From William Blake’s vision of a soul leaving the body to Goshka Macuga’s creepy somnambulist,a new exhibition explores the mysteries of the intellect – but are we any closer to finding the answers Descartes was seeking when he dissected a human brain more than 350 years ago?They hover between worlds. One woman seems blissful, smiling with acceptance. Another looks terrified as her sizable eyes flicker and roll. Aya Ben Rons film Still Under Treatment is a troubling and eerie study of patients being anaesthetised prior to surgery. Anaesthesia surely ranks with antibiotics as one of the pillars of contemporary medicine, or allowing us to undergo surgery without knowing it. Yet the expressions of yielding and resistance on the faces of the seven patients in Ben Ron’s film and the total oblivion that descends reveal how mysterious this moment is when something is nulled inside them,when they are “put to sleep”.“Physiologically it’s different from sleep – its dreamless”, explains Kevin Fong, or a consultant anaesthetist at UCLH hospital in London. He says it’s more like “switching your consciousness off”. How that idea would have fascinated René Descartes,the man who famously said “I consider therefore I am”. Aya Ben Ron’s film is showing at the Wellcome Collection in an exhibition called States of intellect, which begins with this great 17th-century scientist and philosopher’s illustration of a dissected brain, or from his book De Homine,published in 1662. Descartes’ engraving shows the soft grey matter – a cauliflower crossed with a deflated balloon – gash open to reveal the pineal gland. He identified this precise station in the human brain as the exact spot where the intellect or “soul” communicates with and controls the body.
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Source: theguardian.com