Week 10 Response

In the lecture last week, we had guest speakers here to give speeches. The most interested part for me will be the Primate Cinemas that introduced by Rachel Mayeri. She works on the project with monkey and apes. Mayeri focused on how the monkey react to the image they received and what did the monkey like the most from many video clips. She observed what was the behavior of those chimpanzees after they watch the show on the TV. She also tried to find out which get chimpanzees’s attention more, sound or the image.

In this video, Mayeri mentioned that chimpanzee liked to watch cartoon or some other types of videos. Chimpanzees did not stay at a spot and finished watching the whole video for a long time, and chimpanzees would leave when they felt the video was boring to them then came back to the TV when the sound attracted them. I felt that was really interested and it also made me think that chimpanzees were like young kids. Young children like to watch the colorful image with simple story lines, and the period of how long they could focus on a thing was short too.

https://vimeo.com/99715947

I felt that was really interested that Mayeri tried many different ways to get attention from chimpanzees. But all of the result were based on Mayeri’s assumptions. She compared the common and difference between chimpanzees and children. Chimpanzees will react when they see the video they liked same as children who will laugh when watch the interesting scenes.

In my opinion, chimpanzees are just like young human beings but they could communicate with the body language. When we were still in the young age, we could not express our feelings by speaking in a certain language, what we knew what to let others know what we were thinking was to communicate with our body language. Our parents also learn how to communicate with us. Parents will guess what was wrong with us when we cry, what was wrong with us if we got mad, and what will make us happy. Our parents will talk to us with the language and the body language which made us lean better and made us know what was the message they wanted to deliver easier.

Tzu-Hsien Yang (Anna)

Week 9: Body Language, Present and Future

This week lecture, we had three special guests, Rachel Mayeri, Dr. Deborah Forster, and Dr. Adam Burgasser whose talks gauge me towards a topic that I have been following and find interesting, and that is body language. As Deborah Bell have said, “body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the word.” As I listen to Mayeri’s lecture on her film series Primate Cinema , I was reminded by Deborah Bell’s quote. One of the film was Primate Cinema: Apes as Family  is an 11 minute single channel film and a two channel video installation that follows a young female chimpanzee  as she befriends a wild group of foreigners. The drama is intercut with the chimps’ responses to the film, when it premiered at the zoo. The project creates a prism for human beings to learn about the inner world of chimpanzees. By watching a movie through these  chimps’ eyes, we can imagine what they think and feel.

What makes a chimpanzee unique is that although they couldn’t speak vocally like humans do today, they use their body as a way to communicate  with their peers. The sounds they hear and the expression of humans interacting with the chimpanzees, these chimps move in a way to express how they feel.  We ourselves are no different from these chimpanzees, not just because they are our closest relatives but a lot of what we do and how we view others in today;s society are also through our body language.

A show that I continue to rewatch again and again is Lie To Me,, an American crime drama back in 2009 that assist in investigations, reaching the truth through applied psychology, interpreting microexpressions, and body language. From this trailer, you notice that just from the face alone, a lot can be said from just slightly moving your eyebrows, flaring your nostrils, or even having a smirk on your mouth. Why I bring this up is because these small details can truly define an individual if we can manipulate how we interact with other people.

It isn’t easy to try and arrest someone if there isn’t enough evidences. But by manipulating our questions, we can slowly begin to read the body language of the individuals and make an attempt to tell the truth.

Body language can also be seen from the hands. Allan Pease spoke at Marquarie University and explaining that how we think and react and come from simple as simple as the palm of a hand. The video is long but I highly encourage you guys to watch it.

The body language is a powerful tool that can be used to speak to another person. Imagine a person who cannot speak or is afraid to speak, we can use our body, our gesture, and our facial expression to convey the message we want to convey. While we are more sophisticated than chimpanzees today, our body language speaks a thousand words. While body language is used today to conceive how we imagine others, we should be thinking about how we can use body language in other settings. There is a lot that can be done. For example, we can use body language in psychology tests and see how one interpret that individuals. From there, data can be collected to observe the brain as to how people are thinking or to even see if an individual is functioning properly. Body language is a common practice among friends and family and a lot can be said about that individual, but the question is can we take the art of body language to a new level and use that to our advantage in interpreting individuals.

~ Kevin Trieu-Nguyen

Week 9 Response: Body Language

Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema, specifically Baboons as Friends, reminded me about the fact that humans and primates are not that different at all. Our DNA’s are greater than 97% similar to primates after all. The side by side comparisons between the two species in Baboons as Friends made obvious that the storyline enacted by the primates could be easily replicable by humans and was something that is fully understandable and believable to viewers. This was possible even though the human reenactment had no dialogue. I believe that viewers were able to comprehend the storyline through the body language of the human actors.
Doctor Hugo Heyrman explores the idea of body language, essentially what human beings tell with their bodies in his project, Body Language Sequences. He presumes that up to 90% of all communications between humans are nonverbal and that bodies do not lie. Our bodies send subliminal messages, which greatly affect how we relate to each other and how they view us. The Body Language Sequences includes a series of experimental ultra-short films that captured the variety in human behavior. It is a cinematic study to discover patterns in human behaviors and to give insight to feelings, attitudes, expressions, gestures, and emotions that are rich within human communication. Heyrman studied the “micro-motions” of human acts in order to get a better understanding of human character and discovered diversity existed in life styles, but no matter what every action was recognizable.
One looping clip (about a second long like the rest) featured a man expressing what seems to be anger at another man. Because of the looping of the ultra-short clip, the viewer realizes how much movement has happened within that one second. The man leans forwards to seem assertive. He pulls his hands out of his pocket in an explanatory gesture. His brows are furrowed, expressing frustration. And his mouth is smile-less and opens wide, so viewers can infer that the man is yelling and is unhappy. The other man stands up straight and keeps a straight face, but opens his mouth midway to interrupt- in a sense, defending himself when necessary. All this was gathered from a one second clip and anyone who saw could easily identify that there is a dispute between the two men.
Another clip replays a girl sitting on a ledge surrounded by rose petals and playing with some of those petals. Her body movement suggests playfulness and the carefreeness associated with children. The way crossed-legged way she sits combined with her seemingly dancing/bouncing truly depicts youthfulness. She lifts the petals and the viewer can almost hear her singing a song.
The various clips, although amazingly short, are able to capture the intent of each person in the clip because of the subjects’ specific body language. Every part of a person’s body plays a role in enabling other people to “read” that person. Body language lets people understand each other without any dialogue exchanged. It is amazing that this concept is an inherent part of life not only for us, but for other species too. We are able to understand the basics between certain species; it’s a wonder if other species understand us too.

– Crystal Nguyen

Resources:
http://www.doctorhugo.org/bodylanguagesequences/series1/index.html