In the fall of 2003, a San Francisco art gallery exhibited my brain. As a conceptual artist, I work with ideas instead of oil paint, which sometimes leads to accusations that I’m not creating anything others can experience. To express my thoughts as directly as possible, I collaborated with University of California, San Francisco, neurologist Bruce Miller, who imaged my brain while I laid down in a medical scanner and contemplated beauty and truth.
The technique Miller used, called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), was developed in the 1990s to noninvasively measure mental activity. Blood flow inside the brain is tracked with strong magnetic pulses that interact with the iron in the blood’s hemoglobin, a protein that helps transport oxygen. Because circulation increases after neurons fire, the flow of blood reveals the flow of thought.
At least that’s the concept. When we put it into practice in 2003, my resulting scans showed scant detail. During my exhibit at Modernism Gallery, spectators squinted at the red blobs overlaying my gray matter, shook their heads in bafflement and replenished their glasses of chardonnay.
