While I was at Duke I volunteered as an undergraduate assistant at the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab, a lab in the Neuroscience department that worked in research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology.
My days there were usually either dull (doing silly little undergraduate things like identifying artifacts in scans) or immensely interesting (usually on lab meeting days were research progress was discussed). Although I found the idea of furthering our knowledge of the brain and cognition very inspiring, I very quickly realized that life in a lab was not suited to me. Not because of the slow pace inherent to research, but because there seemed to be a fundamental gap between what we discussed and learned in the lab, and life outside the lab. Brains, morality, forgetting, memory, imagination, all of these things seemed to operate in two different modes - within the lab and outside in the "real world". Not to mention a creeping fear of Reductionism seeping into my mind the longer I worked in the lab and saw brains as organic machines that produced the mind.
All of this to say that after days at the lab, I would come home and instead of doing my physics homework or writing my philosophy papers, I would draw people overlayed with neural correlates. I would squish the two things together - the person and the research, hoping to close the gap between my two realities. It was this love of neuroscience but desire for it to be present and recognizable in my day to day that led me to fumble y way through my first portraits and representation of cognition.
Left to Right: Deep in Thought, Alzheimer's Gaze, Risk Factor
Deep in Thought
Graphite and acrylic 48.3 x 61cm19 x 24, September 2019
This piece illustrates a woman in a neuron pool. I drew the woman crouching and resting on her hands, alluding to The Thinker’s posture and name. I’ve painted the neurons with minimal space between them to create a network illusion and gradually changed their darkness to create depth. Looking closely, it is evident every neuron is separate instead of a network, a visual process analogous to the evolution of neuroscience. The pool represents our experience of thought. Our internal monologue can seem continuous or segmented, either way, we experience life partly submerged in our thoughts.
Alzheimer's Gaze
Graphite and acrylic 48.3 x 61cm19 x 24, September 2019
This piece portrays a woman enveloped by her neurodegeneration; Early Onset Alzheimer’s. Its progression leads to memory loss and disorientation, so I’ve drawn her a serene yet lost expression, an open mouth to indicate confusion and wispy hair to give her an air of mild disarray. She hugs her chest, unsure and unaware of her forgetfulness to create a feeling of vulnerability. The half-moon shapes I've painted mimic neuron stains of a degenerating hippocampus - the cause of memory loss - the hazy colors and dispersed shapes mimic gappy neural pathways. Her hair, expression and hovering hippocampi suspend her in time and space, an effect intentionally created to mirror the experience of having Alzheimer’s.
Risk Factor
Graphite and acrylic 48.3 x 61cm19 x 24, October 2019
This piece shows a girl with a cold gaze, disrupted by stains of a protein-deficient amygdala; a risk factor for Antisocial Personality Disorder. The white space inside each rhombus represents the absence of the essential protein, and I’ve painted the amygdala red to add a tone of aggression, a trait of ASPD. I made her body language defiant and her stare callous with a slight inclination in her eyebrows, an attitude resulting from her disorder. Importantly, she is unaware of the jagged interruptions in front of her, symbolizing how personality disorders usually go undiagnosed and be attributed to age or “teenage phases”.
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