By Dalmar Yusuf
The arts never stopped experimenting with what the sciences have had to offer. Look at the chemistry that goes into everything from cyanotyping and photography to pottery and painting. Tattooing and piercing, singing and dancing, and sculpture and portraiture all require intimate understandings of human anatomy, and what writer hasn’t fervently researched everything from weather patterns and forensics to menstrual cycles and space travel? I’m of the belief that the supposed split between these two epistemologies occurred rather one-sidedly; despite all that the sciences have done to seemingly separate themselves from their humanity, they have and will always need art in order for us to make sense of the world around us. To articulate this, I’d like to begin with an experience I had holding a brain in a lab.
In a sense, what we were doing wasn’t really an experiment; we weren’t manipulating anything. Instead, we’d been asked to follow a document and locate the different parts of the brain to get more of a hands-on experience with what we were learning in class. Obviously, encountering what were once living beings presented to us dissected like that spurred the usual existential feelings, but there was something else about the encounter I couldn’t quite place. Here were these brains, naked, all without their eyes and the rest of themselves. And here were we, tasked with finding the areas where they got to experience the world. We could see where these people saw, touch where they touched and felt loved; we could trace where they remembered and imagine where they dreamed.
Despite all we could learn from these brains, something was missing. While we could see where they saw, there was no way for us to know what they saw. It wouldn’t have been enough to simply dissect them either, if we wanted to understand them, it would’ve required us to do something scientifically impossible: bringing them back to life. Even then, had they been brought back, they would’ve needed ears or eyes or at least skin to understand our asks, and mouths or hands in order to speak or to write or draw for us.
The scientific method, much like humans, is unique in that it makes itself unique. It quite literally works by isolating things from themselves, breaking them down to their most fundamental components in order to come to some sort of understanding about our experiences. However, we don’t experience the world packaged in phenol and formaldehyde. While phenomena can occur with and without our intervention, it can never be observed in isolation; as every scientist should know, our mere observation of something as small as a photon complicates our ability to look at it.
For centuries, the sciences have sought to remedy this bias intrinsic to scientific inquiry by attempting to remove the influence of the human wherever possible: studies rarely include the first-person singular, let alone any discussion of how they feel about their findings, and entire lives are reduced to data points and statistics. Despite the lengths with which scientists have gone to strip themselves from their work, we still visualize findings in colours and dimensions our minds can comprehend, and we translate algorithms and models into languages we can understand. We don’t just observe things, we name them. And we name everything from proteins to plants and planets after things that make us laugh. Should it not be the point of scientific communication to explain the world in ways we can understand?
Before experiment solidified into how we define it today, etymologies have traced it to also having meant experience in Old French, and at one point, even enchantment.1 While the arts cannot exist without scientific knowledge, this scientific knowledge itself can only make sense to us when mediated through artistic expressions. And what are the arts if not an attempt to re-enchant the world around us, to tailor the world to our experiences? Art is how we’ve always brought things back to life.
In a scientific sense, that lab we were in was not an experiment; it wasn’t the time and place for us to manipulate those brains. In a more historical, artistic sense though, it was just as much of an experiment in that it gave us the space to actually experience touching them. Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly believe in the invaluable knowledge that the scientific method has allowed us to reach, but what it does best is to explain through disenchantment. What I think we need right now is not one epistemology or the other, but both all at once: disenchantment and re-enchantment, a return to what makes us living.
I’d like to finish then with my encounter with one of those brains. While I could tell you the various processes in my body that occurred when I held it in my hands, I instead would like to direct you to how it felt. For one, it was cold and it was heavy. It wasn’t pink, as it would’ve needed a heart to fill it with blood, and because of the solution it’d been preserved in, the brain came to me a yellowish gray. The only thing I could ever really compare it to would be the experience of handling clay. Not the velvety kind you’d use to make ceramics, but the carved kind left overnight, covered in plastic with a damp sponge beside it. Though stiffened by life and its stasis in that fridge, the brain felt like it could still be worked on with only patience and a gentle hand, its surface almost rough from traces of fingerprints that once tried to smooth it over. I held it as I’d have held a newborn. Tucking it back into its container felt like placing a pillow under a loved one’s head. Though it’d been some time since it last had a dream, I still wished I could kiss it goodnight.
1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Experiment” , accessed April 29, 2025, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/experiment_n?tab=etymology