Soma}News – Jan/Feb 2014

Hello! Today I’m kicking off a more newsy approach to the E}V blog reflecting ongoing interests in the overlaps between art/design, science, dataviz and the body. Your comments, shares or suggestions are warmly welcome. 

This Finnish research project about the body and self-reported emotions was the main interest in January. See my review here.

“Bodily Map of Emotions” – Research paper (Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari, Hietanen)

A team of Finnish researchers Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari, Hietanen recently published a paper “Bodily Map of Emotions”. It outlines how people describe their emotion related body sensations. This blog post responds to the work in the context of it’s own research ‘Emotionally}Vague‘, (video presentation here).

Measuring Love in an fMRI Scanner

A charming film from Aeon Magazine – five ‘competing’ individuals generate feelings of love in an fMRI scanner at Stanford. Watch film here.

Art and Illness Symposium: What does illness feel like?

For the vast majority of us, illness is where life and death meet. It’s a guarantee that even if we ourselves don’t get seriously sick soon one of our loved ones will. Knowing a little of what to expect and trying to imagine that will prepare us and help us be more compassionate if our mother, say, screams random obscenities at us. Or we ourselves might find strength knowing that this indescribable agony is shared with countless others. I know it did for me. I hope this post may be of some value to even one person who may feel confused or misunderstood right now. The speakers gave so much of their time to the symposium (more here) that I hope to do a little justice to them here.

What I learned from ‘The Experience of Illness: Learning from the Arts – a Symposium’ at University College Cork, 2012.

Roundtable Discussion

The reductionist methods of science, so well taught to physicians, need to be linked with an imaginative investigation of our patients’ experience.– David H Alpers

Without exception, everyone’s lives are somehow or other effected by illness. It is a pressing concern to develop understanding of, and therefore empathy for the ill, which leads to better care. Empathy involves being able to put oneself in another’s shoes and to actively imagine their experience. To do so we must understand the experience in detail. However, the ill have greatly reduced verbal capacities and verbal language cannot fully describe pain and experience. So communication methods must go beyond words to better describe experience.

Cultural Depictions of Meloncholy

Arterial Plumbing: Data visualisation and diagnosing heart disease

Credit: Michelle Borkin

It’s encouraging to learn of scientists actively researching and highlighting the importance of data visualisation in life-saving areas. Two aspects of data-viz principles have been demonstrated by Professor Hanspeter Pfister and Michelle Borkin, at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, from a study on diagnosing heart disease.

What is Universal Design?

2010 theme: Technology in the City. Seminar held at the Radisson.

Ireland’s wracked by frustration at its inept government this week but after a day with the professionals of the National Disability Authority, I have more faith in the public servants than the bumbling leadership. Donal Rice and Barbara Schmidt-Belz summed it up: ‘Bad design excludes’ they say and quote Victor Papanek that ‘Good design applies to all people’.

Helen Thomas / Jen Tarr – Dance injuries

In order to examine the social contexts around dancers who experience pain and injuries, researchers from London College of Fashion used a 3D body scanner along with interviews. The project, Pain and Injury in a Cultural Context, Dancers’ Embodied Understanding and Visual Mapping asked  200 subjects to map current and past pain and injury sites onto the their own body scan. The same technology is being used at Hull University to measure the changing size of Britain’s children.

Gary Wolf – The Quantified Self