Intro:

The most diverse city in the Commonwealth with more than 63 languages spoken directly from Malden, Massachusetts. This is culture matters. Culture matters in Malden.

Ose Schwab:

This is Culture Matters in Malden, a podcast that uses the arts and culture as a lens to exploring important themes relevant to the members of the Malden community. My name is Ose Schwab, your host for this episode with neuroscientist, writer and artist Joshua Ana. Today I'm excited to introduce a thought-provoking conversation about a creative way Joshua has conceived of to explore the relationship between our internal world of thought and feeling and the spaces we move around. In this project, mental mapping, the art of exploring connections, Joshua uses artificial intelligence as a tool to analyze interviews with creative professionals about how they navigate their work, social and natural spaces. He shares the insights that emerge in a collection of photographs that blend portraits of his interviewees with landscapes and cityscapes of Malden. This project is all about the connections. Joshua is and has always been curious about people with their environment, past and present art and science, internal and external worlds, the seen and the unseen. Josh, thank you so much for conversing with me today on Culture Matters in Malden.

Joshua Sariñana:

I'm so happy to converse with you today. Thank you.

Ose Schwab:

So we are going to be talking about your project mental Mapping, the Art of Exploring Connections. But before we delve into that, I did want to explore your earliest memories of things that you were curious about.

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah, great question. It all kind of started back when I was a little kid. Actually, a lot of the questions I had dealt with stars and electricity, so there were inherently scientific, I can remember back when I was, I don't know, first or second grade, and talking to my grandfather Eat a nice backyard, and we lived in a part of town that didn't have too much light pollution. And so I remember just talking to him about it and he would say, oh man, these stars are actually much bigger. They're not little, he's an accountant so he doesn't have much of a science background. But I couldn't fathom it. It didn't make sense to me the idea of distance and things being small, but that is certainly one of my earliest memories that, and asking questions like what is electricity? And my family would be like, oh, there's electrons, but how does it work? And then questions like that. So those are some of my initial thoughts as they relate to science.

Ose Schwab:

And given that you are currently a neuroscientist, how did some of those questions connect with humans and the mind? Or did that come later?

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah, it was a development for sure. So my interests were primarily in physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, so dealing with things that are very large and very small. And that happened when I was in high school in part precipitated by a friend who had passed away, a very close friend. And I think I was trying to make a sense of what something was in terms of existing and not existing. And what came through is the big bank going from something that did not exist to the known universe. And that really sparked an interest in wanting to study physics at a young age. And as I read these books that were written for a general audience, what came through to me were also the scientists themselves. So Oppenheimer is pretty relevant right now because it of the Christopher Nolan movie, but I remember reading about him and Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, Richard Thyman, who MIT alum actually.

And their personalities came through in the books that were either about them or about their research. And as I went through my college trajectory, I moved from physics to chemistry in part because I worked in a chemistry lab at NASA studying media rights. But over time, after I finished my science requirements, I had to study things like philosophy and language and linguistic to a certain extent. And what came through to me was what is creativity in and of itself? And I took courses on those types of questions, but also on existential philosophy, which dealt with things like why do we exist or the meaning of life, and how do we have consciousness as it relates to the environment. I decided to switch to neuroscience. I was at a community college and I had to transfer. And instead of going to physics or chemistry, I chose neurosciences that pathway.

Ose Schwab:

And there does seem to be quite a number of parallels between quantum mechanics and the mind to some extent. And is that something that you have stumbled upon in your scientific journey?

Joshua Sariñana:

So I've always tried to integrate all the science that I've come to know and learned in the past to try to develop a better sense of how nature works, not just in one aspect of science or discipline like physics, but also across the board to neuroscience and psychology. And so things like quantum mechanics, although they're very small, you can take some of those concepts and extrapolate into other parts of the physical world or even the digital world to some extent, or computation I should say. And there were some, I think it was maybe Roger Penrose, he had some ideas on the interaction of quantum forces at the neuronal level and how quantum forces can shape these proteins that help carry neurotransmitters across the axon. So just even seeing those types of connections for me were just exceptionally important because they were hidden and I wanted to see things that were hidden and just bring 'em into my conscious understanding of how the world worked beyond physical, including psychological and emotional.

Ose Schwab:

I love that you said bring into view what is hidden because that makes me then wonder how did photography enter into the picture and arts more generally?

