My annotations from the article “The Future of Science… Is Art?”
After reading this article I believe that Jonah Lehrer’s argument is that the cultures of science such as physics and neuroscience need art. In this chunk taken from Lehrer’s book, he explains how each culture can benefit from art. He says that the way art can help physicists is by helping explore the meaning of mathematics from a different perspective. The way that art can help neuroscience by helping construct complex representations of the mind that aren’t built from the bottom. Lehrer addresses that the way we can make the combination of science and art possible by keeping an open mind and I believe this related to Yo-Yo Ma’s article. After reading this article I realized that art helps tell the story and shape the way we all think. I found this to be very relatable to my future career in the health field as a dental hygienist. I am currently in an art course here at UNE and since being in this art class I have started to change the way I look at certain situations. I now stop and take the time to think deeper into the reasoning and cause on why things might be happening. I now try and look at things from a different point of view. I feel like art will help me in my future career in dental hygiene by allowing me to understand the reasons why certain things might be happening to my patients on a deeper level. This article also helped me realize that scientist needs to be able to understand themselves before they can go and find a solution for the reasons why something is happening to someone else or something else. This article talks about how metaphors can be dangerous, and I do find this to be true. Something that I thought about though was that if metaphors are dangerous and imperfect, how can we use them in science because scientific equations have to be perfect and can have no misunderstandings. I believe that the culture of art can help scientists experiment in different ways by looking outside of the box and being creative. This article talks about how art can change the way that the mind thinks to create more questions that need to be answered. While reading Lehrer’s article I did catch why he believes that art should be added into the studies of science. I found the reasoning being “the fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress towards any unified understanding of everything” what I think he means by this quote is that art will help scientist see things in a different way that they may have not seen things from before. In this article, I also did find an anecdote. The anecdote that I had found was that he looked at cubism to help him visualize why are is needed in science. He looked at what cubism did it, Bohr. I found that cubism-inspired him to look at something in a new way. Overall, I did find Ma’s article to be a lot easier to read than Lehrer’s article. I think this might be because Lehrer goes deep into the topics of physics and neuroscience, whereas Ma just skims the surface by discussing art should be added into all sciences.
The bridging principle: Used to connect one idea to another? (art vs. science)
Synapse-a junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.
Synapse to me means nerve cells that help influence the way that the brain processes information and comes up with new ideas.
Holistic perspective: Different factors, such as culture, taken into account to help generate a picture of a certain culture as a whole.
Reductionism: Taking a bigger picture and breaking it down into smaller ideas.
