Week 7 Neuroscience + Arts

In Week 7, the topic is about the relationships between Neuroscience and Art. Briefly, neuroscience is the field to explore the structure and function of the brain or nervous system.

As the professor Vesna pointed out in the lecture video, two psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are regarded as the founders for neuroscience. Firstly, Jung studied under Freud, and respected his theory. Later, he separated with Freud because he could not accept Freud’s concept of unconsciousness in the dreams, however both psychologists’ concepts contributed to the growth of neuroscience.  

Compared Freud’s with Jung’s concept, I have same thoughts as what Jung stated. While Freud’s concept was based on “sexuality” individually, Jung’s idea was related with “collective unconscious” (especially, “mythical aspect”). In my experience, when I have a dream about snakes, I often imagine “Ouroboros”, which means the "eternal return" from ancient times (Egypt and India). I feel that the dream can provide a good message in my daily life. This would be a part of “collective unconscious”.

In the article of Giovanni Frazzetto and Suzanne Anker “Neuroculture”, it explains that the neuroscience can be the fundamental to explore the creation of other resources in our lives. They believe that “Hence neuro-cultural products become metaphors to describe and interpret neuroscience knowledge embedded in social values and competing cross-cultural norms within divergent societies. (1)”

This is very interesting to me because the divergent societies can be produced by the connections between neuroscience knowledge and cross-cultural norms. As my experience, many people would have norms unconsciously. The unconsciousness can spiritually lead to our “creativity”, and then our society can be developing by amazing images that neuroscience are together with art.

Work Cited

1. Linne, Marja-Leena. “Computational Neuroscience Research Group.” The Computational Neuroscience Research Group. 16 Dec. 2015. Web. 17 May. 2015. http://www.cs.tut.fi/sgn/cns/

2. “Childhood Dreaming: Jung and Easily Freudened?.” The Soft Anonymous. 14 Jul. 2011. Web. 17 May. 2015.

http://thesoftanonymous.com/2011/07/14/childhood-dreaming-jung-and-easily-freudened/

3. “Ouroboros.” Wikipedia. Web. 17 May. 2015.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

4. “TheCreative Brain: ‘the imagination network’.” Connecting The Growingbrain.com. 2 May. 2014. Web. 17 May. 2015.

http://www.connectingthegrowingbrain.com/blog/2014/05/02/the-creative-brain-the-imagination-network/

5. Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. "Neuroculture." Science and Society 10 (2009): 815-821. Print.

6. “Collective Unconscious.” Wikipedia. Web. 17 May. 2015.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

7. UConlineprogram. “Neuroscience-pt2.mov.” Youtube. Youtube. 17 May. 2012. Web. 17 May. 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFv4owX3MZo