Critique: Does this image looking like active brain?

Question

I want to represent an active brain. So I created an image of brain. In order to show that it is active, I used a bit of animation. I want to highlight right & left brain which suits my requirement. I used colours in order to differentiate

My question is, Does it conveying the meaning what I intended? If not suggest me how can I improve this one.

P.S
I made few changes in this image. As Zack said I made the points to move fast and added few more dots.

I intentionally made few dots to move slow which slowly turns fast. I want to reflect my mind. When I begin to learn something new I usually start slowly and when I get in touch with something I do things fast. So for that reason I would like to reflect that in animation.

How's it now?

P.S 2 I tried to make it look like loop. Since few lines doesn't connect with anything I made it somewhat closer. I think it looks more smooth and looping compared with previous one. Is there any thing else to improve? :)

Version 4
Increased the width and made few changes in animation style. While designing I kept in mind to make variations in speed and to make the animation look like continuos loop. How is this version?

I did some random dots look using fading effect. another version.

Answer 1

I think it conveys an active brain but could be a little better I think.

Things I would try out to see how it looks:

• Making the white dots move quicker and having more of them
• Add some scaling of the whole brain in a pulsing action
• Different patterns of animating

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Edit after second demo posted:

Much better! It looks a little jumpy though, you might consider doing more of a continuous animation (one that flows into itself to repeat) if it's going to be looping like it currently seems like it is.

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Edit after the third demo posted:

The third one does loop better but it looks a little too formulaic, not quite like the way that we think. I might try changing the speeds of them a bit and perhaps the easing on either side of some to make it appear a little more varied.

Answer 2

My opinion is the second image works best. Definitely conveys an active brain.

In terms of "brain", I kind of feel the overall image is too tall. I'd probably still get "brain" from it if you never posted that's what it was. But it is closer to a pecan or walnut shape. The brain is more of round shape, as opposed to oblong. Shorten it so it's square, or close to square, and it would be pretty perfect to me. However, I don't know if the height is imperative.

Either way I think image 2 works very well.

Answer 3

I love what you've done with the turning and stuff, but I think that it should be more random. Right now, you can easily identify all of the paths that the dots take and it looks more like a machine repeating a given task than a person making connections. I'd say quadruple the length of the gif (or whatever format) and have one or two dots moving at a time, starting from seemingly random spots, starting at a random times, and moving to a random locations.

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Edit after comment and update to post (too long to fit in comments)

Hmm, that's not quite what I was thinking. Basically the problem is the length and timing of the animation. All of the dots start and all of the dots end at the same time in the animation. That's not how people think... like nobody gets 8 new ideas every 1.5 seconds. Instead, you'd expect somebody to think of 2, maybe .2 seconds later think of another, .3 seconds later think of another two, etc - sort of how a random generator might work.

Say you have ten boxes. Every .1 seconds, a dot is added into one of the boxes. For every .1 seconds that a dot is in a box, it has a 1/10 chance of going away. One of these boxes represents a brain section. If you monitored this box for around 10-15 seconds, it wouldn't be too obvious that the animation is a repeating gif. Right now, I can easily tell you just did around 1 second of animation. Make it long enough, I forget about the start of the animation (unless I'm focusing specifically on where it loops), so when it repeats, my mind thinks that it's new animation and I don't get bored of the image.

Answer 4

i'm sorry, but i think the top view makes it hard to understand that you are showing a brain and not something else as lungs for example. i dont know if the front view would be too much work from where you are now, but it could make the brain more recognisable. if not, try changing the structure of the brain and the shape. and use references! http://gabellabrainandspineclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/brain-imaging.jpg

Answer 5

It is way better than the previous one. You can also keep the pace of dots as in the first seconds of the animation to implicate brain works continiously.