The Mysterious Diamond Eye Imp: An Optical Illusions from Early American Advertising
From Duke University’s Emergence of Advertising in America archive comes this beautiful advertisement for Diamond Dyes, published sometime between 1853 and 1920. The ad uses the negative afterimage optical illusion, which is a common sight in most first year psychology textbooks, although usually in a much more boring way. This image is actually kind of frightening.
,The Mysterious Diamond Eye Imp
Diamond Dyes
Hodgepodge: How to electricute yourself, where the machine of big science go when the science stops and a woodcraft fMRI puzzle
From Bre Pettis via Make Magazine come these wonderful diagrams illustrating the dangers of electrocution in typically glorious Weimar fashion. From the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern By Stefan Jellinek. I like to think of these as filling a need to acculturate people to the dangers of electricity, and based on these images, I would guess electricity was pretty dangerous technology at the time.
This is one of the most normal diagrams in the collection.
One of the stranger ones.
A brief article and slideshow from New Scientist (Where do science supermachines go when they die?) on what happens to all of physics pretty toys when the atom smashers shut down.
An obsolete copper radiofrequency cavity from the Large Electron Positron collider now lies in the garden at CERN.
Finally, Neil Fraser, a Google engineer, applied 9 MRI scans to 60 1-inch wood blocks to create this simply amazing puzzle that can be re-arranged to display different cross-sections of the brain. Via Infostetics.
Neuroscience + Woodwork = Awesomeness
The Body Landscapes of Fritz Kahn
In this short post I look at some illustrations produced by the Weimar era popular science writer and illustrator Fritz Kahn. Theses illustrations are interesting because they break with Kahn’s more popular man-as-machine metaphor (which I have explored in The Body Machines of Fritz Kahn) by depicting the body as a fantastic landscape. Produced early in Kahn’s career to me these illustrations present a more traditional and romantic view of the body than Kahn’s later work.
This first image is illustrates the glands of the skin as chimneys on the hand:
Chimneys of the Skin
The next image depicts the inside of blood vessels and could be considered a bit of a stretch as a body-landscape. However, I have seen exactly the same illustration in another Kahn publication with the sole addition of small fairy-people riding on-top of the blood cells through the vein. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the image at some point in my move from Toronto.
The Vein as a Tunnel
A bit more of a stretch is this illustration labeled “how the dessert cleans the tongue” where the tongue is a landscape being worked on by little figures who represent various foods and drinks. The reason this is a stretch is that the meme of little people working (and carrying out tasks) inside the body is very common in Kahn’s illustrations, including his body-machine images. This image is part of a series of fascinating illustrations dealing with eating habits and I will definitely do a full post on in this topic in the future.
How the Dessert Cleans the Tongue
Next is an illustration meant to show the spead of the neural impulse compared to the speed of contemporary air travel and wireless communication. Interesting here is the choice of North and South America as the comparitive landscape, probably related to Kahn’s move to the United States following being smuggled out of Nazi Germany just before the outbreak of World War Two.
The Speed of the Neural Impluse
This last illustration is my favorite of the series and the image that prompted this quick post. This illustration is of a landscape drawn from the perspective of a person inside the nose looking out.
Through the Proboscis Darkly
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The history of psychology through the lens of Life Magazine
Google announced this week that they are partnering with Life Magazine to digitize the entire back catalog of Life’s images and are making them available through Google’s Image search platform. While looking through the archive I found a number of eclectic images from the history of psychology and decided to post some of the more interesting ones here. To be clear, I am not trying to tell a coherent history with this post; rather, I just selected the most iconic images I found that still illustrated some of the prominent trends in psychological research throughout the 20th century.
This first image depicts the Yale’s child psychology lab of Dr. Arnold Gesell in 1947 and is possibly my favorite for its surreal, B-movie, science fiction quality:
Child Psychology lab at Yale
According to Wikipedia:
Gesell made use of the latest technology in his research. He used the newest in video and photography advancements. He also made use of one-way mirrors when observing children, even inventing the Gesell dome, a one-way mirror shaped as a dome, under which children could be observed without being disturbed.
Here is a “The March of Time” video hosted on Google Video of a Gisell Dome in action.
