Brain Research and Art?—A Short History of Neurological Research and Creative Expression

Abstract

This chapter provides a concise working review and critical examination of the long history of scientific and neurological interest in art as it intersects with research about the brain. Examining the historical connections between aesthetic practices and compositional performances with the constitution of the changing or atypical brain offers interesting epistemological insights into the relationship between art and neurodegenerative disease at the intersection of illness and creativity. This regards the aesthetical, practical, and methodological foundations of human creativity and neuroscientific imagery throughout time. The current chapter studies several profound issues regarding classical empirical “styles” in neurophysiology and brain research, including how knowledge is generated in the laboratory and the neurological clinic. Contemporary practices of investigation and communication in brain research have appeared to move the arts and neurosciences ever more apart yet, in fact, through analyzing and appreciating artistic elements such as visual beauty, aesthetic practices, as well as the emotional appreciation of research data and clinical insights, these two fields can be brought closer together. This chapter thus circumscribes—through taking a historical and critical perspective—the turning points where physiological recording devices have broken through the boundaries of human perception as well as aesthetic judgments and deductions by researchers and clinicians. It offers good reasons and tangible examples why modern-day clinical neurologists and bench neuroscientists should start to appreciate the richness of their own creative solutions and aesthetic concepts, as these are deeply ingrained in every system used or innovated in the sciences of the brain. The artistic presentations, aesthetical criteria of their selection, along with the interrelation of visual products in the arts have only recently become the subject of considerable historiographical research (Dierig and Schmidgen, Physiological and psychological practices in the 19th century: Their relation to literature, art and technology. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2001). While this broad tendency began in areas of art history and media studies, the historiography of clinical neuroscience has now participated in these new analytical perspectives. The fundamental epistemological questions of creative expression, the relationship between life science practices and the diagnostic views of neurological disorders remain unfortunately quite under-explored. The “iconic turn” (Nikolow and Bluma, NTM 10:201–8, 2002) and the investigation of “visual cultures” (Heintz and Huber, Mit den Augen denken. Voldemeer: Strategien der Sichtbarmachung. Vienna, 2001) moved in the direction towards more in-depth analyses of the media products as well as the practical aesthetic means of modern brain research, in the way they are received in this historically and epistemologically focused chapter.