About

The Beautiful Brain explores the latest findings from the ever-growing field of neuroscience through monthly long-form essays, reviews, galleries, short-form blog posts and more, with particular attention to the dialogue between the arts and sciences. The site explores questions of creativity, the mind of the artist, and the mind of the observer that modern neuroscience is beginning to address. Instances where art seeks to answer questions of a traditionally scientific nature are also of great interest, and for that reason you will hear from artists as well as scientists at The Beautiful Brain.

Personnel:

NOAH HUTTON is a director based in New York City, working through his production house, Couple 3 Films. His first feature film, Crude Independence, was an official selection of the 2009 SXSW Film Festival and won Best Documentary Feature at the 2009 Oxford Film Festival. In 2010, he began filming a 10-year documentary about The Blue Brain Project, and in 2011 he directed a series of 30 short films for Scientific American, and served as a judge for the 2011 and 2012 Brain Art Competitions. His 2012 concert film King for Two Days, which premiered at the 2012 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, is a portrait of jazz drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus). Noah graduated from Wesleyan University, where he studied art history and neuroscience.

BEN EHRLICH lives in Washington Heights, New York City. He is interested in the life and work of Nobel Prize-winning “father of modern neuroscience” Santiago Ramón y Cajal, some of whose non-technical writings he has translated from the original Spanish. His selections from Café Chats (Charlas de café, 1920), a popular book of semi-serious aphorisms and meditations, were published in New England Review in Spring 2012. Ben also published twelve articles in 2007 as a summer intern at The Forward, a national weekly news magazine. He is currently finishing up a job as the ghostwriter/ editor of a pop-psychology book for a major publisher. In 2009, Ben earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors in Literary Studies from Middlebury College.

SAMUEL D. MCDOUGLE  will begin his tenure as a doctoral student in neuroscience at Princeton University in the fall of 2013. Sam holds a degree in Neuroscience and Behavior from Vassar College, where he focused his studies on cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology while enthusiastically dabbling in philosophy. He previously worked as a researcher in Dr. Javier Medina’s lab at UPenn investigating the neural basis of motor learning– specifically learned reflex timing– using tools from neuropsychology, in vivo neurophysiology and computational neuroscience. Sam’s musical credits include performances with his band, The Powder Kegs, at various prominent festivals and clubs in the US (including a 2007 performance reaching millions of viewers worldwide on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion), two acclaimed full length albums, and an EP.

IAN PARK graduated from Wesleyan University in May 2011 with a degree in Neuroscience and Behavior.