Week 7: Neuroscience and Art

In this weeks lecture we explore the relationship between neuroscience and art. In the lecture, the professor asks “ what is consciousness? What does it mean to be conscious or unconscious? What about dreams?” These topics still leave huge mysteries even with the development of modern technology and people never stop their efforts to explore our minds.

Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, stated that the seat of human thought and motion was the heart. He believed that the brain’s function was merely cooling the blood and preventing the heart and lungs from overheating. He also described minds as “the part of the soul by which it knows and understands.” With modern neuroscience technology we all know that our consciousness and thoughts are coming from our brains, but Aristotle’s statement shows us that people began to explore our minds thousands of years ago.

And The Interpretation of Dream was written by famous phychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in 1899. This book introduces the theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Freud describes his book as a shortcut to understand the subconsciousness. He believes that the dream is not meaningless activity and the dream interprets the inner desire of subconsciousness. For my personal experience, I did have weird dreams when I was stressful.

Both Aristotle and Freud were trying to analyze and explain our consciousness, and Santiago Ramon y Cajal gives us a different view of the brain. Cajal is the founder of Neuro-anatomy. He was originally interested in art but chose to pursue his career in the scientific field. He uses the structure and patterns of neurons to create beautiful artistic works. His works not only show the beauty of art but also present how neurons and cerebral form and function. This is really the perfect combination of art and science.

Another interesting aspect about neuroscience and art is that artists could take advantage of human visual processing to make their works look more attractive. The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Have you ever wondered why her mysterious smile is so attracting? Dr Margret Livingstone, a visual neurophysiologist in Harvard, analyzes that her expression changes depend on how far your central gaze is from her mouth. You will feel different emotions when you look at the background, her mouth or her eyes. Leonardo da Vinci is really good at manupilating a human’s visual shortcoming to make us feel something beautiful and complicated.

Neuroscience may be the most interesting and mysterious part I learned so far in this quarter. I Believe there will be more astonishing discoveries in the future.

Citations:

"Aristotle's Psychology." 11 Jan 2000. N.p., Online Posting to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E-mail. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/

Vesna,Victoria. "https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TzXjNbKDkYI" Lecture 7. May 2013, 09.Nov. 2013.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, Third Edition. Trans. by A. A. Brill. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/285/. [Date of Printout].

Sotelo, Constantino. "Viewing the brain through the master hand of Ramon y Cajal." . N.p., Online Posting toNature Reviews. E-mail. <http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v4/n1/fig_tab/nrn1010_F2.html>.

Cara Santa, Maria. "Neuroscience & Art: Margaret Livingstone Explains How Artists Take Advantage Of Human Visual Processing (VIDEO)." 07 Jan 2013. N.p., Online Posting to Huffpost science. E-mail. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/neuroscience-art-margaret-livingstone_n_2339429.html>.