What you see is who you are
Una Meistere
A conversation with British neuroscientist Daniel Glaser
On British neuroscientist Daniel Glaser’s personal website, his biography is available in four concise, wittily titled versions: The ‘One-liner’, the ‘Short Biog’, the ‘Medium Biog’, and the ‘Long Biog’. Preformatted, so to speak, depending on the reader’s purpose, curiosity and interest. The ‘One-liner’ is verbally sparse yet eloquent: ‘Dr. Daniel Glaser is a neuroscientist and writer, the founding director of Science Gallery London, and a 2019 Winston Churchill Fellow.’ This one sentence, however, contains clues that reveal the essence of Glaser’s work – focusing on the search for a creative interface between science, health and the arts, thereby stimulating bold and imaginative science/art collaborations while at the same time promoting the public’s engagement with science. Opened in 2018, Science Gallery – housed in the Grade II-listed Boland House, a part of the original Guy’s Hospital and located opposite London Bridge Station – is the platform-cum-epicenter where this interaction takes place on a daily basis in the form of exhibitions, events, performances and festivals. With its collaborative projects between science and art, the initiative churns out new ideas, new points of view, and consequently, a completely new range of experiences for the visitor.
Daniel Glaser comes from an unusual academic background – he studied maths and then English literature at Cambridge, received his master’s in cognitive science from Sussex University, did graduate work in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and then postdoctoral work in brain imaging at University College London (specifically, brain imaging of the visual system). In 2002 he was appointed ‘Scientist in Residence’ at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) – the first appointment of its kind at an arts institution. In 2005 he was in the first cohort to receive a Cultural Leadership Award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). For ten years he chaired London’s ‘Café Scientifique’, and in 2014 was the first scientist to be a judge for the Man Booker Prize literary award. Glaser is also closely associated with the media environment – he is the author of The Guardian's popular column and podcast ‘A Neuroscientist Explains’, and presented a BBC television series on how science really works.
Our conversation with Daniel Glaser was about how experience, prejudice and expectation change the way we see the world (which has also been the subject of his research using fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging]), on the ability of art to influence human behaviour, change people's perceptions and influence their psychological well-being, and on the importance of bridging the gap between science and art.
‘You can't tell that story of who you are through science alone. And therefore, you cannot tell the story fully of what you experience through science; there cannot be a fully, entirely narrow scientific story of that. Because what you see is who you are, and who you are comes from culture as much as from biology,’ says Glaser.
How do we perceive an artwork? How would you characterise this process from the viewpoint of a visual neuroscientist? How does our brain register the sensory data of the artwork?
It's an easy question to answer – how you see an artwork. All you need to understand is what seeing is and what art is, and once you've defined these two, then you know – it's trivial, right? So let me say a little bit about seeing, which I kind of do know about, and then I'll give you a little bit about art, which I don't really know about.
I guess I should also say that, in my view, understanding seeing as a biological process can also help to make sense of what art is. I actually do think that visual neuroscience has something to do with what visual culture is. In the UK, we tend to call it the history of art. What that means is a kind of visual culture or visual literacy. I guess what you need to understand about seeing, or at least the thing you need to avoid when thinking about it (and I'm afraid it was implicit in your question), is that seeing is about taking information from the world and processing it using some pathway in the brain to produce the percept, to produce what it is you're seeing. There's a number of ways in which that's not the best way to think about things. There is a philosophical response to that, which is known as the homunculus fallacy or the theory of the Cartesian theatre (after the philosopher René Descartes). A homunculus is a small man who sits inside your head, and the Cartesian theatre is this idea that somewhere inside the brain there is this kind of cinema or theatre, and there's a screen in it. And what happens is that information comes into the eyes and it's processed by a whole bunch of really complicated machinery which produces the percept. But then, of course, who's inside your head to see the thing, to see the result of this processing? So that's why it's a fallacy; that's not what's happening.
