Eva Catenaccio
About the artist:
Eva Catenaccio is a medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY. “I spent a summer working with a neuropsychiatrist and a radiologist examining functional neuroimaging in schizophrenia. My paintings explore the ways in which images are used to communicate scientific results to both professional and lay audiences; and also how, when taken out of context, these images become open to an array of emotional interpretations. I like to imagine the patients who participated in these research studies examining the work as a reflection of their own experience of illness.”
About the artwork:
“This is a painting of the statistical parametric map generated by the analysis of regional cerebral blood flow as measured by positron-emission tomography during verbal auditory hallucinations in five patients with schizophrenia. The work is inspired by the paper “A functional neuroanatomy of hallucinations in schizophrenia,” by Silbersweig et al (Nature, 1995). During PET scanning, subjects in this study were asked to press a button every time they heard voices. During auditory hallucinations, neural activity increased in deep brain structures, including subcortical, limbic and paralimbic areas.”
Visuals editor:
Justin Sanders
