I’m going to try to give you a very brief neurological perspective on drugs, and how they interact with the brain, and what they might do to the brain. But as you heard, from Warren’s introduction, I am by no means, an expert on drugs (in both ways). I’ll try to give you an idea of what the current thinking is on how drugs impose themselves on the brain. To do so, I’m just going to give you a brief introduction to some of the main players of the brain. I’m going to talk a little bit about neural synapses, because the synapse are key…
This panel is comprised of Beau Lotto, Jules Davidoff and Olafur Eliasson.
Jules Davidoff, who will speak third, as a few of you know, is a Professor of Psychology, an evolutionary psychologist, a different kind of evolutionary psychologist, with a great amount of knowledge of cognitive neuroscience. He writes on color, very fascinating, he’s done benchmark pieces on color - and his notion of color works with a very sophisticated idea of culture as well as nature.
Beau Lotto will speak second on the postmodern brain. Beau is a neuroscientist; he’s going to speak about the brain apart from notions of linear causality.
Today I have chosen some works which I think will have more or less relevance in this context. Just briefly, I was born in Copenhagen, my parents were from Iceland but were studying in Denmark at the time, and I lived a little bit in-between. Then, ten or eleven years ago I finished art school in Copenhagen and I moved down to Berlin and I have been living there since. I came out of art school at a time (in the early nineties) when, at least in Danish art schools, it was slightly apocalyptic, always being about the end of everything in this sort of…
For today, much of what we have been hearing about is context, context in perception. Neuroscientist are usually interested in is how context affects what we see. But today I am going to focus on the question of why context matters. The effect of context is fundamental to everything that the brain does even what is most basic to the brain … seeing colour. One of the examples I am going to show here is a well known color contrast illusion vision. As a neuroscientist I get very excited about very simple effects and why this comes about.
Well it’s a pleasure to continue this discussion about color, and a bit of a superb organization allows me to naturally flow from what I think was said before. Now I feel that some of the effects that I wish to talk about may appear somewhat more subtle, perhaps less dramatic, than the wonderful things we’ve seen up until now. And I do want to talk about the ways in which our experience might affect the way we see similarities in color. But in order to do that, perhaps I’d like to try to put some sort of perspective on a memory structure that will…
Two images from Leonardo da Vinci: the brain and the genital urinary tract. Pen and ink drawing on the right, and sections of the head on the left hand side.
What I want to do is to use my 15 minutes here to add art to the movies and buildings of our event’s title. And, I want to offer a quick sketch of half a dozen or so relational positions between art and science. After which, if I have time, I’ll add just a few words about one instance of the effort to reflect on the representation of thought itself.
So, I will take the next fifteen minutes to tell you how the brain works. Good luck. Let me try to say some things about how the brain works that I think are very relevant to the discussion today, and in particular that speak to some misconceptions about how the brain works. If I can untangle them, might make it seem a bit more comprehensible about why we can produce art. William James probably got more of this right than any other single individual in history. He understood several very critical facts: 1) that consciousness is not a thing, but a process, and 2) that…
color can help to facilitate and fulfil some very basic human needs. it can: identify and specify necessary objects (animal, vegetable or mineral) for survival and/or enjoyment; stimulate and work synergistically with all the senses – sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch; mark territory and manage personal space; symbolize abstract concepts and thoughts; recall another time or space /create a mnemonic sensation); express fantasy and wish-fulfilment; create illusions and ambience; emphasize or camouflage figures or objects; enhance self-image and personal esteem; produce an aesthetic response. most important, the use and arrangement of color enable us to create beauty and harmony and express our personal taste,…
To ask such a question is to presuppose that a certain form of empirical knowledge can arise by establishing relations of reciprocity among diverse structures. Be it in terms of contrast and polarity or in the form of shared qualities that emerge in correspondences which are manifest in a quasi-experimental manner, such a question assumes that something can be shown of the brain in art and, moreover, that the brain thus exposed would otherwise remain hidden from view.
If one places phantom limbs within the context of the self, the phenomenology of phantom limbs, confronts us with some very interesting ontological questions regarding mental causation and the function of illusion. Phantom limbs do not exist in the physical world as they are unconsciously generated constructions of the mind/brain As phantom limbs are not in the physical world, we say that they are illusory. The self is also a construction of the mind/brain : the self does not extend into the physical world, and can also be described as an illusion.