If Looks Could Kill - Graphic Art & Design

In Japanese culture, they focus on eyes to determine the mood of others. In America, they look at mouths, according to tests. It even plays out in the emoticons favored.

Japanese Happy Face (^_^)

American Happy Face :)

Theoretically, it’s because the Japanese are more guarded with emotion, less apt to smile. One side note, is that Americans are more prone to prolonged eye contact, which is considered very rude and intrusive in Japan, yet this is how they read one another.

I am amazed that Americans would gauge mood based on lips. That would never occur to me. Explains a lot of gullibility in this country, if all it takes is a smile. Suckers!

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Related:
Face Reading
Understanding Facial Expression

According to this article, arousal is triggered by the subconscious before the brain decodes the desire. In other words, we are not in control of what turns us on, so much as how we react.

Controlling these areas of the brain are “two basic and distinctively operating pathways - one that promotes sexual enthusiasm, another that inhibits it,” likened to a gas pedal and a brake. Everyone drives differently.

Men are not moved by images outside of their own orientation, while women’s test results revealed their desires to be less exclusive.

I get pissed when people suggest that someone can choose to be gay, heterosexual or otherwise. As this article supports, individuals do not determine their own desires so much as whether they repress or pursue it. So, Nyah! ;p

(SOURCE) - free registration required

On the opposite end, there are those that claim asexuality. Now that’s *fucking wild. *fucking being an adjective, rather than a verb, in this context. >;)

Not one of my personal favorites, but there’s no denying his talent, the misunderstood Vincent Van Gogh fancied himself a realistic painter, rather than the expressionistic one he was labeled as due to his complementary colors and pronounced strokes.

Though “tragically brought down by incomprehension and madness, Van Gogh himself aspired to serenity and happiness.” It eluded him. He snuffed himself at 37, suffering from the seizure disorder and hallucinations, exacerbated by alcohol and probably syphilis as well.”

(Source) - Slideshow on Van Gogh with detail

Of further fascination to me, is the fact that if people were eventually “scanned” for perceived mental illness, we wouldn’t have work like his. The line between madness and creativity is hardly there - afflicting not just artists, but scientists, raising the question:

Do the mad have access to hidden worlds of imagination, denied to the sane? Is madness the final frontier of art and science? Is genius only a step away from insanity?

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Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuroscientists are able to determine the following:

• Which of 2 images a subject is looking at
• Whether one is looking at a face, animal or scene
• What finger you’re about to move

Already, scans have been used to identify brain signatures of disgust, drug cravings, unconscious racism, and suppressed sexual arousal, not to mention psychopathy and propensity to kill.

Interestingly, John-Dylan Haynes, coins the phrase, “mental privacy,” which is exactly what concerns me about this.

(Source) - complete with links to abstracts and additional detail

Visit the Gallery, click on Design, to peep the full sized version of the Illustration I did this weekend, shown top-right.

Perpetually fascinated by the subconscious, this intrigues me:

• Rats deprived of sleep die faster than rats that are deprived of food
• Some sadist actually implemented and tested the aforementioned bullet to the point of death.
• Memory consolidation takes place (defragmenting)

…if our brains did what they do during dreams while awake, we would be diagnosed as mentally ill. Yet we enter into this cousin of delirious insanity every night. “Do we go mad at night to prevent ourselves from doing so in the day time?” Hobson has asked. “Or do we go mad because the brain temporarily gives up certain of its controls in order to regain them, in better order, when sleep ends?” - Harvard sleep researcher, J. Allan Hobson

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As if it were necessary, further proof that homosexuality does occur in nature. An article notes that in captivity, flamingos will pair up boy-boy, girl-girl or boy-girl.

Are these flamingos going to hell? Luckily, according to popular religious theory, animals don’t have souls, so the answer is “No,” - sarcasm dripping heavily.

It’s interesting, flamingos even have a societal hierarchy according to pairings:

1. Male-Male pairs
2. Male-Female pairs
3. Female-Female pairs
4. Single Males
5. Single Females

I post stories like these to point out the normalcy. I am continually perplexed by the fact that sexual orientation is even an issue in this modern age, but living in good ol’ Texas, I know we have a long way to go before everyone is truly treated equally.

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