Week 7: Consciousness, Thoughts, Jung and Piaget

 "The modern man....alone has a present day consciousness, and he alone finds that the ways of life on those eariler levels have begun to pall upon him"[1] The concept of a present day consciousness and living in the present versus living in your head and on past events is something that has interested me since I was a teenager because of the bouts of rebeliousness I had in attempts to differentiate myself from my parents while simultaneously finding myself acting in new and surprising ways in incredibly similar ways to them. This got me interested through reading an essay on Art,Mind and Brain by H.Gardner on the works of Jean Piaget and his views on adolescense and young adulthood. [2] Piaget talked about stages of development and how children grasp certain concepts at certain ages including the abstract concepts and similarities and differences. And this comes through art.

For a lot of history, the parent people in the Catholic World talked about the most was God and this God was male and ideolized.  God was out of reach, only able to be touched ever so slightly by mere humans, even those he created in his image. And there are tales and tales of parents being represented as such, so the way children saw their parents was similar to God: objects of love and adoration that were just out of reach. Piaget seems to classify thinking like this on the concrete operational stage and I would tend to agree, it is a painting showing God to be perfect and just out of reach for mere humans. One way consciousness comes through in art and painting



                                  Michelangelo https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/parenting-in-art/

However, how do actual brains, when they have a way of acting abnormally, or might be stuck on one of Piaget's earlier stages of development produce amazing art work? It depends but there's hope. Let's take obsessive compulsive disorder for example because I was diagnosed with it. OCD is a psychological disorder which causes people to focus on an unwanted  thought in a way that causes them to become stuck on a cycle of obsessions and compulsions in a way that greatly hinders their quality of life. And sure enough you can see it in the following image, the OCD brain seems to light up brighter red when obsessing. [4][5] The most characteristic phrase uttered by an OCD survior is "what if this"  But there's hope as shown by musicians and artists who live and use the handicap to be more creative and really wonder "what if". The following image shows artist Andrew Kim painting a mouse guarding a forest and you can feel like you can step into that world. Because why not



                     OCD Brain https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/what-does-an-ocd-brain-look-like/
                                 Mouse Guard  https://www.andrewkimart.com/mouse-guard

[1] Jung, Carl. The Spiritual Problem of the Modern Man. Translated by W. S. Dell and Carey F. Baynes, Civilization in Translation, 1933.

[2] Gardner, H. 'Art, Mind, and Brain.'

[3] Green, Hank. “The Growth of Knowledge: Crash Course Psychology #18.” YouTube, 9 June 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nz2dtv--ok. Accessed 13 May 2022.

[4]“NIMH » Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.” National Institute of Mental Health, https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd. Accessed 29 April 2022

[5].“How a new generation of musicians are confronting OCD.” The Independent, 3 April 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/ocd-in-music-obsessive-compulsive-disorder-george-ezra-ramones-martin-scorsese-a9445281.html. Accessed 29 April 2022.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2: Math and Science

Image
 I have loved the golden ratio since I learned about in Geometry in 9th grade. I loved the fact of an infinite sequence and how it would appear in everyday life: from flowers to museums to my classroom.  It was one of the first fairly complex concepts I could see in nature and touching on the ideas from last week on Art and Science, it was the first concept in Math I found artistically beautiful. The golden ratio, especially in flowers just amazed me and filled me with wonder. But I had no idea that there were more connections between art and Science, especially in the field of optics.  There's an entire chapter in the most difficult physics class I have had in my engineering major dedicated to optics, but I never knew where they came from. The concept of the vanaging point and how the rules of geometry applied to pictures of actual places, especially the expansion on the importance of triangles. In exercises like trying to find the reflection of an object either on a mir...
Read more

Event#3- The Horse

Image
This past sunday I attended the event from HOX zodiac honoring the horse and it reminded me of the idea of how we can connect with both art and science through every aspect of our lives. The speakers talked about their functional relationshipes with horses, the stories they had around horses and the functional relationships between humans and horses though horse camp riding, cleaning horses, doing cinematography in movies on horseback, and even the origins of how horses were domesticated. Some of the speakers, including professor Vesna, talked about the idea if so many people belief in something that is unscientific then it becomes real within the context of horsecopes. However, even scientific quantities and hypothesis we make are made up and are only true if taken to heart and adopted by a large enough fraction of the scientific community. An example of this would be the definition of the kilogram.  The kilogram, as definied by the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the basic unit of ma...
Read more