the right hemisphere of the brain dominates the understanding of spatial relationships and it thinks more holistically -- think gestalt -- we might not understand art without that side of the brain. And without understanding it, we can't analyze it or enjoy it. So maybe the same is not true for professional artists.

Maybe, we are more bilateral in our analyzation of art than we think.

It might also help to think about it in ways that describes our difficulty in talking about art. We understand the emotional content and the way it works with gestalt through our right hemisphere, which translates over to our left hemisphere to inform the understanding of strategy and intent. Our language skills are in the left hemisphere, where we are trying to analyze theory and hypotheses as we talk about it. The simultaneous actions in the same hemisphere compete against each other, and make it more difficult to talk about what it means and easier to talk about how it makes us feel.

Importance

I have been challenged to create the best piece I have made for my last project in class. Art is art, and we are relatively unconstrained as far as this final piece goes. But when I challenged the fact that no one can determine the "best" piece so far, especially without knowing each others' past works, I was charged with creating the "most important" piece I have done.

Most important. What is importance? Is what is important to me the same as it is to someone else? Are the similarities between our definitions of important MORE important than the differences? Or are the differences what is truly of importance?

Important, by definition can mean several things.
"Of great significance or value." Talk about totally relative. My values are defined by experience, by personality, and by beliefs and convictions. The significance of something depends on the situation.

"Authoritative; having authority, ascendancy, or influence." I certainly believe that's true. All art takes on the righteous position of having authority and influence. All artists take on the role of teaching someone something, or asking something. Humble though some questions might be, their challenge is an influence on the viewer. Then there are the self-righteous and haughty artists that create for the mere fact that they have the ascendancy, the power, and the voice to say what they want in any way that they want. They become authoritative. Art is, by this definition, important.

"Crucial; vital to the resolution of a crisis." If I were to use this as a definition for the piece, it would be asking much of myself in regards to figuring out what crisis to resolve, and how to go about it. What would it take for me to find some sort of satisfaction about creating? Is there a conflict that arises because of it? And when the answer is yes, as it always is, what do I do?

If importance is relative to any person at any time, what is my definition? And what, personally, does it mean for me right now?

I think that it means thinking.
It means taking chances. It means learning.
It means being experimental and being okay with it.
Not being afraid. Embracing fear.
It means being conceptually and rhetorically solid.
I want to do something that asks questions, that messes with people's minds, that challenges them, that makes them mad or frustrated, that brings out the messiness of thinking that we try to keep to ourselves.

If it's going to be important, it can only be important to me. I can't determine what is important to other people. I can challenge what they view as important-- what they hold as significant or valuable, or what is crucial to resolution of conflict for them. I can objectify importance, I can portray importance, by using imagery directly. I can coerce importance into things that are meaningless. But if it is a piece that is most important, it has to be important to me.

Legislating Morality

I've been reading in my Social Psychology book about attitudes and beliefs, and how it (doesn't) predict behavior. Truly, we end up justifying our behaviors by adjusting our attitudes than the other way around.

But I found it interesting, two days before this presidential election, that I had to think about politics while reading my psych text. A whole section talks about interracial behavior and racial attitudes, and what stuck out to me was the effect of social psychology in our legal system, and then our society in general.

Because to be honest, creating laws that establish and encourage certain behaviors ends up influencing how we, as a nation and a society, create our beliefs and attitudes towards something. Examples? It wasn't until a law mandating seatbelts was instituted that we all eventually found it to be something that was necessary, acceptable, and understandable-- the creation of a law changed our behavior, which made us have more favorable attitudes.

And again-- when desegregation was an issue before the U.S. Supreme Court, social scientists were asked to explain the ramifications. They said that waiting for the public's opinion to change would take a long time-- changing the law gave our attitudes impetus to change more quickly.

"If we legislate moral action, we can, under the right conditions, indirectly affect heartfelt attitudes."

It's not talking about fleeting feelings-- but people's convictions and beliefs.

So with this upcoming election in mind... with any politics in mind, I have to support candidates that support creating legislature that will change attitudes for a better moral community. Enacting laws against abortion might not be a favorable thing now, just as some people opposed the desegregation of schools. But, in essence, it could truly create new perspectives about unborn children and abortion. Our behavior could change our attitude, cultivating a culture of life-- of responsibility and solidarity. We, as a society, and in a general sense, would begin to respect life and reject our current culture of death.

And I have to believe in psychology more than I believe in our political system.

What would happen if we enacted laws that invited immigrants to come to our soil? What if refugees were welcomed with open arms, as mandated by legislature? Would our attitudes about them and their situations change? Theoretically, yes.

I'm interested to see, in my lifetime, what laws are passed and what legislature is created. Hopefully, the majority of it will create situations in which our mindset about many things will change for the better, where attitudes will become more positive or more negative towards specific things in order to create a better community for us all.

I love strawberries

I was fixing lunch today when I realized how much I love strawberries. This jumped out at me before I could even think of another word. :)