The art of science

Sometimes when people ask me what I study and I answer, “Well, my major is neuroscience,” I inevitably get this odd answer: “Oh. That sounds cool. And really hard!” Then I shrug a little, and I explain that I’m actually more of a photographer. That confuses many people.

There is this misplaced assumption that because you’re a scientist you don’t appreciate things like art or literature, and vice versa. We grow up in all kinds of boxes: There are the math nerds, the drama kids, and the literature wonks. We don’t mix or match—until we all end up in Frontiers of Science together. But by then we’ve been so conditioned to think of the humanities and the sciences as disciplines entirely separated by everything—from academic boundaries to the physical sectors of the brain—that we tend to hate the experience even if we acknowledge the good intentions behind it. And a few hours of Frontiers can do very little to bridge this gap.

What we do not internalize until maybe too late in our education is that both spheres are manifestations of the same innate curiosity. When scientists set out to answer fundamental questions about human nature, what we have dubbed as “humanities” and “science” can hardly live without each other.

From that same separatist sentiment flows much of today’s cognitive science-loving media, including Tom Wolfe’s ominous yet far-seeing 1997 piece, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died.” There is a notion that everything that has to do with human nature lives “somewhere” in the brain, or in our DNA. We have the “god gene,” the “love gene,” the “gay gene,” and even back in the 20th century, Wolfe got so excited about the advent of brain imaging that he categorically declared, “We live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless to avert your eyes from the truth.” He was convinced that somewhere out there, people in white lab coats work day and night to point us to a form of truth that might replace the capacity of arts or the humanities to do the same.

Ironically enough, the media picks up on whichever “truth” resonates with and reconfirms everyday experience (liberal brains vs. conservative brains, men’s brains vs. women’s brains, etc). Nowadays, we seem to think that we can explain anything away by labeling it as “hardwired.”

But like other science commentators, Wolfe may have overlooked that from within, science humbles as much as it awes. The matter of fact is, we are a long way from empirically grasping satisfactory answers to the most complex questions. For example, to understand how to think of something as fundamental as memory, one would have to first go back to Dr. Eric Kandel’s work with the marine mollusk Aplysia californica, whose neurons have been the first to give us clues about the changes that happen in cells during learning. The search did not stop there: In the aftermath of that work came roughly 40 years of further conceptualizing what memory means, of studying everything from owl brains to human vision. The more one digs into the literature, the less defined “truth” seems to be. And when studying the human brain, one heeds many forms of intuition.

David Eagleman, a young neuroscientist recently profiled in the New Yorker, began wondering about the nature of time perception after nearly falling to his death from the roof of his parents’ house. He says it best: Much like artists, “scientists are often drawn to things that bedevil them.” Conversely, art historians are pushing their own work against the boundaries of neuroscience. Columbia art history professor David Freedberg studies the psychological responses to art in an attempt to understand images that seem to “come alive.”

Science and art need not exclude each other. On Columbia’s campus in particular, even among students, the notion of “well-rounded” is more than just a catchphrase. Many here juggle between drawing and chemistry, between biology and literature, between programming and theater, between music and psychology. Carl Schoonover is a graduate student in neuroscience whose best-known work is a book titled “Portraits of the Mind.” To a great extent, the mind reveals itself more readily when we train it to think in different ways.

But to close this gulf between science and the humanities, one must start much earlier in education. Neglecting this gives less of a chance for human curiosity to manifest itself and creates the divides that later hinder our ability to collectively solve the most complex of riddles. Stumbling upon the beauty of connecting the two should not be an accident. It should rather be constructed into the way we learn. And most importantly, into the way we teach others.

Angela Radulescu is a Columbia College senior majoring in neuroscience and behavior. She is a former Spectator photo editor. The Rookie Brain runs alternate Thursdays.