Art Meets Neuroscience…and It’s Stunning

Neuroscience – and in particular its application in marketing – has been hot news lately. Advances in the field are helping us understand why consumers are triggered by particular stimuli. And this is helping brands create better experiences for their customers.

In the publishing industry, neuromarketing studies are helping us understand the impact of print on the brain, and how that differs from digital.  This helps us all create more strategic and effective advertising and marketing campaigns, and publish better quality content.

But the study of neuroscience is not all hard science. Sometimes it includes some absolutely stunning art. Daniel Dejan of Sappi etc. shares a beautiful example — “Haptic Brain, Haptic Hand: A Communicator’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Touch.”

The book, he explains, features images from the world’s first comprehensive surgical guide, “Atlas d’Anatomie Humaine et de Chirurgie (The Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery).”

“It was written and researched by Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery (1797–1849), and illustrated by Nicolas Henri Jacob (1782–1871), a student of the French painter Jacques Louis David,” Dejan explains. “The eight books, or tomes as they were called when published, were produced across almost two decades—between 1831-1854. Bourgery lived just long enough to finish his labor of love, but the last of the treatise’s eight volumes was not published until five years after his death.”

In this new book, the incredible artwork lives on, updated based on what we now know about the human brain.

“To create the images for the publication, the Houston-based design firm, Rigsby Hull, sourced Jacob’s original illustrations from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library located at the University of Toronto,” he notes. “For this Sappi project, the brain portion of Jacobs’ original illustrations has been replaced with intricately-rendered, interconnected neural networks re-imagined by Jonathan Hull in 2015.”

It’s a beautiful take on a scientific subject that continues to evolve as we get better at understanding our brains. The book is highly relevant to modern marketing best practices and the importance of engaging the senses in the customer journey. And for those of us with a love good design, the imagery makes this one sing.