And I guess the other evidence that we can bring beyond this philosophical argument actually has to do with neuroanatomy. The parts of the brain concerned with vision are subdivided into areas, and the areas have specialties. Some areas are interested in colour and some are interested in movement, some are interested in stereo, and some are interested in primitive shapes, in 3D shapes, and so on. And we know this from work with monkeys, with cats, but also from human work. There is good evidence for this. But when you look at the connectivity between these areas, what you discover in the rule in the brain is that if two areas are connected – there are as many connections from A to B as from B to A.
So why is that interesting? Well, because if what you thought was happening was that information was coming into the eye, then being processed by a number of stages, and then resulting in the percept, you'd expect that the connections would be one-way. That's not true, and there's plenty of other evidence to back this up that suggests that the process of seeing is as much what we call top-down as bottom-up. So what you see is driven as much by your expectations of what you're going to see – your knowledge, your experience, your hypotheses, if you like – as it is driven by what is in the eye. We can talk at much more length about that, and that's what I used to work on. But the critical point here is that perception is driven by what you think as well as what you see. And I think that already begins to loosen the idea that what's going on in seeing is that there are these objects in the world, and we're making a representation of them in our heads. Rather, we have a worldview and we're projecting that out onto the world that we see.
What you see is driven as much by your expectations of what you're going to see – your knowledge, your experience, your hypotheses, if you like – as it is driven by what is in the eye.
So we can do more on that, if you like, but I guess the connection into art for me is the following – again, I'm a professional on that part of the conversation, and I'm an amateur on this part of the conversation. I take as a working definition ‘defamiliarization’, the term coined by Russian formalists. I think what's happening for visual art, and I think it's working metaphorically also for other stuff, is that it's being framed in some sense. So we're taking a thing which, in some ways, we are familiar with. (I mean, like a Rothko, maybe it's a colour we've seen before anyway, but it's still seeing.) We sort of frame it in a way that defamiliarizes it, that makes us understand it differently. And I guess the point there is, if you think that framing is something that only happens in art, that explanation would suggest that it is unique. But actually, that's what perception is. You know, putting things in boxes is what seeing is, actually. I guess what's happening with art is that there is some culturally developed sense of what seeing is or what is being seen. And that produces a different kind of image of something that is an artwork as opposed to anything else. And for me, that definition of what art is is helped by an understanding of what seeing is.
I guess what's happening with art is that there is some culturally developed sense of what seeing is or what is being seen. And that produces a different kind of image of something that is an artwork as opposed to anything else.
Is there any similarity in how we read the world and how we read a painting, for example? What is happening in our brain when we see the everyday world around us? Do we see it as a picture?
For me, the opposite question is the interesting one – is there anything different in our brains when we see an artwork? I might be wrong, but I don't think I am wrong; I don't think there's any evidence that if I did a scan of your brain or some measurement of your brain, I could say – Oh, yes, this is Una looking at an artwork. And now she's just looking at a picture of her dog, or, you know, seeing objects in a gallery, and this is what it's like in her brain when she's walking around the street now.
I don't think we can answer finally the question of what is art by doing brain scans. Having said that, we know that art does produce different effects on us as humans. There's obviously introspection; there's a kind of reverie that sometimes accompanies art; there is a degree of immersion, of peacefulness sometimes, but then there’s also degrees of disturbance and sometimes terror that comes from art. So I don't think we can generalise in that respect, either. And I don't think we can get either from active scientific observation or from theory the fundamental answer to the question – What is it that you see? Because what you see is to understand that you need to understand who you are. What you see is the result of who you are, what your experiences are, what is your cultural immersion. You will see artwork differently having come from a particular cultural tradition and history, as well as based on your personal history. Maybe younger generations who did not experience so much directly will have more in common, but they will also feel a legacy. You will look at art differently and you will hear music differently because of who you are, in cultural terms and in personal terms.
I don't think we can get either from active scientific observation or from theory the fundamental answer to the question – What is it that you see? Because what you see is to understand that you need to understand who you are.
You said that our brain has a hypothesis about what is out there in the world, which leads me to wonder about, for example, when we experience catharsis while looking at an artwork – what is happening in our brain at that moment? Is it a confirmation, a denial, or a refinement of the hypothesis that one’s brain already has?
