We know that animation creates the illusion of movement through a rapid sequence of still images (as indeed does traditional celluloid film, including live action) and that comics creators have long used various devices and tricks to imply action and motion from a still frame to the reader’s eye. The excellent New Scientist has an interesting article on how artist’s can ‘trick’ the brain into perceiving motion from a static image; they have examples drawn from 18th and 19th century Japanese artists, but there’s much here that would be familiar to 20th and 21st century comics artists and readers too.
Kyoto University’s Naoyuki Osaka scanned the brains of volunteers while exposing them to the work of Hokusai Katsushika (above), showing them Hokusai-san’s art with examples implying motion (on the left), little to no motion (in the centre batch) and static objects (right). In the results the university team found that only the images on the left (the ones which implied motion) activated a region of the brain known as the extrastriate visual cortex – the same area which lights up on scans when subjects are shown photographs which depict real-world motion. Interestingly even single images could imply movement to the brain, even without any extra devices such as ‘speed lines’ and facial expressions were also found to imply a sort of movement.
It won’t be a surprise to cartoonists, comics creators and readers, of course, that you can successfully imply movement and actions from a seemingly frozen image (and indeed a whole, flowing narrative from just a few static panels with the imagination filling in the gaps between frames) but it’s amazing to learn that the actual areas of the brain which deal with motion comprehension are activated by these pictures too. To coin an old Vulcan phrase, ‘fascinating’. (via Exclamation Comics’ twitter)
March 19th, 2010 at 10:11 am
I’d love to see what would happen if drawings (all intended to depict movement) of varying quality – from beautifully drawn and fluid drawings like Hokusai’s, to stiff or awkward poses with poor technique – were presented to a range of subjects, from artistically lay control subjects to professional artists.
Which drawings would activate that brain region, and in who?
For that matter, how would varying detail in the image change things, how would abstraction, or realism, or any number of variables? Seriously exciting avenue for research.