🧵
1/ Salvador Dalí's delirium as science
1904-1989 | Spanish surrealist | Explorer of the (erotic) subconscious through his "paranoiac-critical" method
🦋🦋🦋 Neurology is everywhere
2/"Critical paranoia."
🤓Another way to perceive reality. Revealing the "irrational knowledge."
🤓"My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision" Dalí
3/
🤔"..it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality." Dalí
4/
🤔Is delirium an expression of a different reality? (involuntary)
🧐Dalí consciously extracts elements that make up the inner world (of the paranoiac)
🤔And I wonder if his artistic ecstasy is a convulsion, a seizure. I wish we could have had cEEG during Dalí's trances.😍
5/
"The only difference between a madman and me is that I'm not mad." Dalí😆
🤓He was just delirious! (A fluctuating confusion or a different perception of what's real?)
6/
🤔Was Dalí tapping into Default Mode Network (DMN)
🦋Medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, and angular gyrus -> strong low-frequency oscillations activated when individuals are focused on their internal mental state processes (Limbic network?)
7/
"I use hypnagogic images, vivid lilliputian images." Dalí
🧐Hypnagogia is associated with stage 1 NREM sleep and pre-sleep alpha waves
🧐Lilliputian hallucinations described in seizures, brain tumors, AIDS-dementia complex, delirium, Lewy Body dementia, schizophrenia.
8/
"Sleep is a heavy monster held up by the crutches of reality." Dalí
9/
Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)
🤓Nemesis punished Narcissus. He fell in love with his reflection. He melted away from the fire of passion burning inside of him, eventually turning into a flower (Narcissus flower) -> Narcissism is born.😅
10/
🤓Dali's fascination with Freud manifested in his art ("On Narcissism: An introduction" Sigmund Freud 1914)
🦋He was a diligent reader of Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams." (1899)
11/
🤓Stereopsis (Binocular depth perception)
🧐Dalí created art using our optic nerve-chiasm-lateral geniculate nucleus-primary visual cortex (Near Far discrimination)
🧐He experimented with 3D images, Frenzel goggles (disables visual fixation)
12/
😍Nuclear Mysticism
😍Homage to Crick and Watson's DNA double helix
"On Jacob's ladder, each step is a DNA landing, and the angels going up and down are the RNA" Dalí.
13/
🤓Nuclear/Atomic period
🧐"Dalí was fascinated by the theory of relativity because it offered the idea that reality could not be reduced to a single flow" Gavin Parkinson.
🤓"Determinism doesn't exist.. the identity of objects is created by observation!" Dalí
14/
🥸1938 Dalí meets Freud
😆During the meeting, Dalí sketched.
"I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud's cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral – to be extracted with a needle!" Dalí
15/
🥸Freud, in a letter to Stefan Zweig (Austrian Novelist)
"I was inclined to look upon the surrealists as absolute, cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion".
16/
😍Dalí's brain->snails
🦋Hard outside (cranium), soft inside (Brain)
✅Insects bite -> reveal a watermelon. (insects for Dalí, were symbols of fear-> neurophobia?)
✅To the left, there is a skull, but the skull is a larva -> symbol of evolution—neuroscience evolution?
17/
😍Dalí's melting clocks
🧐A reminder of our ephemeral nature or our mental decay = dementia!
18/
🥸Reinterpretation of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
🦋Inkblots, notice figures of Diego Velazquez, Dalí, and Christ.
🧐Velazquez (Spanish painter) has a saw opening the skull. Christ closed his eyes.😅😅
19/
🥴Dali's Parkinson's disease (76 y/o, 1980)
😍He depicts his malady beautifully.
✅Tremor, rigidity, postural instability (crutches, repeated in different paintings)
✅Dementia (melting clocks?)
20/
😳My surreal ramblings
😳Giraffes on fire, I see hippocampi in status or inflamed from autoimmunity
😳Long elephant legs, I see neurons and long axons
🦋Butterflies, I see neurons (#cajalbutterflies)
😅Critical paranoia, I see multimodal monitoring and deep electrodes
21/
🤓Dalí is a challenge to our scientific perceptions and bias.
"Our reality is a habit of the mind" Salvador
22/
"I don't do drugs, I am drugs" Salvador Dalí
🦋🦋🦋Neurology is everywhere!
@EmoryNeuroCrit @caseyalbin @bensalem_owen @gabifpucci @JimmySuhMD @sigman_md @Capt_Ammonia @EricLawson90 @VizcarraJA
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.