BrainBlog

On the 20th of October, the New York Academy of Sciences is hosting the following event: Celluloid Science: Humanizing Life in the Lab From the website: "Science & the City teams with the Imagine Science Film Festival (ISFF) to present a panel discussion about telling the stories of science through film. Moderating this panel will be A Planet of Viruses author Carl Zimmer. On the panel will be Sean Carroll, PhD (evolutionary biologist and founder of the Howard Hughes Medical institute's Documentary Institute); David J. Heeger, PhD (neuroscientist who studies the brains under the influence of cinematic stimuli); Darcy Kelley, PhD (biologist at Columbia University); and Valerie Weiss, PhD (scientist and award-winning writer and director, Losing Control)." Full description here

"Gold Cortex" - the image of the week from Scope, the Stanford School of Medicine blog: Image of the Week "Gold Cortex" was created by Greg Dunn. Here is is website: Greg Dunn Visual Art

Today's recommended paper reflects one of my research interests when I was an undergraduate: Experiencing Art: The Influence of Expertise and Painting Abstraction Level. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2011;5:94 Authors: Pihko E, Virtanen A, Saarinen VM, Pannasch S, Hirvenkari L, Tossavainen T, Haapala A, Hari R Abstract How does expertise influence the perception of representational and abstract paintings? We asked 20 experts on art history and 20 laypersons to explore and evaluate a series of paintings ranging in style from representational to abstract in five categories. We compared subjective esthetic judgments and emotional evaluations, gaze patterns, and electrodermal reactivity between the two groups of participants. The level of abstraction affected esthetic judgments and emotional valence ratings of the laypersons but had no effect on the opinions of the experts: the laypersons' esthetic and emotional ratings were highest for representational paintings and lowest for...

The Charlie Rose Show's series on neuroscience is replaying right now the creativity episode - airing on Bloomberg. The discussion between Richard Serra and Chuck Close is compelling. Check it out, if not now then by streaming from the show's website. Addendum: Show link: Charlie Rose Brain Series Episode Twelve: Creative Brain (originally aired in late October 2010).