That's a good question. Is there a signature neurobiology of a cathartic moment? Can I tell if you're having a cathartic moment by observing your brain? Well, I would probably argue that you can, and actually, interestingly, maybe even more from observing your body than your brain. Again, we can argue what catharsis is, but my feeling about catharsis is that it's not an intellectual or an informational moment. It's a moment of emotional engagement as well as of intellectual engagement. It's not a purely cerebral, as we would say, thing. If it is an emotional thing, our emotions are embodied – we feel through our bodies. You can't feel without a body. Another thing I'm quite interested in as an example is sexual feelings. I don't propose to talk about them in any explicit detail, but, you know, you can be turned on by an image, by a physical sensation, by a poem, by a memory, by the sound of someone's voice or a nonverbal sound. What I mean to say is that the experience of being turned on, the experience of catharsis, the experience of joy, all of these things, cannot be confined to a single sense. So, even if it's a picture that generates your feeling of catharsis, which I think was your question, it cannot be that the catharsis is integral to the visual percept. Because it can come from any number of senses or memory, and you can suddenly realise, with hindsight – Ah, that's what this person meant. Like, now I understand what is going on. So I think that catharsis, as a biological process (if we can call it that), exists outside of the realm of any sense processing or sense experience.
I think that catharsis, as a biological process (if we can call it that), exists outside of the realm of any sense processing or sense experience.
How much time do we need to understand what we see? How quickly does a painting resonate meaning to its viewer? And how important is it to look at things slowly?
Again, seeing a picture is a very slow process, right? It takes decades before you can really see it. We know that people who are experienced viewers or experts in art history, for example, show different eye movement patterns when they're examining a picture. You know, the centre of your vision is much better at seeing than the periphery. The periphery, the edges of your vision, are only really there to tell you where to look. Experts in art know where to look, or at least they look differently. For non-experts it may be some time before you solve the puzzle, you know, look at the picture, as it were, in ‘the right way’. And if we think of defamiliarization as being an artistic process, it may be that our initial response to an artwork, in some cases, may resist the kind of defamiliarization, the kind of framing which is integral to perceiving it as an artwork. So, taking time for it to generate its own context – or to take it outside of the room in which it is, or your mood at that time, or the responses of the people around you – to actually develop a direct relationship with the work, the object that you're seeing, could certainly be a slow process.
Besides some primates, we are the only species that has obviously visible eye whites. You’ve said that just by observing the eye movements of people standing in front of an artwork, you can tell if a person is either an artist/art historian, or an ordinary viewer. How? What is the difference?
Again, you see what you know, and the clearest expression of all of that is eye movements because your knowledge tells you where to look. It's a syllogism, but if your knowledge tells you where to look, then if I look where you're looking, I can tell what you know. Here's a couple of examples. One of my kids goes to a local primary school, and the headmaster there is a member of the magic circle – he is a magician. I mean, he does the whole thing – making the lady float, etc. He and I have interesting conversations about this because in some ways, it's much harder to do magic for five-year-olds than for grownups. Because the grownups, they know where to look. So when a magician obviously moves his hand, the grownups look at his hand, while the five-year-olds are going: hey, he just put it in his pocket... And mummy's going: shush, shush, darling... and the five years old continues: no, I saw it, he put it in his pocket... Because the five-year-olds haven't been trained to look where the magician wants them to look. The magic trick is short-circuited for kids because they are not expert, grown-up humans. Meanwhile, a magician watching a magic show will be at the next level: he's a grownup, he knows where the magician is trying to make him look. He knows – Oh, yeah, he's doing the double lift...yeah, interesting use of pockets there... So, expert magicians look differently at what they're seeing than non-experts.
It's a syllogism, but if your knowledge tells you where to look, then if I look where you're looking, I can tell what you know.
Again, if we believe, which we do, that what you know tells you where to look, then if I examine where you're looking by tracking your own movements, I can tell what you know. I mean, I don't talk about lie detecting and police and so on, but if you know where something's hidden and I freak you out, you will almost certainly glance at where the thing is hidden. With these kinds of psychological tricks you reveal your knowledge by the way you look. That's the link.
You wrote in one of your columns that studying art has a dramatic effect on one’s brain activity. This led me to wonder if perhaps this is one of the intuitive reasons why people collect art – in terms of how in-depth contact with art can stimulate brain plasticity. Does it also improve one’s cognitive functions?
