Week Seven | Neuroscience + Art
Because of the incredible beauty of MRI and neurons, I always believe that there exist some connections between neuroscience and art. After watching the videos this week, I found that neuroscience was more like art rather than science in the beginning. In the process of discovering the structure of our brain, people were fascinated by its beauty and created various kinds of art projects based on it, such as fMRI Butterfly by Suzanne Anker, Between a Thing and a Thought by Susan Aldworth, and the fluorescent protein.
The fMRI Butterfly especially surprises me because I had the same imagination before. I frequently had headache a few years ago, so I went to the hospital to do fMRI. It turned out that nothing was abnormal. I looked at my fMRI, thinking why everything seemed so perfect and why it could not detect what was going wrong there in my brain. The pictures were extremely attractive, so at that time, I felt I was in a gallery rather than in a hospital. At the center of the fMRI picture, there was a shape that really looked like a butterfly.
During the exploration of hallucinogen, it was amazing that scientists' delusions had close relations to art, too. Visual hallucinations include bright colors, sharp shapes and horrible scenes, which to a large extent depend on users' mental states and the environment they are in. This makes many people curious about hallucinogen and produce works of art based on it.
I think the reason why people easily connect neuroscience with art is that they are both mysterious. Since people have studied neuroscience for only a century, we still know little about it. We have many guesses at human mind, consciousness and dreams, but only a small part of them have gotten confirmed. Therefore, neuroscience becomes a science that requires creativity, which is largely needed in the creation of art. I believe that as time goes on, we can definitely find out the secrets of our brain, but will the connections between neuroscience and art be lost then? I hope not.
Reference:
Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. "Neuroculture." Nature, Vol 10, Nov 2009, pp. 815-821. Print.
"Hallucinogen." Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen. Accessed 21 May 2017.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience-pt1.mov" Youtube, uploaded by uconlineprogram, 17 May 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzXjNbKDkYI.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience-pt2.mov" Youtube, uploaded by uconlineprogram, 17 May 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFv4owX3MZo.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience pt3" Youtube, uploaded by uconlineprogram, 16 May 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5EX75xoBJ0.
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| Connections between Neurons (UNC) |
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| Between a Thing and a Thought | fMRI Butterfly (Nature) |
The fMRI Butterfly especially surprises me because I had the same imagination before. I frequently had headache a few years ago, so I went to the hospital to do fMRI. It turned out that nothing was abnormal. I looked at my fMRI, thinking why everything seemed so perfect and why it could not detect what was going wrong there in my brain. The pictures were extremely attractive, so at that time, I felt I was in a gallery rather than in a hospital. At the center of the fMRI picture, there was a shape that really looked like a butterfly.
During the exploration of hallucinogen, it was amazing that scientists' delusions had close relations to art, too. Visual hallucinations include bright colors, sharp shapes and horrible scenes, which to a large extent depend on users' mental states and the environment they are in. This makes many people curious about hallucinogen and produce works of art based on it.
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| Hallucinations (Tophdimgs) |
I think the reason why people easily connect neuroscience with art is that they are both mysterious. Since people have studied neuroscience for only a century, we still know little about it. We have many guesses at human mind, consciousness and dreams, but only a small part of them have gotten confirmed. Therefore, neuroscience becomes a science that requires creativity, which is largely needed in the creation of art. I believe that as time goes on, we can definitely find out the secrets of our brain, but will the connections between neuroscience and art be lost then? I hope not.
Reference:
Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. "Neuroculture." Nature, Vol 10, Nov 2009, pp. 815-821. Print.
"Hallucinogen." Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen. Accessed 21 May 2017.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience-pt1.mov" Youtube, uploaded by uconlineprogram, 17 May 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzXjNbKDkYI.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience-pt2.mov" Youtube, uploaded by uconlineprogram, 17 May 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFv4owX3MZo.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience pt3" Youtube, uploaded by uconlineprogram, 16 May 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5EX75xoBJ0.
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