The brain, that unknown. Jordi Costa, head of exhibitions at the CCCB, tried to illustrate this uncertainty by recalling the novel ‘El ser mente’, by science fiction master Frederick Brown. In it, a being from another planet is presented, a pure intelligence that has committed a crime that cannot be explained in a social system that our limited mind could never understand. In that limitation, which goes far beyond our whitish brain mass, he tries to shed a little light the exhibition ‘Cervell(s)’, so with the plural in parentheses, which can be visited in Barcelona from this Wednesday until November 7. The sample is Curated by the physicist and popularizer Ricard Solé and by Emily Sargent, director of exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in London, one of the best endowed with ancient medical material. The fact that it has been a cultural center like the CCCB and not a science museum that deals with it already gives clues that the intention is to interrelate with subjects such as art and philosophy to understand the phenomenon.
The ambition of the proposal is great and fascinating. Especially in these moments of great transformation and advances in neuroscience or biotechnology. The brain creates what many call the mind (and believers, the soul), where emotions, consciousness and dreams are located. It goes even further: the investigations of artificial intelligence and robotics they are taking us to the dream of being able to connect our brain to networks to take the last leap, for now, in human evolution. This raises not a few ethical debates. And one step further: Is there an intelligent biosphere? Can artificial intelligence acquire autonomy from humanity? Can there be a computer that, like HAL, has feelings?
Nearly 300 exhibitsa score of contemporary artists and more than 20 loans on loan from historical collections, join forces not so much to explain, but also to sow questions that, naturally, do not yet have a concrete answer.
In the rooms you can find histological Petri dishes of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the patron saints of this exhibition for his discovery (in Barcelona) of the neuron whose brain mass constituted an intricate network. “It’s a shame -says Ricard Solé- the little care with which Spain has maintained the legacy from his monumental figure which is still valid today. In London, Darwin’s house is a museum, while here his home now houses tourist apartments & rdquor ;.
damaged brains
Brain damage gave a first clue that it was the brain that governed our senses. And there it is, far from the Hollywood movie, the documentary that illustrates the famous ‘awakening’ of patients with encephalitis lethargica -in a permanent state of semi-consciousness- that occurred when neurologist Oliver Sacks He injected them with medication to treat Parkinson’s. Impressive is also the series of self-portraits made by the painter William Uthermohler from 1995 until his death in 2007 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The fragment of the film ‘Beyond the mirror’, in which its director, Joaquim Jordanexplains how he lived his agnosia, that is, the inability to identify an object through the senses. Or the very moving scene in which a patient with parkinson’s He is able to express and control his words and movements with the medication and, almost automatically, returns to his paroxysmal movements when it is withdrawn.
Some questions question the visitor. Are there differences between the brain of men and women? The answer is naturally – beyond its size, which is not significant – no. It is part of those pseudoscientific conclusions that led to Cesare Lombroso to separate the malefactors by their cranial characteristics or the null results provided by the analysis of the brain of Einstein, which was stolen by a disciple and is now kept at the University of Kansas. Also on display are the perforated cards with which Ada Lovelacethe only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, built a machine that tried to emulate the brain and today is an ancestor of the computer.
Towards the future, the possibilities skyrocket. Keeping a brain separate from its body is an image that has repeatedly fueled science fiction, most jokingly in ‘Futurama’ or in a B-movie like the one shown. But there is more: can the mind be transferred to a machine? Or as it happens in ‘Matrix‘, add to our brains concrete chips that provide us with an automatic knowledge capacity.
Not everything that the brain perceives is in line with reality and the visitor can test this directly with a series of optical illusions and a disturbing experiment in which a rubber hand can be perceived as one’s own if certain conditions are created. It is a phenomenon similar to that of those who feel pain in an amputated limb and therefore, phantom.
Beyond the human brain, there are alternative intelligences. Did you know the octopus is itself all brain, with terminals on the legs? “It is a very sophisticated intelligence that has nothing to do with the functioning of our brain, and despite this, it has an amazing ability to solve problems. Unfortunately, they can only live for about two years, which is a waste & rdquor ;, the curator comments ironically. There are animals whose mind extends beyond the brain, such as spiders capable of building webs that allow them to build surfaces up to 10,000 times that of a single individual. Or those that act as a single mind in unison, like the impressive flocks of starlings or the ant whom the filmmaker WernerHerzog, who admires them, defined as “neurons with legs & rdquor ;.
robots and automata
And naturally, a robot could not miss the appointment, specifically a Hespian that it is not the last generation of its genre, that does not lack a sense of humor -or its programmers do not lack- because it is able to sing a happy ballad of ‘Smiles and Tears’ or present itself as a member of the Robinson family as B-9, the robot from the ‘Lost in Space’ series, would do it. Without forgetting its antecedents, the automatons, the machines that we imagine capable of playing chess before the Deep Blue computer defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. The most famous of all automata was the Turkish. Inside it, like so many other automatons, real players were hiding. In the expo you can read: “El Turco was a hidden machine inside a human that pretended to be a machine that pretended to be a human”.
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Robotic arms are also capable of making a portrait of the individual who remains completely still in front of them. Is that art? Maybe not, but the answer is more difficult to establish at installation than Joan Fontcuberta and Pilar Rosado they have done by feeding an algorithm with pictorial images from the Prado Museum, which in turn creates other paintings that make the system a “forger and an expert in art”, according to Pilar Rosado’s definition. It is the artists, however, who decide which of the infinite images thus created will be exhibited.
The implications and questions of the subject are so many and so varied that the debates and conferences of experts such as Núria Sebastián, Helena Matute, Andy Clark will try to approach, among others, essential questions such as whether it is language that makes us human or whether there is a bias in algorithms in our intelligence. Man and machine, not so far away.