Websites As Graphs offers a tool to create a visual map of a website's structural components. Colors represent tags, or, more accurately, a document's main structural elements. Blue for links, red for tables, green for divs, etc. The image above represents a snippet of the weblog you're reading now.
You can get a sense of the variety of structures possible by perusing the Flickr tag websitesasgraphs.
Our sensorimotor engagement with the world shapes our perceptions of the world. This is one of the main tenets of embodied cognition, a line of cognitive scientific investigation that promotes the inclusion of the constraints, opportunities, and affordances of the physical organism and its physical world. The project rejects the notion of the brain as a "central processor" controlling an organism’s actions in favor of distributed decision making that's embedded in the organism's biology — or even in some framework of the environment itself. Embodied cognition thus extends the project of connectionism, with its distributed knowledge structure, but adds the restriction of biological and evolutionary realism.
It strikes me this approach is on the right track. Embodied cognition goes beyond a rejection of Cartesian mind/body dualism, extending the inquiry into ways our perceptions are shaped by — and shape — the world. The experience of moving my hand, or casting my eyes across a scene, changes my perception of myself in the scene, thus changing the scene itself. Recursive? Maybe, but acknowleding the role that the sensing organism plays in the sensing itself is important and, for some reason, new.
"The content of your tactile experience is enacted by your exploratory hand movements... Vision acquires content in exactly this way. You aren’t given the visual world all at once. You are in the world, and through skillful visual probing... you bring yourself into contact with it... Vision is touch-like. Like touch, vision is active... You enact your perceptual content, through the activity of skillful looking."
— Alva Noë (2004), Action in Perception, MIT Press
Visual Complexity, a site by Parsons School of Design student Manuel Lima, offers a searchable collection of complex network visualizations.
Researchers at Stanford University have shown that subjects can reduce their pain when presented with a visualization of their brain images. This is all about feedback loops: patients, through the magic of fMRI, can see their pain, and, with practice, can learn to modulate it.
“We asked them to think about changing the meaning of the pain. Instead of thinking of it as a terrible experience, to think of it as something relatively pleasant. Then the patients were turned loose. Over time, subjects showed an increased ability to change their brain and by doing so to modulate their pain. We really don’t know [how they do it], but then we really don’t know how anyone controls their brain to perform an action."
- Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, study co-author
