2022 Neuroscience Art Contest

This artwork depicts that everyone's brains are different at birth, and continue to change throughout life. I expressed that by highlighting various brain regions and giving each twin their distinct neurochemistry through colors. The duality and idea of Yin and Yang also influenced me. I imitated the shape of the Taoist symbol by making the twins swirl around each other. Neurodiversity explains that everyone's brain functions differently, but we can find complements in that difference.

"Spectrum" is a work of art centered on the Neurodiverse community. The rainbow and bright colors (which fall on the color spectrum) serve as a symbol and a reminder that all humans are unique and fall on the neurocognitive spectrum. The chaotic placement of the colors represents the challenge researchers face in creating a single unified model of cognition and the black background contrasting with the vibrant colors suggests that there is nothing as magnificent and beautiful as the human brain.

We have often heard the saying "many hands make light work". The aim of this piece was to show how together, we can improve and uplift, through various world views, cultures, and ways of thinking. Sometimes we have the tendency to reduce everyone to one (i.e. "at the end of the day we all have a brain") but by doing so, lose out on the richness that comes from diversity - both neurologically (anxiety, depression, autism, etc.) and in the field of neuroscience. This piece features several different hands of color supporting a midsagittal view with the cingulate gyrus highlighted, dorsal view of the brain with PFC highlighted, and coronal section in the circles. We can improve together. Together we are better.

For my piece I used pet scans and MRI's of various neurological disorders and neurodevelopmental conditions (ADHD, Autism, Tourette's, OCD, Epilepsy, etc.) as references which I overlapped on top of each other in varying colors and styles. I also included a karyotype of Trisomy 21. I wanted to show how these different conditions affect the way people see the world and interact with it. There is nothing "wrong" or "right" about the different ways our brains work, instead they overlap and interact and ultimately contribute to our neurodiverse world.

Colors are a great way of seeing and feeling diversity. Through color, we can clearly follow one path, but as we step back, we see that the neural pathways are many. As in the Latin phrase, "E pluribus unum," from many we are one, and this is true as well within us. Diversity is the key to survival, in large ecosystems and small, like the biodiversity in our gut. All these neural pathways work together to make us one, and to make us who we are.

Although we differ person to person in unique ways, the underlying structures that make us human are largely the same. The wiring you can see represents some of the main white matter structures we all have in common; the surrounding cortex that makes us distinct is intentionally left out, suggesting that a "one size fits all", single representation is insufficient.