Jenna M. Lang edited untitled.md  about 8 years ago

Commit id: 46d20bcd77f02aac19535ffccc143fa90821cbef

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#big picture questions, motivation and relevance  But, actually, pie A single microbial community can be composed of many thousands of species, and the tools most commonly used (pie  charts are a problem because and stacked bar graphs) to visualize  the relative abundances of species in communities are inadequate. The  human brain is not good adept  at estimating area. And, the areas of wedges in a pie or rectangles in a bar, and if  it is worse at estimating angles than lengths, so were,  the stacked bar chart is an improvement upon color palette and graph size required to faithfully represent  the pie chart relative abundances of thousands of species of even a single community would be prohibitively large.  There is a great need to develop more intuitive visualization tools, especially  for that reason. However, when the comparing microbial community composition across a large  number of chunks in samples. Fortunately, human evolution, via natural selection has engineered  a bar or pie chart increase, solution to this problem. The human brain has a region,  the value fusiform face area, that is entirely devoted to facial recognition. This region  of the graphic brain allows us  to convey information about overall community composition takes process  a nose dive. very complex image in an instant, requiring minimal decomposition into component parts. Instead, faces are perceived holistically, as a gestalt. Faces are infinitely variable, and we can quickly pick up on even very subtle differences and similarities between them.  Given that human brains are not well-equipped to interpret pie charts, how can we present microbial community data in a form of which we can make sense? The solution to this problem lies in a region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus.   This region of the brain allows us to process a particular, very complex image in an instant, undergoing relatively little decomposition into component parts. Instead, they are encoded via a holistic or integrative mechanism, as a gestalt.