Art and emotion under the microscope

The New York-based artist Nene Humphrey discovered a remarkable link between a cultural practice and neurology while working as an artist-in-residence in the lab of the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux at New York University: the images she had been researching of the Victorian mourning ritual of braiding dead loved ones hair looked exactly like the neurons of the amygdala, the area of the brain that processes emotions, when viewed under a microscope, she tells The Art Newspaper. This inspired her