Imagine working in a windowless building, cut off from the soothing sight of clouds blowing across the sky or leaves rustling in the wind, as another deadline looms. Feeling stressed, you look up at the wall and see a strange but somehow pleasing pattern etched into its surface. You feel better.
That's the kind of future that University of Oregon physicist Richard Taylor imagines, and now he's working with other scientists at the UO and other universities around the world in hopes of realizing it. They're studying patterns known as fractals in an effort to understand why and how certain ones seem to give people a mental boost.
First, though, it's important to understand what fractals are. Simply put, they are patterns that repeat themselves at increasing levels of magnification. Think snowflakes.
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Of course, it gets more complicated than that. It turns out that the mathematical relationships in those obvious kinds of fractals also exist in things that don't have any kind of obvious pattern at all. Think coastlines and tree branches and clouds.
But somehow our brains seem to recognize these patterns, Taylor said. And certain kinds - those that fall in the middle range of complexity - have been shown through earlier research to have a soothing effect on people.
Not coincidentally, scientists believe, those are the kind of fractal patterns found most often in nature. Enter the UO researchers, who are trying to figure out how our brains process these images and eventually harness nature's fractal patterns for use in the built environment.
Paul van Donkelaar, a professor in the UO's department of human physiology, is working with Taylor on a project that tracks the small movements of the eye as a subject looks at a computer-generated fractal pattern. The idea is to get a better idea of how the brain recognizes and assesses the patterns.
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http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/11/25/d1.cr.fractals.1125.p1.php?section=cityregion
October 02, 2006, 09:19:59 PM
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