That's a really interesting question. I was reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography about a year ago – for the first time, I'm embarrassed to say. And it was really interesting because she wrote it before iPhones and selfies, and all of this stuff. And so reading the first chapter, I was kind of feeling all superior, because, you know, she didn't predict any of this stuff – it's all been superseded. And then I kind of realised: actually, no – we're living out the reality which she predicted. This ‘art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. And what does it mean to own an original of something? I think it is still the most interesting question.
A friend of mine, Marine Tanguy, has an interesting theory about what she calls a visual diet. And she thinks that your visual diet is as important as your nutritional diet. Especially for young people. Take the particular issue of women's bodies: if you take a Rubens’ painting and look at what female beauty looked like back then – in terms of what we would call body mass index, and what's big and what's small, and how it’s shaped and so on – it's a very different convention of beauty compared to today’s. And when I think about this as a neuroscientist, I wonder about the following things – you may be familiar with a thing called the waterfall illusion. The waterfall illusion is that if you stare at a waterfall for 30 seconds (at the water coming down), and then you look away – everything else in the world seems to drift upwards. There are other similar illusions you can find online, such as where you stare for a minute at a spiral that's moving, and then when you look away, the whole world seems to be twitching and moving. This is called the neurobiology of adaptation, and it's a pretty well understood phenomenon. It takes a minute to establish, and then it washes out after five minutes. Actually, there are also some really interesting experiments you can do with inverting spectacles – these are glasses with prisms, and they make the whole world appear upside down. When you put them on, it’s like wow – you walk into things, you can't hold a glass, or anything else, and it takes hours to sort it out. In fact, a day or two, really, if you keep them on. There have been beautiful experiments in which, after a couple of days, you can even ride a bicycle with the spectacles on. And, hilariously, if after a week of wearing the spectacles you take them off, then you're like, once again, wow... Well, the reversion takes less time – about half as much time as the induction of the effect.
A friend of mine, Marine Tanguy, has an interesting theory about what she calls a visual diet. And she thinks that your visual diet is as important as your nutritional diet.
So then we look at what female beauty is, what a beautiful body is – this may take decades to establish. I think there are different kinds of time constants. And, as you know, there can be disorders of perception also in terms of oneself. There's some reasonable evidence that people with anorexia or disorders of appetite, and so on – if you ask them to do an experiment where they see their own body in the mirror, and they have to move marks on the mirror to indicate the edges of their body, they systematically estimate – they see – their body as being bigger than it actually is.
What you see – your visual diet, in Marin's terms – changes your view of the world. And maybe visual literacy, or a curated worldview through an artistic perspective, gives us a richer, more balanced view in the world. I don't know if this is more healthy; I mean, it depends on whose work you look at. If you spend all your time looking at Francis Bacon, maybe you’ll have a pretty fucked up view of the world in time. But yes, I think it will have an effect.
When inside an Infinity Mirror Room by Yayoi Kusama, the state you find yourself in is a little bit reminiscent of a hallucinogenic state, but without the use of any substances. As you said in your The Guardian podcast, we hallucinate the world we see. Seeing is like transmitting reality from the outer world into your head. Does this somehow explain the power of art?
It's not that art is an empirical thing; I mean, it's quite theoretical. But let me give an analogy: if you want to study consciousness (and I've said this many times), the best people to talk to are novelists because they know how to generate and communicate subjective experience. When you read a novel, you are in someone's head. Now, in order to do that effectively as a novelist, you must have some understanding of what subjective experience is. Even if you can't have an explicit understanding of it, even if you couldn't write philosophy or haven't read a neuroscience book, you must know how it works on some level. Visual artists are also experts in generating perceptions. You know, sometimes you watch a documentary about film editors (especially for horror movies) and they often have, like, literally a numerical scale for the scare that they're going to give. As in – I think we'll do a ‘one’ here with a bright light flash, then let's do a ‘three’ and then let's do a ‘two’ and let them calm down again, and then let's go for a ‘five’.... And everyone in the cinema is screaming. Those guys are pretty cynical about it – they will actually check this out and they'll do test screenings. That's craft. I don't believe that artists do exactly that, at least not in most cases, but I think they are experts in manipulating perception. And some of them do it really empirically, I guess. And others would violently deny that that's what they're doing, but they are experts in manipulating perception.
