Institute of
Neurological Disorders

Zurich-adjacent | Founded 1923

A fictional research body dedicated to exploring the intersection of clinical neurology and creative expression—literature, music, and the visual arts. The Institute reimagines disorder not as pathology, but as genesis: an epistemological rupture where cognition becomes aesthetic.

“A brutalist monolith that thinks in fractured sentences.” — Internal briefing document, Archive of Neural Aesthetics 

Founded in 1923, the Institute is nestled in the Alpine foothills outside Zurich, Switzerland. It occupies a converted sanatorium overlooking a glacial valley—a site chosen for its symbolic resonance between isolation and introspection. The structure’s brutalist geometry, recursive corridors, and mirrored observation bays evoke both intellectual severity and sensory disorientation.

The Institute does not seek cures. It excavates. Neurological disorders are treated not as deficits, but as portals—into new architectures of perception, fractured narrative forms, and alternative modes of creativity.

This is where cognition disassembles—and in doing so, creates.

Departmental Schema

Bureau of Cognitive Echoes Explores the residual imprint of neurological disruption in literature, music, and visual art. Focus areas include synesthetic tonalities, ADHD-inflected narrative disjunction, and Tourettic lyricism.

Division of Linguistic Disruption Reframes speech disorders as radical literary modalities. Aphasia becomes poetic silence; stuttering functions as rhythmic device; echolalia emerges as recursive meaning-making.

Office of Temporal Misalignment Investigates perceptual distortions in time associated with epilepsy, dementia, and Parkinson’s. Narrative forms are dissected for chronological fracture; musical pacing is re-mapped through the lens of distorted intervals.

Archive of Neural Aesthetics A subterranean repository housing annotated case studies, dream diagrams, and hallucinated compositions. Contributions include theoretical marginalia, patient-generated artefacts, and expressive outputs born from atypical cognition.

Faculty

Dr. Elisabetta Kretsch, Professor of Philosophical Psychiatry, Université Sylvienne Pioneer of the concept of “cognitive anatomization,” treating perception as sculptural dissection.

Dr. Olivier Moreau, Neurologist-poet specializing in the mapping of metaphor against fMRI data. His work bridges neuroimaging and symbolic language to expose latent structures of thought.

Dr. Anika Voss, Founder of the Neurophonic Archive. Known for transcribing hallucinated symphonies composed by Parkinson’s patients into performable scores, stored in Sub-Level B2 and encoded for aesthetic disruption.

Finbow Residency

Operating from within the Bureau of Cognitive Echoes, Steve Finbow conducts research at the threshold of neurology and aesthetics. His investigations track how neurodivergence reshapes conventional modes of language, ruptures narrative structures, and deposits traces of altered thought in literature, philosophy, and art.

His ongoing monograph, The Disorder Diaries, formulates a new field: neuroaesthetic historiography—a method that uses aberrant cognition as a lens for understanding cultural production.

“Finbow works at the fault lines of human awareness, where disordered perception becomes a sculptural force.” — Dr. Léonore Halberg, Chair of Neurocritical Poetics, Université Sylvienne.

“Finbow doesn’t just interpret cognition—he anatomizes it. His work is a scalpel carving open the temporal folds of human awareness.” — Dr. Theo Vahrendt, Institute for Interpretive Neurosophy, Graz.

Archive & Artefacts

Sub-Level B2 houses patient-generated artefacts, including dream diagrams, recursive prose, and musical compositions born from cognitive disruption. Observation bays are lined with mirrored surfaces to induce perceptual echo. Signage throughout the Institute reflects its philosophy:

“COGNITION REFINED. UNCERTAINTY PRESERVED.”

Hallways loop with no apparent destination. Server halls hum with encrypted neural data. The building itself is part laboratory, part mindscape—a topography of fractured thought.