Science Magazine University Project

Two editorial spreads for the theme human achievement. I chose the following article to produce two images for the fictional scientific magazine “The Scientific Reader”

The article It takes more than an IQ to describe how our brains work required extensive research in order to craft supporting imagery for the spreads. Some of the points that sparked great interest through research were:

“Regular brain training didn’t aid performance at all, yet people who often played other types of computer games did significantly better in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory. It seems the popular idea that brain-training games are helpful whereas standard computer games are somehow bad for us could be the wrong way around.” (Highfield, 2012) This image was the driving force for the background of each rendition, the part of the brain that showed stimuli and the cognitive output using a statistical tool to analyse the variations in performance.

Brain Stimuli – The colors of the ‘brainbow’ come from mapping neurons which show up as fluorescent proteins of a random mix of yellow, green and red. The research gave insight to the concept of illustrating the outcome of the scans that allow scientists to trace the connects between neurons by using a non invasive techniques of water diffusion. I painted the brain regions that showed stimulation after testing to illustrate the visual evidence of the brain activity in response to playing the computerized games.

The circles over top represent memory by associating circles with the popular memory game “working circles” a brain game that exercises your working memory, which is the brain’s ability to actively hold information for tasks such as reasoning, comprehension and learning. The grid represents the statistical approach used to identify and analyze brain activity. The pieces of the outer man floating across the grid were inspired by Cubism and creates the allusion of pieces of cognition landing on the grid and helps connote results of the test.