Optical experiment eyes Parthenon mystery

The Parthenon ruins in Athens. "For complex visual and psychological reasons, it's an extremely powerful building," Bonna Wescoat says.

By Carol Clark

The Parthenon, one of the most important buildings in world history, has been studied for centuries, but many questions remain about the 2,500-year-old centerpiece to the Acropolis. Among them is the mystery of why an ornate frieze was located in a seemingly obscure position, high on the outside wall of the Parthenon’s central chamber, and partially blocked by the surrounding colonnade.

An optical experiment, to be led by students of Emory University art historian Bonna Wescoat, will take a fresh look at the puzzle. Volunteer observers have been recruited to participate in the event, to take place on Saturday, November 10, at the Nashville Parthenon, a full-scale replica of the original building.

“We’re recreating the experience of how the ancient Athenians may have viewed the frieze as they approached the Parthenon,” Wescoat says. “This experiment could become a paradigm-shifting intervention in the studies of the frieze. We’re bringing the science of seeing into the discussion, an important and overlooked area.”

The original Parthenon, in Athens, Greece, was built to honor the goddess Athena, the patron of the city. “For complex visual and psychological reasons, it’s an extremely powerful building,” says Wescoat, whose research focuses on ancient Greece. “There’s not a straight line in the Parthenon, every single stone in it is curved and tapered slightly. And the proportions are not the usual one-to-two, which is stable, but four-to-nine. These subtle refinements produce an energy and tension that engages the eye.”

One section of the Parthenon's frieze was still in place when William Stillman took this photograph in the 1860s. (Michael C. Carlos Museum.)

The building was elaborately painted, and outfitted with beautiful statuary and adornments, including the celebrated frieze. Wrapping around the four sides of the building, the carved marble panels depict a ceremonial procession. Now dispersed between museums in London, Paris and Athens, the frieze is considered an icon of Western art.

It has long been debated why such a refined work of art was placed in what seems like an obscure, cramped location. Scholars have surmised that viewers would have to crane their necks to glimpse the frieze, and much of its detail would be lost in the shadowy, ambient light. Some have even suggested that the frieze was not part of the original plan for the Parthenon, and may have been added as an afterthought.

Wescoat is among the doubters of that theory. Her perspective has been shaped both by her work on major archeology projects in Greece and frequent visits to the Nashville Parthenon, about a four-hour drive from Atlanta.

The Nashville Parthenon, originally built for Tennessee’s 1897 Centennial Exposition, is made of concrete, not marble, and it does not include all of the original structure’s ornamentations, such as the frieze. But the replica offers a vision of the Parthenon not as a ruin, but as a complete building.


Bonna Wescoat and graduate student An Jiang compare images of the original frieze to a canvas simulation. Photo by Ann Borden.

“Each time I’ve taken students to the Nashville Parthenon, I’ve thought that the area where the frieze would be located is not as bad as it is made out to be,” Wescoat says. “It’s an intimate area. Tracking the panels with your eye, catching shifting views of them between columns, requires an effort that draws you in. You have to keep moving, just as in the procession portrayed by the frieze. The scene is both timeless and timely, an enduring visual expression of the citizens’ relationship to their divine patron, Athena.”

After officials at the Nashville Parthenon gave their blessing, Wescoat and the 11 students in her seminar called Ancient Greek Architectural Decoration set about designing an experiment to test the visibility of the frieze. They decided to create facsimiles of some of the panels and install them in situ.

Their work began with a reconnaissance trip to Nashville in September, where the students decided to concentrate on panels that would have adorned the northwest corner of the building.



The students returned to Atlanta and set up a workshop in the Michael C. Carlos Museum for their Parthenon Project. They made full-scale line drawings for each of the original marble panels. They researched what colors the ancient Greek artists might have used, and how color might have factored in with the visibility. The end result is five painted canvas panels, and a sixth panel made of insulation foam to imitate the 2-inch relief of the original frieze.

“It gives you a much better appreciation for the artists who carved this out of marble,” says Rebecca Levitan, a senior art history major, as she dabs a finishing touch of paint on a horse’s hoof.

The ancient Greek figures take on a new vibrancy with paint. “They start to come alive as we add color and shading,” says Katie Cupello, a graduate student in art history.