If you want to study consciousness, the best people to talk to are novelists because they know how to generate and communicate subjective experience.
Are our thoughts/reflections on art conscious? Or do we just think that they are, as most of what goes into our heads is invisible to us?
There's a few things to say about that. I mean, when you say thoughts and reflections about art, that language encourages me to think about explicit thoughts and reflections. I mean, you can ask anyone what they think about a picture, right? But generally speaking, you benefit from training in how to see. This is what I call visual literacy. Again, and I've said this many times before, most scientists are not visually literate. They don't know how to talk about colour, for example. Scientists often choose the colours of their graphs or their illustrations so that it ‘looks right’. Because they're not visually literate, they think that that's a neutral process. Obviously, art historians and artists know that choice of colour is very meaningful. You know, it's like racism or something. If you're claiming you're not racist, it’s a really good way to behave in a racist way. Until you realise that you're racist, you can't do anything about being racist. So, visual literacy helps us to express ourselves more clearly.
I have a very good friend who's a choreographer and dancer – an expert in digital technology and dance and movement, and so on. And she always said that for cinema, she never reads critics – she just goes and sees whatever film is on. She wanted to leave one art form unmediated; she just wanted to go to the cinema to see a movie. And if it's sad, she'd cry; and if it's exciting, she'd cheer. Because she wanted to have one art form where she wasn't responding like a critic. But for everything else – she would never dream of going to a gallery show, and certainly not to a dance performance, without knowing the work and reading the programme notes and doing critiques and speaking to the performer beforehand. But she wanted to leave her experience of cinema unmediated. I don't know whether this is possible – if she can succeed at it. But I do think that you can learn to reflect and think about things in different ways. Introspection is a terrible technique for neuroscience. I mean, it doesn't tell you about the biology very much. I think it's quite misleading, in fact, but in terms of expressing views on an art show, you can learn to do that better.
What role does the frame play in how we perceive a painting? And why do so many artists today decide to leave their works unframed?
No, they're not. [Laughs] What they're using is ‘not-frame’.
So it's still a frame.
Yes; they're framing it by not framing it. To me, again, it's circular. I mean, if they're artists, then they're framing stuff, right? These days, if you present a picture without a frame, you're saying something. It's still a frame, it's just a ‘not-frame’.
These days, if you present a picture without a frame, you're saying something. It's still a frame, it's just a ‘not-frame’.
You mentioned visual literacy. ‘In these difficult times, art helps to improve our psychological well-being.’ This sentence has been quoted many times since the pandemic started, and has now become a baseline for many art projects all over the world. In the meantime, is the average viewer capable of fully understanding/feeling the power of art, and therefore allowing this mental/emotional/visual healing process to happen?
I think it depends a lot on one's experience. For myself, I bought noise-cancelling headphones. This was the first thing I did when the lockdown came – so that I could create my own acoustic world outside of the distraction. I think many of us are smart enough to realise that we need to have experiences outside of our physical realities.
The rise of Netflix means that people have understood that when they're not able to go out, they have to bring culture into their houses. That's actually the answer to your question. I mean, I'm not going to get into an argument about whether Netflix is art or not. But, you know, it's not YouTube, right? Netflix is a curated form. It's got editors and commissioners, and the people who make it have deep knowledge of their craft. And arguably, there’s the budget of Netflix. I'm not saying that cheap telenovelas are not an art form as well, but when you've got that much money... I don't know what your view about Netflix is, but for me, Netflix needs to look expensive. Netflix productions look expensive, and that's certainly encouraging. It feels to me that the people making them want to make them artistic, as such. The rise of streaming services shows that people understand that they need art in their lives, and if they are unable to leave the house to get it, then they will pay to bring it into the home.
The rise of Netflix means that people have understood that when they're not able to go out, they have to bring culture into their houses.
