Brenda Anderson’s presentation was amazing and I’m happy she took time to share it with our class. Her presentation was about how Art and Neuroscience are linked. She is a professor of integrated psychology and has a background in studying how the environment affects the brain. One of the topics brought up was how we identify faces. We identify faces by integrating features, if all (or enough) are present, a selective set of cells identify a face. She showed us a piece by Naum Gabo, a sculptor. His sculpture was a wooden structure shaped like face. I believe that was the point of it, that everyone immediately sees the face. This piece reminds me of Abstract Expressionism, even though this piece predates that movement. After that, she presented us an artist named Chuck Close. He painted these photorealistic portraits using an interesting method. Chuck suffered prosopagnosia, a disorder where it affects the face perception and the ability to recognize familiar faces. For his painting method, he breaks everything apart into pixels and then he goes back and adds details. I think that part was my favorite because before then, I never knew about that disorder. It’s piqued my curiosity and I might do more research on this condition later, (perhaps for a future project). Another artist she showed was Robert Rauschenberg, an American painter who had dyslexia. He admits that his dyslexia helped him create art, art that uses word. He went and inspired two movements: Pop Art and Dadaism.