Throughout the course, I have enjoyed the fact that our social networks are compared to “harder” sciences (potential energy of an auction or the current of the “water cycle” of PageRank). As a biologist, I am more familiar with the concepts of physics and math than I am with those of economics or sociology, so it is helpful and satisfying to relate the “truths” that I have studied to other fields. I happened upon Jonah Lehrer’s article, The Future of Science … is Art?, and realized that science itself is a network of “truths” (nodes) that can all function together through some known (but mostly unknown) relationships (edges). The article argues that artists have their own network of truths from their careful observations, reflections, and metaphors, but that this network better explains the relationships and overarching ideas than specifics. Thus, only together can scientists and artists create a more complete network of human knowledge.

An example is given in the article about neuroscience and human consciousness. Neuroscientists have “reduced our sensations to a set of discrete circuits (p.3),” each of which could be considered a network of neurons (nodes) and their signals (edges). However, the “discrete circuits” have yet to be connected to each other, in a larger neural network of networks that will enhance our understanding of what’s going on in the brain overall. Lehrer argues: “What neuroscience needs is a new method, one that’s able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren’t built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole (p.4)”. The network of information that neuroscientists have collected is essentially a bunch of components (the discrete circuits) that we know form a giant component, but we don’t yet know how. So, the future of neuroscience is determining the bridges between these components. Artists, on the other hand, look at life from the perspective of the individual to earn insight into how people react to their environment through direct observation. Therefore, an artist could be said to have a general idea of the network of human reactions to sensations, yet lacks the intricate details that a neuroscientist may understand. In order to fully understand the mind, perhaps neuroscientists should consider the science of the artist, somehow superimposing the two networks.