EVENT #3

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ART + BRAIN FEAT. DR. MARK COHEN

On Thursday, May 26th, I attended the talk, Art + Brain featuring Mark Cohen. Dr. Mark Cohen was introduced by Professor Vesna as the “example of a renaissance man” who is a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and engineer. He is also a professor of Medicine here at UCLA. I found Dr. Cohen’s talk to be very intriguing; he covered a vast amount of ideas and topics having to do with our brain function and how we interpret things through our own eyes, through our own brain functions. 


A question posed by Dr. Cohen during his presentation


The topics of idealism, our conception of our world, cortical columns in our brain, image compression, and the sparseness of our world were some of my favorite topics he spoke about. Because of the focus on the brain and how our neurological systems help us interpret the world around us, I found this talk to be a great continuation of our module Neuroscience + Art. We learned the background and basis of these two disciplines merging, but Dr. Cohen helped to take an additional step to understanding how the brain and art interact. 


Dr. Cohen during his talk


Dr. Cohen first discussed the idea of the human consciousness — how we interpret the world around us as “consistent, complete, ordered, [and] meaningful”. This idea led him into the topic of idealism, which is the idea that everything we know is based upon our own perceptions. We are limited to knowing based on our senses and our ability to sense our world — we are unaware of what we do and do not know because there is no other way for us to measure it. For me, this topic was completely mind-boggling, but it made sense. We only know what we know and we do not know what we cannot sense. 

A slide about the brain and visual reality from Dr. Cohen's presentation


Going further into his talk, another topic I found very interesting was the ideas of image compression and our brain inference. The idea that we are able to interpret raw images and fill in the gaps subconsciously is fascinating. Dr. Cohen used the Picasso “Donna Che Dorme” as an example. He asked the questions “what is this a picture of, what is she thinking, what is she doing, how did Picasso feel about her” and the phenomenon is that we all generally come up with the same conclusions even though the picture is merely a few lines. This phenomenon is called surround inhibition.


Picasso's "Donna Che Dorme" featured in Dr. Cohen's presentation


There were many other topics discussed by Dr. Cohen that I enjoyed hearing, however the ones I mentioned were some of my favorites. I would definitely recommend this talk to anyone interested in learning about ourselves and our interactions with the world. The topics can be applied to anyone, as he talks about phenomenons that we all experience whether we know it or not. Dr. Cohen’s talk was both educational and equally fascinating. 





PROOF OF ATTENDANCE:






proof of attendance 2: my name featured in the talk



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