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Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 306-309, 1983. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/ 83 $3.00 +0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd. NEURAL ART: WORKS BASED ON CONCEPTS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM George K. Shortess* 1. Introduction My work, which I call neural art, is based on a scientific ~nderstanding of the nervous system. Neural art combines my mterests and professional training in art and physiological psychology. I began developing these ideas about twelve years ago while I was both painting and practicing psychology. I felt that there were new problems to be solved, and I wanted to achieve a personal integration of my activities. In line with most ph~si?logical psychologists, I started by assuming that our artistically related experiences, like all experiences,are the result of neural activity but, unlike other experiences,are generated by art objects in the environment [I]. Furthermore, it seemed that this activity of the nervous system is essential to art, or at least is significant. In moving from these assumptions to actual works of art I considered a number of approaches. The approach I chose ~o develop actively involves selecting certain features or characteristics of the nervous system as the basis for my art work, in the way many artists select features of their experience or environment as material for their art. For example, a painter of still life first selects the objects to be portrayed-apples, tin cans, dead fish , or silk purses. Most artists then try to convey the objects' underlying essence, using color, form, and space. Instead of selecting objects, I select aspects of the nervous system as the elements of my art. These aspects are tangible elements as well as conceptualizations of the way the nervous system functions. This approach is based in part on ideas developed by C. H. Waddington (2], who pointed out striking similarities in structure and form between twentieth-century painting and the natural sciences. For example, he suggested that the major concern of modern physicists probing the underlying structure of matter is similar to modern abstract artists' 'retreat from likeness', probing the underlying structure ofreality. At another level,he showed the parallel between the extradimensionality of relativity theory in physics and ofcubism in art. These and other examples of .formal features common to art and the natural sciences suggested that I could self-consciously take certain properties in science and use them to develop a specific art form. This is what I have attempted in my work, using the nervous system as the scientific starting point. To identify and develop these features, I began by defining a nervous system conceptually and by stripping away, as much as possible, the specifics of ion flow and detailed molecular structure. Using this approach, a nervous system can be defined in either structural terms (anatomy) or functional terms *Artist and psychologist, Department of Psychology, CU No. 17, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, U.S.A. (Received 21 January 1983) 306 (physiology). More often we think ofthe nervous system in both ways, the structural and the functional helping to define each other. The system is a network of individual cells. Each is typically composed of a cell body and extensions that provide for communication with other nerve cells, with the environment and with the muscles and glands of the body. The nerve cells ar~ organized in clusters called ganglia or nuclei with well-defined tracts connecting the clusters and allowing communication. In a formal sense the nervous system is a network or nonuniform grid structure that is fairly well fixed overthe life of the adult. All normal human nervous systems include spinal cords, optic tracts, corpus callosums, occipital lobes, etc. But a nervous system is more than a static structure. Associated with it are various energy transformations that change over time in a dynamic interactive way. For example, there are electrical changes in individual cells in the form of discrete pulses by which nerve cells communicate with each other. The code of this language is the temporal sequence or tim.ing of the pulses rather than the magnitude of the pulses, whtch remain roughly the same. The rate of impulses is the important dimension. For some nerve...

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