Blog Post #1(repost)

After reading these two papers, I find myself connecting more with Sack’s paper of how brain-science interacts with one’s artistic preferences. According to Sacks’s examples and prior knowledge, brain science is very closely related with one’s musical identity. Medical cases have shown that physical changes to the brain can alter an individual’s way of thinking. I think of it as a back-and-forth mutual relationship where our thoughts are influenced by the physical structure and stimulants from our brain, and what we think about, the neuron connections we build will change the physical structures of our brain, affecting our future thinking.

Our understanding of the brain and how it relates to our mind is actually somewhat limited. Modern science is based on the principle that in order to understand the whole, we will take it apart and see what the individual pieces do to understand how it works. It’s difficult to do that with the mind as you cannot really take it apart. We can see the sophisticated neuron networks firing signals but we can only guess what each area does. Most of our understanding is based on observations of behavior, which as we can see in Sack’s examples, probably plays a critical role. It will take more time and investigation to further our understanding of the brain and its relationship with art.

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