December 31, 2012

Science of Organization: Organizing Visual Information in the Brain

2012-12-31-brain — Excerpt from The Human Body and Health Revised by Alvin Davison, published in 1908. From perpetualplum (Sue Clark) at the Flickr Creative Commons.

This morning, my medical news search alert produced an article about the science of organization! A group of scientists at UC Berkeley has constructed an outline of how the brain organizes visual information.

I find that creating categories is one of the most difficult aspects of organizing anything. Here are some of the broad organizational categories the scientists found when it came to organizing visual data in the brain.

It was interesting to me to see what a people-focused brain we have. Every single category has people in it somewhere.

What they didn’t find as significant organizing categories:

Place (i.e. where something happens) doesn’t seem to be of extreme importance in any of the identified categories

Size (i.e. didn’t find that larger objects more important than smaller objects)

I am clearly oversimplifying the results. For a scientific, yet easy-to-understand overview of the research, watch the video below from first author of the study, student Alex Huth.