A problem with the art world is that it is a very closed circle. In some ways, that also seems to be a problem in the world of science – both have a bit of a privileged status, which is not always healthy. Is science the tool that helps us to best understand the world, or can perhaps art, in some way, also helps us do that? How successful is the collaboration between the two? What’s been your experience in this regard since you’ve been the director of Science Gallery London, which was created with the aim of developing projects that explore the possible synergies between science, health and the arts?
I think each of these discourses gives you tools to understand the world better. The way to understand what you just said about closed domains and privilege, and all of that kind of stuff, is anthropology or social science, right? And actually, we have a pretty good understanding, theoretically, of how this works – you know, the high priests and their policing of knowledge and privilege. It's no coincidence that high art and high science are both largely white, often male, rich and privileged domains, which coincide with social power and are also policed in that kind of way. I guess I brought in Netflix to answer your question because I think that the art in the art world sense is very narrow – it's a self-defined, self-policed, high-culture version of what art, and certainly culture, is. Certainly visual culture.
I don't know if it's true in your linguistic background, but in the UK we have lots of arguments about speaking properly and not speaking properly. And people who are serious grammarians, people who study language properly – linguists, not the grammar police – recognise that basically all language is equally sophisticated. So speaking correctly just means speaking like the privileged white power, you know – the upper middle class, ‘means of production’ thing.
It's no coincidence that high art and high science are both largely white, often male, rich and privileged domains, which coincide with social power and are also policed in that kind of way.
What is true about art is that it has a literature about itself. It's self-reflexive in a way, and maybe other forms of culture are not self-reflexive in just the same way. If you control the means of production, then you can set up jobs where you can be paid to write about art. And if you're policing that social and economic construct, then you'll be able to hold a degree and get a highly paid job as somebody who simply thinks about what that sort of art is. It's not an option that's available to other forms.
Now, in terms of Science Gallery, what I observed many years ago is that the forces which maintain privilege and truth in high culture and in science are the same ones that work in art – this narrow cultural field. And I also observed that the subdivisions within science and the subdivisions within art have a similar policing structure. That's why it's futile. Because, actually, the closer you are to another artist, the harder she will work to say your work is completely different from hers. For example – you're a structural relativist, and she's a relative structuralist, so it's completely different, right? And so this need to police ever finer boundaries between different things in science, between chemistry and physics, between ‘this physics’ and ‘that physics’, is really just a socially driven need to differentiate yourself from others. And to give yourself status by explaining why you're different from the people around you.
And so the mechanisms to overcome it are the same, which is that you have to reward comprehensibility as opposed to incomprehensibility. Not surprisingly, in the social political structures that try to maintain privilege; being commonly understood would be a real problem. If just anyone could understand what you were doing, or you could talk to just anyone, then there's nothing special about it. So to increase its value, it has to be ‘other’. You have to find in this context paradoxical ways of allowing people who are not like you to understand what you're saying, and make an effort to inhabit their space, too.
We built Science Gallery under a principle of accessibility, which is often understood for buildings in terms of wheelchairs and low-vision and this kind of stuff, which is really important. And we did that 100%, too. But actually, accessibility is about people who don't normally see themselves in those kinds of buildings feeling able to come in. And that's about how you train your door staff and the pricing structure of your menus, and who's in the building already.
If you can construct a situation where (and it's not easy) an artist is trying to be understood by a scientist, or a scientist is trying to be understood by an artist, this opens up a gap where people who are neither can find a way in.
What happens when artists work with science? Why is it important? Are they providing greater access?
I don't know if it is important. One of the ways in which it's useful, shall we say – even more than important – is that if you can form a genuine collaboration between an artist and a scientist in which they're really trying to understand each other's discourses. Then they're forced to make themselves comprehensible. You cannot simply repeat things in your own discourse. If you can construct a situation where (and it's not easy) an artist is trying to be understood by a scientist, or a scientist is trying to be understood by an artist, this opens up a gap where people who are neither can find a way in. So that's the trick that we did with Science Gallery – by making it an interdisciplinary space where art and science could collide. We actually made it a space where people who are neither artists nor scientists – and who are often excluded from high culture – could come in and say: Hey, I see it this way. We worked hard to make that directly true. But that was the trick. And again, the point is that by incentivising, enabling, facilitating, generating and training interdisciplinary conversation, you actually open up a route to empowerment for people who are often not allowed to be part of the story.
