Politics meets Neuroscience – Scientific-Artistic Transformation, a New Understating of Humanism

The human nervous system is naturally designed to perform all activities in our everyday lives. The major information input and output unit of the central nervous system (CNS) is the brain. The smaller functional units in the brain are different neural networks and pathways that are composed of millions of individual neurons.

Why should a neuroscientist like myself find that political aspects could be important and co-opted into an art form? That is a question I have often asked myself while working with my own scientific results. As a serious neuroscientist, my attitudes toward understanding experimental findings are often very humanistic and philosophical, since the facts we observe in the laboratory with brain research reflect the basic capability for human survival, as well as everyday human experience. Seeing from a humanistic perspective, I could imagine that the answers as to how the human brain works must be different than what we neuroscientists generally come up with. However, I believe the work of our brain research will help society gain a much better insight of humanism. An important task is to look for a way to expose laboratories’ experimental results and transfer them to the public, in order for each individual to obtain a chance at humanistic understandings of living and life.

History favors aesthetic experience during the development of societies, such as paintings or sculptures decorating churches in the medieval European period for people gaining Christian knowledge with this direct visual perception. Thus, transforming scientific experimental data directly to a form of visual art would be the simplest and easiest solution to accessing public audiences. Further, the political emphasis and promotion of this new cultural form would be the efficient channel granting society this very special way of understanding humanism.