ABSTRACT
Brain images are currently among the most important scientific images to have caught the cultural imagination. This chapter contributes to the growing analyses of brain images that question the rhetoric of these images, be this in the public domain of science communication, or among scientists. It presents instead of comparing brain images to photographic images, bring them into juxtaposition with another form of visuality, that of painting, specifically paintings that convey spatiality in some way. Spatial accuracy is important for precise guidance, orientation and localization in neurosurgery, and, as is well known, for mapping cognitive functions onto the physiological brain in cognitive neuroscience. Functional neuroanatomists investigate structure-function couplings at the level of the brain as organ and at the level of relationships among brain cells. The chapter discusses an alignment between painting and neuroimaging. In the first part of Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty contrasts the artifice of science with the naturalness of painting.