Children have played an important role in the history of psychology and have an equally if not disproportionate place in Life’s images of psychology. In this picture a child navigates a glass obstacle in a box at Columbia University in 1940:
Child Navigating Glass Obstacles
Continuing the baby theme, this image from 1947 is described as showing “Baby John Gray Jr. happily playing in his Skinner box… [a] new-style crib which eliminates germs, drafts & constricting clothing because of temperature controls & slid-down glass.” Looks like a happy little tike to me:
Update: According to Dr. Christopher Green (of the wonderful and informative blog Advances in the History of Psychology) the “baby box” was not really a “Skinner box” (I had wondered about this) as it was not set up for conditioning. Instead, Skinner called it an “air crib” and it was also jokingly called a “Heir conditioner.”
Boxes for Babies
This image, from 1940, is of “a baby climbing pedestals which he has pushed together to reach the lollipop hanging from the ceiling at Normal Child Development Study at Columbia University.” I would like to see someone try to get this one past an ethics review board now:
A Baby Climbing Pedestals
This image is of Army recruits in Miami Beach, Florida taking aptitude tests in a movie theater in 1942. This is important because of the role of aptitude testing, especially in military and educational settings, to the growth of psychology in the United States in the early 20th century.
Army Recruits
Switching gears slightly as psychological research becomes more biologically oriented, this image from 1953 depicts a young girl whose “brain impulses are measured by an electroencephalograph, readings from electrodes cemented to the head may reveal tumor as cause of headache at the Headache Clinic, Montefiore Hospital.”
Girl with Electrodes
Here is an imaging technique I was not aware of from 1966, a “somersaulting x-ray machine being used to photograph the brain’s ventricles.” Looks kind of dangerous to me:
Somersaulting x-ray Machine
This image of a “patient resting on scales, showing a slight loss of skin moisture” is interesting and I would like to know more about what this research was trying to accomplish. Reminds me of a ancient (and possibly mythical) research technique I’ve heard about that balanced a subject like a teeter totter so carefully that blood flow changes during cognition would cause him to unbalance, kind of like an analogue fMRI.
Patient Resting On Scales
Kind of fancifully, this image labeled “studying mental disorders through laboratory research” from 1949 is a sign of things to come as well as a wonderful example of an almost purposely obtuse piece of scientific apparatus.
Studying mental disorders through laboratory research
Animal research has played a huge role in psychology, but more importantly, this image of a “cat pulling rat’s cart around floor as a relaxation from psychology experiments” is why the internets were invented:
Cat pulling rat's cart around floor
Note:
These images are copyrighted by Life Magazine (well.. so they claim, some of the images in the archive are definitely old enough to be in the public domain). I am assuming, however, that someone warned them that goggle-wearing, hot-air ballon flying bloggers are likely to both post and link to these images once they are in the wild, and that they are OKAY with this, at least for non-profit purposes. Clicking on any of the above images will bring you to Google Image’s page for the specific image.
Illustrating the Incomprehendable
Here is another illustration from Fritz Kahn’s encyclopediatic series of books “Das Leben des Menschen; eine volkstümliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwick-lungs-geschichte des Menschen” (The Life of Humans: A Popular Anatomy, Biology, Physiology and a History of the Development of Humans) titled “In 70 Years the Man Eats 1,400 Times its Weight” which purports to show the amount of food the average man eats in 70 years as train cars full of food.
In 70 Years the Man Eats 1,400 Times its Weight
I was reminded of this particular illustration by an image I recently saw on Ptak Science Books (a blog that I can really only describe as a repository of wonderfully eclectic science and technology illustrations) which attempted to show 12,000 employees leaving a tire factor. Ptak uses it to illustrate the number of casualties of the Battle of the Somme (The Department of What Things Look Like: the Casualties of the Somme, Visualized) a task which is as monumental as it is heatbreaking. Here is a small version of the image for the purpose of comparison, but please go see his blog for a full sized image as well as many other wonderful things:
Here is another image from Ptak (A 117×1 Mile Blanket of Planes: What 185,000 Planes Looks Like) which uses a similar visual style to, this time from the London Illustrated News and showing the number of aircraft the United States planned to produce between 1942-194.
Which reminds me of one last illustration in which Kahn uses industrial metaphores to show incomprehensible numbers. Named “The Amazing Pump Within Our Bodies” this illustration uses a tanker trunks and a skyscraper to illustrate the amount of blood the heart pumps during one’s lifetime:
The Amazing Pump Within our Bodies
Unfortunately I’ve lost the source for this image.
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