Skip to main content

Week 7


I really enjoyed this week’s video lectures focusing on Neuroscience and art. Although there were so many directions I wanted to take this post I chose to focus on LSD and the hallucinations it causes.  Dr. Albert Hofmann talked about an experience he had on LSD, “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors” (Vesna 2012). While he was biking home he felt as though he wasn’t moving, but seeing everything and sound become optical perceptions.

After reading some more about what LSD does, I found how it connects different parts of the brain that are usually segregated and has them “speak” to each other (Sample 2016).  This is connecting different parts of our brain and according to Newsweek we are always hallucinating, but usually these hallucinations are based on sensory information, not random connections of the brain (Osborne 2017).


From here I started looking at people who experimented with taking LSD and making art simultaneously. One scientist, Janiger had over 100 professional artists come over and draw self-portraits after taking LSD (Jones 2017). Over time the pictures grew much more abstract and completely diverged from looking like a human, as seen below. Many people have replicated this experiment completely changing the way their art is done. (Bateson). I find it super intriguing how, due to a drug, a person’s work of art and perception of self can be severely altered. 

           




Works Cited

Bateson, Gregory. “Mind and Nature.” Every Schoolboy Knows, www.oikos.org/mind&nature.htm.
Dainius. “Artist Used LSD And Drew Herself For 9 Hours To Show How It Affects Brain.” Bored Panda, 15 May 2016, www.boredpanda.com/lsd-portrait-drawings-girl/.
Dockrill, Peter. “Brain Scans Finally Reveal Why LSD Makes You Feel One With The Universe.” ScienceAlert, 25 June 2016, www.sciencealert.com/brain-scans-finally-reveal-why-lsd-makes-you-feel-one-with-the-universe-acid-psychedelic.
Fogoros, Richard N. “What Does LSD Really Do to Your Brain?” Verywell Mind, Verywellmind, 15 Dec. 2017, www.verywellmind.com/the-effects-of-lsd-on-the-brain-67496.
Jones, Josh. “Artist Draws 9 Portraits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Experiments to Turn LSD into a ‘Creativity Pill.’” Open Culture, 15 Aug. 2017, www.openculture.com/2017/08/artist-draws-a-series-portraits-on-lsd-inside-the-1950s-experiments-to-turn-lsd-into-a-creativity-pill.html.
Osborne, Hannah. “Scientists Show LSD and Ketamine Make the Brain Enter a 'Higher State of Consciousness'.” Newsweek, 24 Apr. 2017, www.newsweek.com/psychedelic-drugs-lsd-ketamine-brain-higher-consciousness-586076.
Sample, Ian. “LSD's Impact on the Brain Revealed in Groundbreaking Images.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 Apr. 2016, www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/11/lsd-impact-brain-revealed-groundbreaking-images.
Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience Pt. 3." Youtube. Uploaded by UCOnlineProgram, May 16 2012. 
          https://youtube/E5EX75xoBJ0

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 16, 2018 at 9:20 AM

    I was also very interested about how LSD and other drugs were once used very leisurely and now their negative health effects have been accounted for. It is cool that taking drugs affects people’s art too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMay 22, 2018 at 3:02 PM

    I love your post! I think it is very helpful that you researched LSD and its effects even further. I think it also great how you showed us how artists who experimented with LSD display the effects of LSD on their brain and perceptions. The picture that you provided does a great job of showing this and is really intriguing. I am left wondering if some artists believe that LSD is a way to be even more creative? (In other words, is taking LSD to create cool art okay?) I think that is an interesting and controversial question.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6

The topic this week was Art and Biology. I don’t think I have ever learned much about this cross-section of fields, so I was really intrigued in a lot of different topics presented. However, I really wanted to focus on and learn more about Marta De Menezes work, specifically her project “Nature?” Marta is originally from Portugal and her work Nature? Was done in 1999 (Nature? 2012). I found this work to be extremely interesting, because I have never heard of artwork that literally lives and dies. Although this was her most well received project, it did have some controversy, which Marta is quick to dismiss. She explains that just because the butterfly is manipulated there is no reason to call it man-made or artificial (Silva, 2008). The way in which Marta does the modification is with an extremely thin needle paired with heat to redesign the wing when they are still in their cocoons (Reinert, 2004). Since the genes remain unchanged the new design of the wings is no...
3 comments
Read more

Week 4

Reflecting upon the video lectures from this week, I found it very interesting to recognize how true it is that most scientific and medical advances are made as a result of war. Usually when we think of prosthetic limbs we think of people who lost an arm or leg. However, with the Third Hand Project that was talked about in lecture, they weren’t replacing any limbs but instead adding addition help. Upon researching this further, the researcher was disappointment with the lack of accuracy that this robotic arm had and its lack of precision when receiving the muscle contractions from the hand. This is how I feel that prosthetic limbs vary whether they are supplementing or replacing a body part. My uncle had a prosthetic hand, because of medical complications when he was born. However, he always was so grateful for everything the mechanical hand could do and appreciated it even if it wasn’t perfect. The expectation that comes with the mechanical hand depends on the...
2 comments
Read more

Week 8

This week in particular, I had a hard time picking a topic that I wanted to focus on. Even after watching all of the video lectures I still had a hard time connecting the idea of nanotechnology to art, as I felt many of the topics covered didn’t completely relate to the art sector. Then after I read more about art and nanotechnology I found Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s work of creating an invisible sculpture. The way they were able to achieve this was with a wireless magnetic force-feedback, which let viewers interact with invisible nanoparticles in order to create a malleable sculpture that changes as people interact with it. They must wear a magnetic ring that allows them to physically feel the repulsions, attractions, and sometimes even shock to help them discover the foundation of the sculpture. The shape of this invisible sculpture changes based how people interact with the magnetic rings and how many people are viewing it (John Curtain Gallery). ...
2 comments
Read more