By incentivising, enabling, facilitating, generating and training interdisciplinary conversation, you actually open up a route to empowerment for people who are often not allowed to be part of the story.
How do you feel this trick, as you call it, has worked out?
Well, before the bloody virus, we had 330,000 people come through the door. 40% of them were aged 15 to 25. Around 40% of them were from black, Asian, or other minority ethnic backgrounds. So we built a beautiful space with award-winning architecture, and four stars in The Guardian for the opening show. Which was, nonetheless, filled with people who are often not comfortable entering an art space. And it had world-leading science in it. So yeah, it worked. And if you want to be competitive, it worked better than a lot of other spaces that tried to do it. But the way we did it was by incentivising and privileging discourse that was not controlled by the powerful.
One of the first projects at Science Gallery was Inés Cámara Leret's saliva crystal work. How has her work and collaboration with scientists further developed? Have you followed it?
We followed it institutionally for a couple of years. I think the story is documented somewhere. Basically, she was kind of working at home, collecting saliva, and she found a way to make crystals from it. And then, at the event where she presented this, I introduced her to Brian Sutton, an X-ray crystallographer – a professional scientist who does this technique of understanding the molecular structure of substances by turning them into crystals and bouncing x-rays off of them; from the scatter pattern of the X-rays you can see the crystalline structure, which tells you about the molecular structure also in wet form. Brian’s PhD advisor had also been advising Rosalind Franklin, the Dark Lady of DNA. So Inés and Brian then formed a collaboration, because Brian told her that her crystal wasn't a spit crystal. He said it was an alum crystal – she was just adding elements to the thing. And she said – well, I don't know, I tried it without the spit and it definitely comes out different. Inés, like all artists, is an experimenter. Long story short, Brian got a postdoc to work on this. Last I heard, which was a couple of years ago, they had found a new technique for desalinating water using the kind of structures that her spit crystal had contained.
When you do surveys of scientists and you ask them for their views of public trust in science, public knowledge of science, and public understanding of science – and this includes their views of artists – they systematically underestimate the degree of public knowledge and trust and so on. And because they're underestimating the knowledge and interest, as a direct result, the scientists are very positively surprised by the knowledge, interest and richness of the understanding of the artists. At Wellcome Trust [the UK’s leading global charitable foundation supporting scientists and researchers – ed.] we were always bringing in artists and scientists. And after the meeting, if you set it up right, if you incentivised, facilitated, etc., the scientists would come away from it almost paranoid. They would say – How could this artist know to ask these questions? Well, they did some research. That's what we answered. The scientists would say – But they had read my papers! They really understood this stuff! I mean, the questions they were asking were really, really good. And we'd answer – Yeah, she or he is an international artist, and she doesn't just turn up and say: ‘Hey, is that blue?’ You know, she gets interested in something, works on it for two years, does her research, she tries things, she speaks to people. She's a fucking expert.
So scientists often don't expect that from people who aren't scientists. And that's why Science Gallery is a fun process for everybody. But you can't just put them in the same room, close the door and hope it is going to work. You have to have an incentive structure and formats which don't allow the patriarchal privilege to squash other voices.
Do you think science will ever be able to understand what consciousness is?
Oh, I don't know. I mean, it seems to me unlikely that there will ever be a fully scientific account of consciousness. And I think the reason for that is what I said before – because what you see is who you are. And who you are depends on your genetics – sure, your upbringing – but also the culture within which you were born. That cannot be explained scientifically. You can't tell that story of who you are through science alone. And therefore, you cannot tell the story fully of what you experience through science; there cannot be a fully, entirely narrow scientific story of that. Because what you see is who you are, and who you are comes from culture as much as from biology.
What you see is who you are, and who you are comes from culture as much as from biology.
Do you yourself understand who you are?
No idea. There's a great novelist called William Boyd, and there’s a phrase he's put into his novels: ‘The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.’
Title image - Daniel Glaser. Photo: Kate Anderson
