A Woman Diagnosed With MS Is Turning Her Own Brain Scans Into Art

Shortly after Elizabeth Jameson was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1991, she became obsessed with the inside of her mind. Jameson would undergo brain scan after brain scan to track the progress of her disease, a process that unlocked what she calls “a deep fascination with the architecture of the brain.” Confronted with a slew of magnetic resonance images, or MRIs, she was able to see exactly what her “imperfect” brain looked like. “Frightening, yet mesmerizing,” the colorless images helped her to come to terms with an otherwise perplexing chronic illness, which would eventually render her quadriplegic.  Still, there was something missing in those scans. Her scans originally appeared as stark black-and-white visualizations, reflective of the clinical environment from whence they came. With little other color or dimension to illustrate her complicated experience with MS (though some MRIs do reflect the pigmentation of contrast agents), these “portraits” of her brain seemed incomplete. So Jameson, based in San Francisco, set out to change that. With no background in art, she began using her brain scans to celebrate her mind, reinterpreting the images that represented her ever-changing understanding of living with a progressive disease. In the process, she became an artist. “In many ways, art has become my voice,” she explained in an email interview with The Huffington Post. Jameson’s art in...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news