These are my new REM Sleep Wave pillows now available in my new Zazzle store. Check it out for more Thinx-inspired designs.

Show your Valentine how happy she makes you with these dopamine and serotonin necklaces by Anatomology. You can find them in my Thinx Gifts shop.

Neuroanatomical atlas illustration plates from the 1786 Traité d’Anatomie et de Physiologie by Félix Vicq D’Azyr

Plates from the X-ray Atlas of the Skull. 1918

Brain art by Elizabeth Jameson

Jameson on her work:

I work at the convergence of science and art in the study of the human brain. I create portraits of myself and others through the use of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) and the latest advances in neuroimaging technology. With the assistance of leaders in the field of neurology and neuroscience, my images provide new insights into the brain and, at the same time, make medical imaging and its representative humanity more accessible to both medical professionals and others who view these revealing pictures.

My fascination with medical imaging and brain scans has a personal basis. Diagnosed with the disease of multiple sclerosis, I found myself confronting stark images of my brain that seemed equally frightening and mesmerizing. In tackling this contradiction, I felt a strong urge to reinterpret these images — to use them to explore the amazing biological structure of the brain. My current artwork saturates these cold, two-dimensional computerized pixels with rich colors that transform scientific images into portraits of individuals with all the frailties, humor, and idiosyncrasies that make us human.

Unfortunately, this Yahoo News slideshow is as close as I’m going to get to the Brains exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, England. 

About the exhibit:

The exhibit makes up part of the Wellcome Collection’s major new exhibition, ‘Brains’ which includes slices of Einstein’s brain, 3000 year old trepanned skulls, ancient Egyptian mummified brains and brains in jars, and opens to the public from March 29 June 17, 2012. 

Reassembling the Self 1 and 2 by Susan Aldworth are currently on display at the GV Art gallery’s newest group exhibition Polymath. The show, like the gallery, features artists that  ”create synergies and connect disparate ideas and different schools of thoughts”.

About her work:

Susan Aldworth’s Reassembling the Self 1 and 2 are lithographs from a new series of work, born from her residency at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, and based on her collaborations with schizophrenia patients and the scientists researching it. The works consist of a collage of medical images – drawings, diagrams, scans – of human body parts, including organs, skeletons, tissue, crania – distributed disjointedly over the picture surface. It gives a sense of the discombobulation produced by this most anguishing of mental illnesses. The cranium visible in lithograph 1 is divided up diagrammatically and numbered, according to the phrenological ‘discipline’ of attributing certain regions of the brain to specific human characteristics. It is a suggestive illustration, identifying how one (now completed discredited) branch of medicine produced a specific series of narratives entangling quack scientific evidence and human identity. In its time, the pioneers and followers of phrenology believed that their knowledge could neatly classify the physical brain and thus explain the self. If any disease disproves this simplistic categorisation, it is schizophrenia, about which so many public misconceptions (and much stigma) still exists.

The BrainCar by Olaf Mooji

From WHOA:

The BrainCar was created by Rotterdam artist, Olaf Mooji, and is a mobile sculpture that features a brain-like extrusion on the back of a modified used car. During the day, the vehicle drives around (operated by a human driver, obviously) and captures and stores images and video from its travels. During the night, the footage is remixed and projected from within the brain sculpture and visible to passersby on the outside. Mooji’s body of work involves the alteration of motor vehicles in pieces that express the nearly psychological connection between drivers and their cars. In the case of the BrainCar, Mooji wondered what it would be like if “…the car itself could experience with a kind of consciousness its own passage through spacetime.”

Read more…

This shiny and bright neuron ornament is available in the Anatomology Etsy store

Wataru Yoshida set out to capture the incredible complexity of the human body:

The motive for the series of illustrations “Body” is to show the complex and interesting structure of the human body. When incorporating the concept of humans as a theme, we come to see the body’s physical features as more intriguing than the psychological. The drawings were made with very fine lines, matching the minute tissues of our bodies.

Mission accomplished!

Selected work by Andrew Carnie

About:

Carnie’s artistic practice often involves a meaningful interaction with scientists in different fields as an early stage in the development of his work. There are also other works that are self-generated and develop from pertinent ideas outside science. The work is often time-based in nature, involving 35 mm slide projection using dissolve systems or video projection onto complex screen configurations. In a darkened space, layered images appear and disappear on suspended screens; the developing display absorbs the viewer into an expanded sense of space and time through the slowly unfolding narratives that evolve before them.

“I still cannot escape the thought that I am seeing all this and thinking all this because of the very thing that I am looking at. The brain is a very strange and marvellous thing. It is not like a heart or a kidney. It is thinking flesh. No wonder I keep changing materials for my work. I don’t have a problem with its structure - it is function and consciousness which baffles me.” ALDWORTH’S DIARY DESCRIBING HER EXPERIENCE OF A CEREBRAL ANGIOGRAM 26 OCTOBER 2001

Artist Susan Aldworth’s interest in brains stems from personal experience – she collapsed in her studio in 1999 and was taken to a hospital where she watched while fully conscious the doctors search for a diagnosis. She ‘was looking into my brain, in real time, live, on a monitor, while lying on an operating table’. Her experience changed forever how she saw herself and how she thought about identity. She’s been exploring that ever since through her art.