brain

The American Museum of Natural History has published a helpful video that explains how the human brain processes color and shines a light on the importance of color accuracy in technology.

Art is something we all enjoy in one way or another. We assume it is a subjective subject, but there may be an objective angle that we can observe art from. Perhaps art isn’t subjective at all? Neuroaesthetics is a scientific approach to art in the way it is both produced and consumed, and this gives us a basis for figuring out what makes art… art!

The simple act of capturing a photo of something impairs your memory of it, even if you don't plan on keeping the photo. That's what a new psychological study has found, but the reasons behind this are still unknown.

Did you know that your brain can be tricked into seeing a black-and-white photo in full color? The 1-minute BBC clip above shows an example of this, and you can try it out for yourself.

Men who share selfies online are more likely to exhibit psychopathic tendencies. That's what researchers are saying after conducting a lengthy study on the link between selfie-taking and certain personality traits.

Photography is powerful because we can place ourselves into the perspective of those we see in an image. Whether it’s street photography, photojournalism or portraiture, we use photography to understand ourselves in relation to people around us.

Feel a bit dry when it comes to being creative with your photography? Try taking a walk -- or, more specifically, a photo walk. A study over at Stanford has found that walking around can give you a significant boost in creativity.

Google is planning on rolling wearable camera glasses out to the general public in the near future, so we may soon be hearing utterances of "okay glass" all around us as owners snap photos with voice control. If using your voice as a shutter isn't your thing, you might want to start waiting for the Neurocam. It's a crazy iPhone-based camera system that uses your brain waves to snap photos!

Good news, camera weenies -- not only does photography make you attractive and rich, it helps your brain stay sharp as you age. That's the conclusion of a new University of Texas study that evaluated a number of different types of activities to see how they affected cognitive skills -- particularly memory -- in the elderly.

Data is embedded in our environment, in our behavior, and in our genes. Over the past two years, the world has generated 90% of all the data we have today. The information has always been there, but now we can extract and collect massive amounts of it.

Given the explosion of mobile photography, social media based photo sharing, and video streaming, it’s likely that a large portion of the data we collect and create comes in the form of digital images.

As a photographer, you will sooner or later bump into the phrase "the decisive moment". The decisive moment is a concept made popular by the street photographer, photojournalist, and Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The decisive moment refers to capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.

People will do just about anything to alleviate their anxiety. During the last year of writing my doctoral thesis, the worry about being able to finish grew increasingly heavy. The relentless grind of research, constantly being told that your work is inadequate, and believing that 80-hour workweeks are average has its tolls on all students. Once you reach the edge of this process and are pulverized into oblivion, you get a nice, shiny PhD.

You may be wondering what got me through this. The answer? Buying a ton of camera equipment. To photographers, this type of retail therapy is known as gear acquisition syndrome. Someone with this syndrome impulsively buys cameras and related gear, amassing more camera gear than they can realistically use.

Photo manipulation is nearly as old, if not as old, as photography itself. It has been used in state propaganda, to unify nations, for aesthetic and creative expression, to generate fear, and the list goes on and on.

As technology advances, altering photographic images has become quite easy. This begs the question: do the images we see convey accurate information?

There has been a good deal written about the similarities of the camera to the eye as well as the computer to human memory. What I would like to do is clarify the uniqueness of the human brain from camera technology and at the same time show the similarities between brain function, photography and cognition.

It was a day of typically brutal summer heat in Phoenix, and I had the air conditioner blasting as I raced down the freeway en route to some event I was obliged to cover in my role as a general-assignment newspaper reporter.

The scene came to me in pieces as I glanced to the other side of the roadway. A car on the shoulder, broken down and steam billowing from under the raised hood. Somebody, presumably the driver, sitting on the grass embankment nearby, head in his hands. Wearing a full-on clown outfit -- wild hair, floppy shoes, pancake makeup, red nose, the whole package. And looking about as morose and defeated as a clown can get.

Here's a walkthrough of how I hooked up my Android phone to my DSLR. Why did I do this? Because of Dropbox, social media, quick editing for the web, an intervalometer, macro/low-angle photography, an external LCD screen for video, Wi-Fi, and more.

Professor and self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann created an eye and memory-aid device he calls the EyeTap Digital Glass. The EyeTap, worn by Mann above on the left, is a wearable device that is similar to Google Eye, pictured right, but he's been making them at home since the 1980s. The goal of his project is to use images to aid memory, or even to augment the memories of people with Alzheimer's Disease or who simply want to preserve their memories more permanently. However, a recent misunderstanding over Mann's technology allegedly caused a confrontation between Mann and several employees at a Paris McDonald's restaurant.

If you ever create a slideshow of portraits, you might want to avoid showing them aligned side-by-side with a gap in between. The video above shows a crazy optical illusion that researchers have dubbed the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect". By flashing ordinary portraits aligned at the eyes, the human brain begins to compare and exaggerate the differences, causing the faces to seem hideous and ogre-like. Researcher Matthew Thompson writes,

Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive.

Here’s something that’ll blow your mind (sorry that it’s an ad): stare at the colored dots on this girl’s …

We’re now one step closer to being able to take photographs with our minds. Scientists at UC Berkeley have …

Update: It looks like the video was taken down by the uploader. Sorry guys.

Color is simply how our brains respond to different wavelengths of light, and wavelengths outside the spectrum of visible light are invisible and colorless to us simply because our eyes can't detect them. Since colors are created in our brains, what if we all see colors differently from one another? BBC created a fascinating program called "Do You See What I See?" that explores this question, and the findings are pretty startling.

Toymaker Kid Robot has a line of DIY toys called …