Summary: When studying user experience, the brain and its activities need not be considered in terms of separate function.

For the past few days, I’ve been taking in the following image, linked to me from the blog of a future coworker of mine, which was originally linked from here.

In science today, many people spend their careers dissecting, disseminating, breaking apart, and then explaining phenomena, anatomies, and actions. This is all well and good. The people who do this work should be honored, because they carry out an important task in quantifying the many qualities of the world. This leads to understanding of complex processes, which leads to many important things like medicines, technologies, and the philosophical underpinnings that explain to us as humans how the world works.

It is all to often, though, that those in non-scientific field appropriate quantitative data into realms of the world in which it should not necessarily be subjected. Sure, researchers in the neurosciences separated the brain into gross approximations many, many years ago. The most basic separation is the left-brain, right-brain split, which in popular media today symbolizes two different types of people in our society. Lesser known are the brain’s quadrants, roughly depicted in the above image alternatively as (clockwise, from left) Occipital, Parietal, Frontal, and Temporal. (There’s also the cerebellum, which is that big, bulbous thing that hangs at the bottom, but it’s often ignored in brain area discussions…not sure why.)

Denoting these basic brain areas was (and is) important for neuroscientists. It helps to create a basic map of the brain, so that we can generalize theories, then dig deeper to understand them. What worries me, however, is when these brain areas are engendered with specific emotions, or otherwise obfuscating labels. In fact, ‘curious’ thought patterns are not located in the Occipital lobe, but this graphic seems to say that they are. The same is true of the other thought patterns and brain areas noted in the graphic.

To take this issue a little further, I do not believe that it is fair to boil down the user experience to these four basic notions of emotion. The user’s experience is a holistic one, that cannot be broken down and “tweaked.” It is not possible to “add a dash of analytics,” or “take away a little curiosity.” When a designer changes one aspect of an experience, he or she automatically and implicitly changes many others.

Still, the notions expressed in the fine text of this graphic are important to understand and consider. So how is this issue reconciled? I do see some validity in assigning a brain area and specific color for each of the pieces of the “Creative Mind” as explained in the image above. Doing this helps the viewer remember each topic, because it is assigned to an area on a visual map.

It is important that we simply not take these lines too seriously, and realize that our understanding of the brain and human experience are blurry things. There are no distinct lines, and notions of experience bleed together constantly. We must be careful with our graphic illustrations, because we may be crafting explanations that are true in one sense, but false in so many others.