Videos > Inner Cartography at the 2010 Chicago Fringe Festival

This evening-length work, created in collaboration with neuroscientist Miriam Sach, PhD, is based on the idea of body mapping. Your experience of your own body creates patterns of neurons in your motor cortex, patterns that can be repeated, strengthened, changed, or even forgotten. This piece explores how these patterns are visible on many levels, from individual neurons all the way up to individual human beings.

SECTION I: the delicacy of patterns
Music: 18/21/46/18
Neurons are the individual cells which make up the building blocks of our nervous system. A neuron has dendrites, which are filaments that allow it to receive neurotransmitters and other chemical signals from surrounding neurons. Neurons also have one axon, which is the filament that allows the neuron to send signals to the other neurons around it, a process known as firing. Depending on what a neuron receives, it will either become excited and more likely to fire, or inhibited and thereby less likely to fire.

SECTION II: the strength of maps
Music: Synaptic Rattles in Eight Large Pulses
Every voluntary movement originates from the surface of the brain, known as the cortex, where all neurons are located. Interestingly, the spatial distributions of neurons, which are responsible for the movement of certain body parts, represent the importance of that body part for the human nature (e.g. the larger the area of neurons for one body part, the higher the importance of that particular body part). Furthermore, the areas of neurons in the brain are highly interconnected and patterns can form not just in a single area but in connections between different areas.

SECTION III: the science of new things
Music: Sonata I
The patterns that develop on a neuronal level are visible in our experiences; learning something new is the expression of that pattern. But learning doesn’t exist in a vacuum, not even within our own minds. Learning is contextual and the way we relate to others around us influences the way we feel about our own learning – frustration, excitement, compassion.