The Marriage of Art and Science

Recently, on my path to try and figure out how to further promote Creative Art Therapies within the science world, I have stumbled upon what feels like an emergent epiphany. It seems people of science are realizing more and more the implications that art has in support of science - and vice versa. People have long known the importance of Art and Science, but more and more people are exploring if there is a relationship between the two and what exactly that relationship may look like.

There are two books which I have recently read that seem to epitomize the above mentioned epiphany. I have a feeling, however, books like this will be showing up more and more.

The first book is called "Proust was a Neuroscientist", by Jonah Lehrer (a young man, less than one year older than me). The book explores various artists across a large span of different art forms and how their works exemplify recent studies in Neuroscience. The way Proust wrote was quite radical and unique during his time. His most well known work was a 4,300 page, seven volume work entitled, In Search of Lost Time. Proust worked on this piece for over ten years and was constantly changing and editing the piece until the day he died. One of the longest works in World Literature, its descriptions of characters would change (a mole on the left side by the lips in one chapter would move to the upper right side of the face in another) amidst a changing, nebulous and inconsistent story line. Through this unique and strange masterpiece, Proust coined the term involuntary memory, a concept which postulated that cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort.

Proust's concept of memory and his search for its origins in the brain were not necessarily unique, and it is such musings of the nature of memory that are the basis of the Neuroscientific work of men like Dr. Kausik Si, who, like Proust (and perhaps as influenced by Proust) speculated about the nature of memory and believes to have found its "synaptic mark" on the brain. This "mark" Si found through research was something called cytoplasmic polyandenylation element binding protein - or CPEB. Through research on sea slugs, Si found that removing this protein disengaged completely the entire function of the sea slugs memory.

Would Dr. Si have ever pondered memory if artists had not explored the concept first? I suppose there is no way to know for sure but I will reference the next book as my defense that Dr. Si relied on those artists to do his work.

"Art and Physics", by Leonard Shlain, is a 437 page book dedicated solely to exploring Art and Physics and their "parallel visions in space, time and light" (as the subtitle states). In the opening chapter Shlain states that "Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality". He goes on to state that "[b]ecause the erosion of images by words occurs at such an early age, we forget that in order to learn something new, we need to first imagine it". Expanding on this concept he discusses how "[a]rtists have mysteriously incorporated into their works features of a physical description of the world that science later discovers" (which is the entire premise of the aforementioned book by Lehrer). I believe Shlain in saying this (perhaps not intentionally) is defining art in a very straightforward way. What is good art? My interpretatin of "Art and Physics" is that good art is art that prepares and directs the future - Like Proust or Cezanne. Art seeks to express what cannot be explained and Physics seeks to explain what has been expressed.

If one is to accept Shlain's notion of Art and Physics and glean some importance from the underlying statement of Lehrer - it seems to me that one must accept the importance of art not as a culmination of things passed - but as a torch to follow for the building of our future.

These books portray a very large scope - society and mankind as a whole. But what does this mean for the individual? If we hone into the individual implications of these concepts, I believe we find a huge argument for the necessity of art therapy. By creating art therapeutically (or non-therapeutically for that matter) one is expressing something that perhaps cannot be explained. But perhaps by creating and expressing the unexplainable in our own lives we may eventually come to logically explain it. Emotion is very hard to describe or understand, and it is mostly through visual cues that we are even able to distinguish emotions in others. Because we see - from outside of ourselves - what laughter, sadness and happiness look like we are therefore able not only to understand, but to explain it ourselves.

Much of psychotherapy involves a changing of the mind, whether by expansion of thought, divergence of thought processes or a changing of behaviors. If we take to heart Shlain's theory that "in order to learn something new, we need to first imagine it," we have a perfect argument in the case for art therapy. By creating art we are first imagining and perhaps by doing this in Art Therapy one can increase or speed up the likelihood of learning something new or changing a mindset that has held captive the ability to move forward.

Art Therapy is an individualized journey to make art and inform the science of self. Every person who is an art therapist must appreciate and have a deeply rooted connection to the expression of art and the exploration of science. The art therapist seeks to first express the unexplainable questions within the mind ("who am I?", "why am I the way I am", etc.) in a tangible, external way and then seeks to logically explain those questions through what is essentially the scientific method. How could this be anything but essential and necessary to the field of mental health - or the field of medicine in general?

I can feel in the depths of my being that science and art are courting. I truly hope they take their relationship to the next level soon - or we at least acknowledge the union that has clearly been there all along ;)