Communicating Science Through Visual Media: Synaptic Pruning

This animation project was created by Elisabeth Evans, Denali Schmidt, and Alexandra Urban through the class "Communicating Science Through Visual Media." This class, offered jointly by professors at RISD and Brown and in partnership with the Science Center and the Creative Mind Initiative, explores and develops the pedagogy of using visual media to convey scientific concepts.

"Synaptic Pruning"
2014
Elisabeth Evans, Denali Schmidt, Alexandra Urban

You look at a coffee cup, you see a coffee cup. But what if when you looked at the cup, your eyes sent signals to the auditory center of the brain? Not only would you see the coffee cup, you would start hearing things too… How distracting! Now imagine how confusing an entire city would be with all this overlapping sensory information. Well, this might actually happen if we didn’t have synaptic pruning.