Presenting Visual Koans

This post is a presentation of Visual Koans, a little web app I made to experiment with an unusual kind of creativity-boosting "meditation", for lack of a better term. Your feedback is welcome!

In August I published a blog post titled Boxed, where I reviewed all the strange things I've experienced and learned while remaining strapped up inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine for dozens of cumulative hours, doing cognitive tasks for neuroscientists. One of these strange things was the effects of watching sequences of completely random images.

This is part of an experiment I'm participating in, where the researchers record my brain's activity while I passively watch thousands upon thousands of pictures. It's an unusual experience for a human being to experience this level of randomness: usually there is a logic in what we see, some kind of intentionality and interpretability, however minimal. But in those experiments I have no idea what to expect next, and can find no logic at all, because, of course, there is none.

I wrote:

Something strange happens: even though it's all purely random, the brain tries to make sense of it all, tries to find patterns and associations. With no time to establish conventional framings, it has to improvise, take in the images in a partly-unconscious way, without thorough processing. This, I think, is a great way to stimulate creativity.

This part sparked the curiosity of several people on social media. They looked for apps giving you the same experience, just to try to get the same creativity boost I wrote about. I was interested in this myself, because I don't always have a 3-Tesla MRI behemoth to meditate in.

It's true that you can buy digital photo frames or install slideshow apps to achieve something resembling the experiments I described. However, as soon as I tried those solutions, I knew they were missing the mark. They felt like scrolling on social media or zapping through channels on the TV or on Youtube. The randomness is there, but it feels distracting, rather than focusing. It took me a while to figure out why I felt like that.

The problem with those existing apps is not in the functionality, which is extremely basic, but in the selection of contents. The slideshows and media feeds easily accessible via app stores and on web pages all have the goal of entertaining you. Each transition might be random, but what goes on between transitions is far from it: it's all designed to interest you, to be pleasant or "nice" in some way, and sometimes even to become addictive.

This is not what I got during the fMRI experiments. The sequences of images in those sessions are devoid of purpose, non-designed, cryptic. The first reaction is to think, "Why should I be looking at a poorly-shot picture of a chicken plucking corn? What is the intent of this other picture of an empty parking lot, with nothing in particular highlight?" Those pictures are sublimely random and unnecessary in and of themselves, in addition to being randomly sequenced. Each, a kind of visual koan on its own. This, I realize now, might be what made staring at them for a long time such a queer experience for me.

If an app to do that doesn't exist yet, I might have build it myself.

And so I present you Visual Koans, an experimental mind-wandering app designed to emulate the effects of my fMRI sittings, minus all the uncomfortable bits. Just out of the oven, still steaming and beta. The app is an extremely simple slideshow: it cycles through random images every four seconds, and there is no pause, no back or forward button, no text. And, most importantly, it contains 24,000 images, all puzzling, not particularly well shot, and meaningless—just what your brain might need to be kicked out of its usual cozy prophesying habit.

The only setting you can play with is which categories of images to display. Depending on how well this works, I might add more categories and more images.

Here is how you use it:

1. Choose one or more categories.
2. Click on Begin.
3. Look.
4. Keep looking.
5. Just look, don't try to interpret the meaning of those images, because they have none. They weren't meant for you. They don't give a peanut that you're looking at them.
6. ...I don't know, try different things: empty your mind or let it wander, think about your to-do list, rehearse a speech, whatever works for you.

Don't expect immediate magic. It might take you two minutes, or five, or thirty, to get in the necessary state of mind (or it might never work for you). My experiments run for about two hours at a time, although I often get creativity sparks relatively early on.

I'm stressing that this is an "experimental" and "beta" app, because I've really just published it. I haven't spent much time actually using it myself, so it will probably need improvements before it can actually work as intended. If you try it and have any kind of feedback, respond to the newsletter, or find my contacts here. I'm curious to know how you use it, and I won't ask you to share the million-dollar ideas you got out of it. ●