Neurology and Language through Art

This past week I continued testing different drip methods and color schemes in my studio time. In order to re-contextualize the familiar drip paintings I was producing, I decided to draw a brain in order to emulate neurological studies done on people that centered around language. When I examined the paintings I made, I kept thinking about how the little intricacies that resulted from the paint reminded me of human anatomy (such as blood vessels and tissue). This in turn made me look at the paintings as zoomed in images of the areas of the brain that light up in response to language. In some of my previous research, I learned that the degree to which someone's brain responds to specific words in a specific language depends on how early in life that person learned that language. Thus, this indicated to me that any word in a person's first language holds memories, meanings, and associations unique to that individual's experience. Consequently, languages learned later in life do not contain the same weight as those that have formed the individual's first communication capacities. For this reason, I thought it practical to draw connections between the paintings I produced this week and the idea of a single word provoking a "colorful" response.

This week's research mostly consisted of "The Neuroscience of Language" by Friedemann Pulvermuller. In Chapter 4, "Words in the Brain," the book discussed the different reactions that subjects had to words and pseudo-words. Responses were indicative of the imbedded meanings held by actual words used in every-day conversation as opposed to the lack of such a reaction for the pseudo-words. This indicated to me that words themselves are relevant to communication and understanding not just because of their explicit meaning, but also because of their existence as 'empty;' as vessels that carry meaning only because we endow them with meaning.