The Binding Problem

Etchings printed onto acetate

H 25cm, W19cm, D2cm

Two overlapping line drawings of the picked flower, an hour apart, are etched in blue. Three such etchings, capturing the images one day after the last, are printed onto clear blue acetate and framed, one on top of the other, in clear blue Perspex. The result is a series of overlaying images of a picked flower, first opening and then wilting, over time. The piece follows time through movement. The flower is dead the moment it is picked, yet it continues to bloom. A study into the space beyond life.

In this piece, I was thinking about a specific issue in neuroscience. Our inability to understand consciousness. It’s called ‘The Binding Problem’.   We don’t know how the brain binds information together. Someone sees a car which is red and is moving. We don’t know how the brain takes those three pieces of information, the colour, the object and the motion, and puts them together to give a moving red car. It gets complex –they feel scared because they are standing in the road and the car is coming towards them. We don’t know how the brain binds information to form a whole experience to act upon (the definition of consciousness) -  feeling scared, they step off the road, onto the pavement.

 Scientists are fairly certain that consciousness originates in the brain. However, many neuroscientists think there is more to the content of consciousness than brain activity. Professor John Eccles, who won the Nobel prize in 1963 for his work on brain synapses, was convinced that an element of consciousness lay beyond the human body - a soul, so to speak (though this is the wrong word because it has connotations specific to a religion). The same school of thought believe this component of consciousness is the continuum that exists after we die.