Click on the photo above, to enlarge the image and get a better view of the completed panels. Photo by Katie Cupello.

This weekend, the students will return to the Nashville Parthenon with the completed panels, where they will be installed in their correct positions on the building. They will recreate the processional routes of the Athenian Acropolis, using contractor’s spray to stake out the paths. On Saturday, the volunteer observers will move along the passages, starting about 35 feet away from the building, and describe how well, and how much of the frieze they can see, using a detailed questionnaire form. As they move along, the volunteers will also use green contractors’ flags to mark particularly good viewing spots.

The result will be the first experimental data on the frieze gathered from conditions similar to the ones in which it was originally viewed. The volunteer observers will be asked to take their time, and pay attention to detail, in ways that our modern eyes rarely do, Wescoat says.

“The Athenians must have felt great pride when they approached the Parthenon,” she says. “The frieze was meant to communicate something meaningful, there is no question about that. It wasn’t a message that you needed to get with absolute clarity in 30 seconds, like driving by a billboard today. It was meant to be appreciated over a lifetime, and down through generations.”

Related:
Emory University Parthenon Project
Digging into the mystery of a Greek Island
How the Greek gods measure up

Predictive Health: A call to reinvent medicine

"Predictive Health: How We Can Reinvent Medicine to Extend Our Best Years," a new book Emory physicians Kenneth Brigham and Michael M.E. Johns, proposes focusing on health first instead of disease.

Brigham and Johns want to harness the formidable power of medicine and technology — including genome-sequencing, protein-cataloging, massive data-sorting — as tools for health assessment, diagnosis, and intervention. The ultimate goal is to guide people to the improvement and maintenance of their health.

Physicians who practice predictive health would assemble a health portrait by running sophisticated tests on an infant at birth. Potential risk factors for diseases, such as type II diabetes or a genetic propensity for obesity, would become evident long before they are problematic, and physicians could initiate personalized strategies for treatment.

"Our approach involves more than curing disease or making an early diagnosis," Brigham says. "We see it as important to develop a mindset in which to see health as defined positively. We look at disease risk but more importantly at what a person can do to live a healthy, fulfilling life. We look at body fat and what is in a person's blood, yes, but we also look at how you live, where you live, who you live with, and how you react to stress, to determine a healthy lifestyle for an individual."

Read more.

Related:
New health course switches to peer-led, personalized approach

Ethicists to wrestle with zombies on Halloween

Among the questions the "Walking with the Dead" conference will tackle is why many people have embraced the zombie fad, such as these enthusiasts in Marietta Square on Saturday. 

By Carol Clark

Karen Rommelfanger’s husband got her hooked on “The Walking Dead.” She had resisted, but finally succumbed to the AMC TV series when her husband was watching an episode on zombie neurobiology set at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“He called out to me, ‘You’ve got to see this,’” says Rommelfanger, a neuroscientist and director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics.

The fictionalized researchers were gathered around a glorified brain scanner, discussing the “you” part of a brain, where thoughts reside, and whether the “you” part was gone.

“This is exactly the kinds of questions we talk about in neuroethics,” Rommelfanger says. “Is the brain the seat of personhood? What does ‘brain dead’ really mean?”

It wasn’t long before the Emory Center for Ethics coined the term “zombethics” and created a public forum to discuss them. “Walking with the Dead: An Ethics Symposium for the Living” is the brainchild of Rommelfanger and Cory Labrecque, a scholar of bioethics and religious thought at the Center for Ethics. All the reserved seats for the event on Wednesday, October 31, are filled, but people can still participate in the campus Zombie Walk, starting at the center at 11:30 am and proceeding up to Asbury Circle.

Zombies are becoming as emblematic of Atlanta as the Varsity drive-in. 

“The Walking Dead,” filmed in and around Atlanta, has resurrected zombies and turned them into visceral symbols of all sorts of modern-day fears.

“The show is full of ethics questions dressed up in zombie suits,” says Labrecque, who wrote his dissertation on radical life extension and teaches courses on personhood theory and religion and medicine.

A close friend recommended the series to him. “I was initially reluctant about wasting my time on a series about zombies, but was hooked after the first episode,” Labrecque says. “I watched the whole first season in one sitting.”

His fiancée was too afraid to watch the show. But after he described it to her, Labrecque says she wanted to know: “Would you shoot me if I was bitten by a zombie?”

