Unit 7 - Neuroscience & Art

This week, we learned about neuroscience and how the discipline overlaps with the art world. Artists have long found beauty and inspiration from the human body, but the brain has been relatively inaccessible, as it is both delicate and extremely powerful. As scientists have grown in their understanding of how the brain works, artists have joined alongside to experiment and create.

One of the first things that interested me about the intersection of neuroscience and art was the "neuroculture" that we currently live in. In their article about neuroculture, Giovanni Frazzetto and Suzanne Anker discuss how, unlike any other scientific discipline, neuroscience captures the imaginations and interest of the general public. They believe this is because we as a society believe that our brains have much to reveal about us as individuals, and in our society individuality is valued highly. This plays into every fabric of our society, and they explain, "we relate aggressive and criminal behavior to dysfunctional firing in the pre-frontal cortex, brain images are used as evidence in court, it has become common to consider depression and sadness as a serotonin imbalance and to refer to the release of endorphins when talking about the sensation of pleasure from the consumption of chocolate or sex."(Frazzetto and Anket, 815) This was a good primer for my study of neuroscience and the art that is being created through it.

As I studied the history of neuroscience, I was intrigued by the scientist Franz Joseph Gall. He was a physician working in Paris, and began the study of phrenology. He believed that intelligence and potential was based upon the shape of one's skull, and he measured people's heads to tell them essentially how smart they were. This was significant because it essentially begun the long-held idea that the size and shape of your brain will determine your intelligence, which has ultimately been disproven. But, his idea that there were localized areas of your brain that control certain things, like speech and language, was correct. This plays directly into the idea that left brain is more science-driven while right brain is more artsy, which we discussed earlier in this class.

This is a typical ocular response to LSD

I was fascinated by the discussion of neurochemicals, specifically LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). It was and is used for psychedelic experiences and was very popular in the 1960 counterculture. Albert Hofmann invented LSD, and was a user and celebrator of its hallucinogenic properties. The drug is so potent that only one gram of it can medicate up to 20,000 for 12 hours. People encounter strange dreams, visions, hallucinations, fears, paranoias, and other strange phenomena when they take the drug, but also report feeling incredibly good, seeing strange and beautiful colors, and experiencing altered perceptions and emotions.

Newspaper clippings concerning Operation Midnight Climax

The CIA used these properties in their experiments with LSD in the 1960s, and called them Operation Midnight Climax. They used LSD and acid on American citizens in order to get them to divulge secrets, telling them that if they didn't tell then their "trip" would go on indefinitely. They concluded the effects of LSD were too varied to be used as a drug to extract truth, and discontinued the operation. This played an important role in the history and future of using chemical and biological weapons in covert intelligence operations all over the world. Obviously, these experiments were illegal and immoral, but more than that I believe that the fact that these chemicals exist and can be used on people is frightening, and shows how destructive humans can be in their search for pleasure. It is good to know that the government is now regulating these drugs heavily, but it is scary to see how something that was designed for art and a sensory experience has been turned into weapon so easily.

Christopher DeCharms is a neurologist and scientist who uses non-invasive scans and mapping technologies to see inside the elusive human brain. He sees a future for this technology in neuroimaging therapy, because a person can see how their brain reacts when they move muscles, feel emotions, or remember memories. I believe this will allow doctors and patients to work together to figure out what causes symptoms like anger problems, addictive behaviors, and more. DeCharms even believes that this technology may be able to cure things like chronic pain by zeroing in on certain areas of the brain that are non-productively producing pain and ending it. I was excited by his talk and feel excited to see how this generation will be the ones on the "frontier of inner space."

Citations

DeCharms, Christopher. "A Look inside the Brain in Real Time." YouTube. Ted Talks, 27 Mar. 2008. Web. 17 May 2015.

Desk, News. "Tampa Bay Police Report LSD Tainted Meat Exposure." Food Safety News. Food Safety News, 08 Mar. 2014. Web. 17 May 2015.

"Franz Joseph Gall : Founder of Phrenology." Phrenology.com. American Phrenoloy Journal, n.d. Web. 17 May 2015.

Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. "Neuroculture." Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 10 (2009): 815-821. Web. 17 May 2015.

Freeman, Shanna. "How LSD Works." HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks.com, n.d. Web. 17 May 2015.

Larsen, Shad. "Operation Midnight Climax." Damn Interesting. N.p., 26 Sept. 2005. Web. 17 May 2015.

Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience-pt1." YouTube. UC Online, 17 May 2012. Web. 17 May 2015.

Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience-pt2." YouTube. UC Online, 17 May 2012. Web. 17 May 2015.