Word: humanities
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...UNHCR Perspective on the International Response to Haiti: Challenges of Coordination and Outlooks on Future Cooperation" on Wednesday from 4-6 p.m. in the Carr Center Conference Room. You'll get to hear from the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the director of the University Committee on Human Rights Studies, and a representative from the U.N. Refugee Agency...
Livingstone is far from alone in her exploration of the science animating works of art. Many of her colleagues, including some at Harvard, pursue similar interests; they channel their curiosity about human visual perception into an artistic study or use scientific findings to explain some of the fundamental principles that underlie works of art. The Vision Sciences Laboratory, located in William James Hall and run by a group of psychology professors, explores this very chiasm in their experiments—though their approach is slightly different than Livingstone?...
...master’s “Mona Lisa,” placing special emphasis on the lady’s uncanny simper. “And in this work of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvelous, since the reality was not more alive,” he wrote. The sublime expression of “La Joconde” has held sway over its viewers since its creation, a testament to its creator?...
Enter Dr. Margaret S. Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, whose research focuses on human visual perception. Livingstone realized that while contemporary art historians like Ernst Gombrich are not wrong in their analysis of “Mona Lisa,” there’s a science to da Vinci’s masterpiece that had yet to be fully explained. Analyzing the work in terms of its spatial frequencies, Livingstone revealed that the lower spatial frequencies, best seen by the peripheral vision, make the figure appear to smile, while at higher frequencies the smile almost vanishes...
Through a careful survey of many works of art, confirmed by experiments on perception, Cavanagh has discovered that the only requirements for realistic depictions of shadows are that they be transparent and darker than their immediate surroundings. He has shown that reflections, like shadows, are a mystery to the human mind; their representation in art has but a few of the limitations which govern reality. He maintains, in a similar vein as Livingstone, that Impressionist art is so appealing because intentional blurring may connect representations more directly to emotional centers in the brain rather than to conscious image-recognition areas...