(Apparently, he gave a satisfying response because the wedding went as planned on October 13.)

Since “The Walking Dead” is set in Atlanta, it seemed especially fitting to launch a zombethics conference here, Rommelfanger says.

Harvard psychiatrist Steve Schlozman will be among the panelists at the Emory conference. In the video below, he describes a zombie brain autopsy:

Zombies touch on fears beyond death, such as slowly disappearing to Alzheimer’s, or wasting away in a coma. “We are not equating real-life patients with zombies, we’re using zombies as an entry point to start a conversation about really difficult subjects,” Labrecque says.

The conference panelists include psychiatrists, philosophers, religious scholars, physicians, CDC officials, historians, ethicists and neuroscientists. They will grapple with questions like: When is a human being no longer a person? What is free will? What does end-of-life care look like for those for whom biological death is not the end? How should healthcare resources be allocated when pandemics hit? 

And, finally, what’s behind the public obsession with a gory series like “The Walking Dead?”

“Some scholars have suggested that it’s massive group therapy,” Rommelfanger says. “Zombies are a way to experience fears of death, degeneration and other scary things in ways that you can manage.”

Related:
The science and ethics of X-Men
Why robots should care about their looks

Photos by Carol Clark

When chemistry becomes a piece of cake

It's National Chemistry Week, when chemists show just how clever they really are by cooking up things like periodic tables made of cupcakes. Non-chemists are also invited to join in the festivities at Emory, which will hold its annual Mole Day party this evening at 5:30 pm in the courtyard between the Emerson and Atwood buildings. Bring your own beaker.

Related:
Sparking a love of chemistry

Higher-math skills entwined with lower-order magnitude sense

While many animals understand the concept of less and more, only humans can learn formal math.

By Carol Clark

The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system,” says lead author Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. “We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated with variations in our intuitive sense of magnitude.”

Babies as young as six months can roughly distinguish between less and more, whether it’s for a number of objects, the size of objects, or the length of time they see the objects. This intuitive, non-verbal sense of magnitude, which may be innate, has also been demonstrated in non-human animals. When given a choice between a group of five bananas or two bananas, for example, monkeys will tend to take the bigger bunch.

“It’s obviously of adaptive value for all animals to be able to discriminate between less and more,” Lourenco says. “The ability is widespread across the animal kingdom – fish, rodents and even insects show sensitivity to magnitude, such as the number of items in a set of objects.”

Only humans, however, can learn formal math, including symbolic notations of number, quantitative concepts and computational operations. While the general magnitude system has been linked primarily to the brain’s intraparietal sulcus (IPS), higher math requires the use of more widely distributed areas of the brain.

For the PNAS study, the researchers wanted to build on work by others indicating that a lower-order sense of number is not just a separate function, but plays a role in the mental capacity for more complex math.

The dot test shows variation in people's ability to intuit number and area.

The researchers recruited 65 undergraduate college students to participate in an experiment. To test their knack for estimating magnitude of numbers, participants were shown images of dots in two different colors, flashed for only 200 milliseconds on a computer screen. They then had to choose which color had the greater number of dots. Most people can quickly distinguish that a group of 10 dots is greater than a group of five, but some people have a finer-grained number sense that allows them to discriminate between 10 and nine dots.

The participants were also shown dots of varying sizes and colors to test their ability to gauge magnitude of area.

They then completed a battery of standardized math tests.

The results showed that the more precise the participants’ abilities were at estimating the magnitude of a number, the better they scored in advanced arithmetic. The same correlation was found between precision at gauging magnitude of area and the geometry portion of the standardized math test.

“By better understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying math abilities such as arithmetic and geometry, we hope to eventually inform how we come to learn symbolic math, and why some people are better at it than others,” says study co-author Justin Bonny, an Emory graduate student of psychology. “It may then be possible to develop early interventions for those who struggle with specific types of math.”

U.S. teens lag in math skills compared to other industrialized countries. China ranked number one in math in 2010, the first year that the country participated in the Program for International Student Assessment, while the United States ranked number 31.

“Falling behind in math is a huge problem,” Lourenco says, “given that we live in an increasingly technological society and a globally competitive world.”

Related:
How babies use numbers, space and time

Top image: iStockphoto.com.