ON TOPIC
Cerebral Reverberations
The romance of neuroscience and art is stronger than
its ever been—and we’re seeing it everywhere we go.
Courtesy of artist Greg Dunn.
By Neel Patel
Managing Editor
New York City’s Times Square is a sight to
behold—a 21st century spectacle where the
bright lights and brilliant colors flash and pulse
like the crowds and characters flooding the
pavement below. Last November, if you happened to find yourself wandering around Times
Square a few minutes before midnight, you
might have seen a projection of wiry imagery
streaked in a rainbow flourish, stretched across
the screens moving down the streets. It was
Noah Hutton’s Brain City: a three-minute short
film that mined images of neurons from several
different neuroscientific projects and compiled
them into a reel that envelops the viewer in a
complex system of brain circuitry.
The human brain is one of the most intricately designed organic structures to ever
evolve out of nature. It’s composed of 86 billion neurons and a roughly equivalent number
of non-neuronal cells, with trillions of synaptic
connections firing between them. The physical
structure as a whole is divided into two hemi-
SciArt in America April 2015
spheres that are further divided into a multitude of different parts and regions, all playing
a crucial role in the conscious and unconscious
processes that keep the body alive and kicking.
In fact, the human brain actually resembl