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The canvas is to fine art as the brain is to Brain Art.
In 1848, a laborer named Phineas P. Gage was involved in a serious accident. An iron rod was driven into his skull, removing most of his frontal lobe. The man survived, but from then on he was never the same: he became grumpy, unfriendly, and associative. It was one of many cases that piqued the curiosity of scientists. Soon after, a new scientific discipline was born: neuroscience. And with it, the realization that gray matter is a substance that can be "attacked" or "shaped" by the external environment. As I pointed out in my essay "The Liquid Mind" Daedalus Ed. there are a variety of ways to modify the brain, including biologically.
But if the brain is modifiable, it seems natural (at least it seemed natural to me) to ask: why not intervene in it for the sole purpose of bringing out an artistic valence? Not for therapeutic purposes, not to improve it, not to study it... just to "make art".
From a certain point of view, Brain Art is a subset of Body Art, since the brain is formally part of the human body of a living being. Just as Mireille Porte modified her own body through plastic surgery (by adding two horns to her head) to convey an artistic message, I am fascinated by the processes of biological modification of the human brain ... again for artistic purposes.
Of course, the brain is biologically transformed every time we have a new experience. Meeting a person or learning a phone number are experiences that affect the memory processes in the brain.
It is the vocation of every psychotherapist to "assemble and reassemble the building blocks of the brain" so that its owner can recover from depression.
And every good basketball coach tries hard to shape the brains of his athletes so that their motor skills will intensify.
But the two examples above have a utilitarian purpose; one modifies the brain to learn, to heal, to improve in sports, and so on.
It is quite another to modify the brain for the benefit of art... or if we wish (since art, by definition, has no utilitarian purpose...), to modify the brain without a pragmatic purpose.
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