Art & Neuroscience

Neuroscientists aim to decipher how the brain perceives, interprets, and responds to the world; artists attempt to express their perceptions and feelings through visual forms. Nevertheless, despite the distinct techniques employed in each field, neuroscience and art share the same fundamental goal: to explore and to understand the possibilities of representing the world in the human mind.

We initiate this “Art and Science” project to explore the link and the tension between visual art and neuroscience. Art helps us peek into the inner logic of the brain, and a scientific understanding of the brain helps us better appreciate artistic expressions. As John Keats famously revealed, “Beauty is truth; truth beauty.”

Current Projects

Projects

Two kinds of events evade the naked eye: those happening too slowly to be noticeable, and those happening too fast to be discerned. While a natural process usually cannot be accelerated for observation, technology has enabled people to catch the moment when a fast process occurs and record it as impressive images.

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Project 4: Yin and Yang

Scientific images usually have a clear distinction between the object of interest and the background. Classical painting adopts a similar perspective between the foreground and the background. However, such distinctions are in a sense artificial, as they depend on where the viewer’s attention is accorded.