Desma 9 Week 7 Blog

Neuroscience and Art

This week Professor Vesna introduced the connection between neuroscience and art. For centuries, human minds have been exploring the physical world surrounding us and have created great and fascinating arts in all categories of study and presences of world.
For now, our explorations have come to its starting point: the neurons which "created" our minds, the starting points of our mind are now a fascinating topic art creations done by our mind.
Professor Vesna introduced us the famous "Brainbow" project conducted by two Harvard professors.

Photo credit to Sanes Lab, Harvard University

By lighting up neurons with fluorescence, beautiful, colorful and clear images of the neurons and their connections in brain can be created. Because neuron cells have a large, round body and a long "tail" to connect with other neuron cells, lighting them up with different colors can help us visualize their "tails" clearly and thus have a visualized understanding of their connections between each other.
Not only a scientific project, the "Brainbow" itself is beautiful and stunning enough to be considered as an artwork.
Dreams is also an very interesting topic in arts, I have read Freud's book Interpretation of Dreams when I was young. It was one of the first scientific books I have read. In the book he stated that sex was the major drive for almost all human activities and mind activities. And he stated the idea of the importance of childhood in a person's mind development.

(Greg Dunn)"Gold Cortex 2" by Greg Dunn, photo credit to Greg Dunn

Neurons are popular element in artworks because of its exotic presence.

Cover of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, photo from google books.

Dreams have always been fascinating, especially the idea of multi layer dreams. I first learned this idea in the movie Inception. The movie basically introduced a mutual multi layer dream by a group of people and greatly presented the combination of dream, neuroscience and art.

Inception poster, photo from imdb.com

Citation and Reference

"'Brainbow,' Version 2.0." Harvard Gazette. Web. 18 May 2015. .

  Freud, Sigmund, and Joyce Crick. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. 

Lewis, Tanya. "Dazzling Images of the Brain Created by Neuroscientist-Artist." LiveScience. TechMedia Network, 10 Dec. 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. .

"Molecular & Cellular Biology - Harvard University." Molecular & Cellular Biology - Harvard University. Web. 18 May 2015. .

Inception. Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. :, 2010. Film. 

 "Greg Dunn Design | Visual Art | Neuroscience Art | Gold Leaf Painting." Greg Dunn Design. Web. 18 May 2015.