As part of the ‘Presentation and Visualisation of Information’ curricular unit of the Master's Degree in Information Systems Engineering and Management at the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, under the responsibility of Professor Ricardo J. Machado, a series of seminars entitled ‘The mind that sees’ began yesterday. Professor and clinical psychologist João Carlos Major was the first guest speaker and addressed the topic: ‘The mind influence, conscious and unconscious, on the visualizing information process.’

It's an (almost) adventure to bring neuroscience into engineering, but according to João Carlos Major: ‘We see things according to internal codes. When an engineer creates an interface, for example, he relates it to the mind, the way we are and see things,’ emphasizes. Emotions were also discussed and decoded as scripts, biological algorithms, and computer archetypes. ‘Emotion is an algorithm that must be evolved,’ says the psychologist, hence the importance of considering emotions and how they can interfere with computational tools design.

This was the first of several seminars under the theme ‘The mind that sees,’ which aim to scientifically address and ‘rehabilitate’ the information visualization concept in all its genesis and applicability.