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Week Seven: Art and Neuroscience


Consciousness and and the human mind is a concept that is extremely interesting to people in many different fields. There is the science of understanding the human mind but there is still so much that is unknown that there is so much room for artistic interpretation. Neuroscience and art have so much overlap both in who and how people look at the focuses of neuroscience as well as the evolution of interpretations of the mind, dreams, and more.  

Scientists and artists alike have had a fascination with the mind and body both with their connection and their separation. From Aristotle’s belief of the heart producing thought to Gall’s phrenology, the brain, its function, and its connection to the human consciousness has evolved drastically over time. Professor Vesna in her first lecture about the relationship between neuroscience and art talks about Santiago Ramon y Cajal and his contributions to the neuron theory. His book Butterflies of the Soul was used in Suzanne Anker’s art using fMRI scans with the overlay of an image of a butterfly. This created an optical illusion of the butterfly changing based on the difference of the brain imaging. This artist used scientific means as well as collaboration to connect neuroscience and art (Vesna Lecture I).  

Another very interesting way that Professor Vesna discusses Brainbow, a technique which shows that individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from other neurons by randomly expressing different ratios of fluorescent proteins. Brainbow mapping images have won science  photography competitions which show its strong relationship with art (Vesna Lecture II).  

Professor Vesna talks about neuron chemicals and drugs that grew in popularity during the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically cocaine and LSD which was a psychedelic drug which produced hallucinogenic effects. This became popular and the effects would influence those in the art community. Even the ones who were in the labs creating these drugs were ingesting them and having these experiences that would influence them in the art community. People like Aldous Huxley who was a writer and a proponent of drugs like LSD. He is a great example os someone who used these science inventions as something to help or influence his writing as well as help glamorize these drugs to the public (Vesna Lecture III). 
In the New York Times Book Review we look at the book Swann Hypothesis where the author Marcel Proust “beat neuroscientists to the punch in discovering that memory is faulty and always changing” (Max). This book looks at the ways that artists can use their interpretations of the mind to help fill in the blanks of all the missing information that we don't have on the human mind. 





References 
Max, D. T. “Swann's Hypothesis.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Nov. 2007, 
www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Max-t.html.
Vesna, V. (2019). Art and Neuroscience Part I. [Video Lecture]. Retrieved from https://cole2.uconline.edu/courses/1067208/pages/unit-7-view?module_item_id=26086651
Vesna, V. (2019). Art and Neuroscience Part II. [Video Lecture]. Retrieved from https://cole2.uconline.edu/courses/1067208/pages/unit-7-view?module_item_id=26086651
Vesna, V. (2019). Art and Neuroscience Part III. [Video Lecture]. Retrieved from https://cole2.uconline.edu/courses/1067208/pages/unit-7-view?module_item_id=26086651












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