Can you think of a time when you felt connected to nature through art as a medium? Maybe you were drawing, maybe you're taking photos, maybe you were making music using natural materials. What about other parts of biology or science? What made the experience so memorable to you? In the last lecture, we talked about how art has advanced biological knowledge and research, and also how art facilitates a human connection to the science at hand. Auger art are using living bacteria to make a design or communicate an idea is a literal and effective way of connecting biology with art. Dr. Sarah Adkins who degenerated the image that you see here, studies how to connect art and microbiology education to improve students' classroom experiences. I'll include a link to her paper at the end of this talk if you'd like to read more. For those of you who are teachers, Auger art kits are available through many of the main educational supply distributors. Art helps to facilitate connection, and photography is a way of helping to both document life on Earth, and foster a sense of connection between humans and endangered or threatened species. This is third root of Joel Sartorius' work on the National Geographic photo arc. Sartorius spent the last 10 years taking studio portraits of animals, many of whom who are endangered or threatened, to get people to care about living beings that they may have never heard of before. Sartorius has been quoted saying "You won't save what you don't love." The photos are designed to help build that sense of connection to spur conservation. In addition to photography, biological illustration is a viable career choice for anyone interested in the intersection of biology and the arts, and one that plays a valuable role in a variety of scientific communications, including research endeavors and education. For example, lacking a time machine, the only way to visualize lifelike reconstructions of extinct organisms is to generate illustrations or animations. This involves someone's ability to use the scientific evidence at hand, such as fossils, and creativity to express what something may have looked like. Certain molecular phenomenon are not directly visible. All we can do to see what is happening is to look indirectly, like looking at bands on a gel to see if a certain form of a protein is present. But an artist can turn this information into an illustration or an animation that is much more accessible. Think of textbooks that you may have used in school, they tend to be full of high-quality illustrations. If you've been to school recently, many electronic textbooks also come with a host of animations too. Illustrations can also be used to remove distracting or unnecessary aspects that would be found in an actual image, this is important when we consider human cognition as well. Our brains can only handle so much information at once, and reducing what's called cognitive load is important for facilitating teaching. Because then the brain is only focusing on what you want the student to learn, not any distracting information. For example, if we're looking at an image of a dissected human body, it's very easy to get distracted by everything else that we see. But a beautiful illustration of a single structure without any intervening blood or viscera, can help the student focus on the most important part, whatever is the subject of that lesson. We see this concept applying outside of biology as well. Think about road-maps. They are simplified versions of rich and complicated structures. However, most of that extra information is removed so that we can just focus on how we're going to get from point A to point B. Illustrations and animations aren't only just important for educational purposes, researchers and professionals like doctors use them as well to communicate important findings. Art is a foundational to biology and an important way of communicating science findings, while also facilitating human connection to science and biology. Too often, science is portrayed as one-dimensional, boring, and abstract, and art is an excellent way of bridging that gap and communicating key ideas to a larger audience in a more relatable and accessible fashion. How else do we see biology in the arts interface? Let's consider another view. What can biological science tell us about our personal experience with the arts?