Joshua Sariñana:

So I'd say my interest in neuroscience specifically started around the same time my interest in photography started actually. So I had the opportunity to study abroad, which really changed my perception of the world. And I spent most of the time in Paris that I had never been out of California or really the city I lived in. So it was just kind of mind blowing to me. Anyhow, during that time, I would just walk around the city for hours and hours mostly by myself and then take photos. I had brought a few disposal cameras with me and I thought that would be enough, but it was not, I think after a week I had already used them. And so I bought a little 35 millimeter and I shot dozens and dozens of roles, but I didn't even see what they were because I didn't develop them.

But I liked the process of it. And at the same time, we were going to museums, we had amazing curators and historians talk to us about the architecture or about paintings or about just the general history. And so one piece that has always stuck out to me was Rodan is the thinker. It's part of the gates of hell, which is monumental piece of art. And even when I was little, I remember noticing that and I had no idea of the background or who did it. And so I learned about it. And so the thinkers literally about the idea of reflecting on oneself and consciousness. And so that really piqued my interest into understanding how we come to reflect and then just trying to create some symbolic connections with things like the curvature of the thinker. And it shaped like the brain. I was a young student, so these things were profound to me.

Ose Schwab:

I mean, the beauty of this kind of awe is really important. I think you traverse that scientific curiosity to the arts and are able to convey this kind of awe. And with that in mind, I wanted to ask about, you've done your own kind of artwork photography, but then you also curate or pull together these projects that involve other artists and scientists, and you combine the world of science and art poetry. For example, one of the projects that you worked on fairly recently. And tell me a little bit about those projects and kind of what they are aiming for.

Joshua Sariñana:

Sure. So past couple of years I have been working on group projects. So I had never really taken on a large undertaking in terms of directing an our project. So a couple projects that you're referring to are the poetry of science where I worked with scientists from the community, primarily Cambridge and focusing on MIT since that's where my alma mater. And also with poets, local poets. The goal was to combine the history and the emotional salience of what scientists do because it's often so hidden and it's hard to see what's happening behind closed doors of these Ivy Tower type institutions, which is unfortunate,

Ose Schwab:

Also very intimidating.

Joshua Sariñana:

Absolutely, I totally agree. So in that project, the goal was to have an emotional connection by reading poetry that was about the lives of the scientists and it can pretty open about the research, about their background, about their motivations. And it was quite moving in my opinion. And I really liked to connect the visual representation of the scientists. So that was through photography. We had a local photographer execute those images, and then the poets worked with them over the course of I think a month or two to tell their stories. And we juxtaposed the poetry next to the images so that people would make a more direct association by looking at the individual and just reading the work. So that's a way to understand things that are hidden, not just the research, but the scientists internal world and to reach out. And another theme of that particular project was identifying scientists of color since they're a minority and understanding that they are a type of hidden network of people that are often not seen.

So that was an important part of it as well. And in relation, a similar project happened in tandem was another project working with photographers and poets. It was very similar actually. I had applied to these two grants at once thinking I would just get one. I got posts. So it was very busy a few years, and that's called through these realities. And it's very similar except to focusing on science, we focused more on the lack of representation of having stories that include people of color from the point of view of the media and having people's stories told by say, journalists or photographers or writers. But I wanted to have more of a direct connection with the people who view the world, so photographers and the people who can write about their internal experiences, which is the poets and they went to collaborate with. So that was the second project.

Ose Schwab:

It's so interesting. I almost feel that you are in a way, a mediator of different worlds through these different projects by your background, your early curiosities, and then study of science and then continued curiosity pursuing arts and photography and then pulling in poetry that you're connecting these worlds of people that might not associate with each other naturally.

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah, I agree. Part of my time in academics was reflecting on the fact that there are so many departments that are specialized and I would see these themes that ran across them, but there was very little communication, even though these institutions emphasized there are multidisciplinary disciplinary interactions, which is of course true to some extent, but you can only get so far when your whole focuses on your project as a scientist or as an engineer or someone focusing on historical figure for their humanities degree, for example. And so a lot of the ideas are similar and overlap, but the language is often different. So a lot of time is spent just translating. And so yeah, I do think that I like to make connections through network type ideas that I've learned through neuroscience. And inherent to that is a type of categorization. So what are the ideas that overlap? How do they connect in terms of concept, but in terms of translating their language. So that was a big part of my want, but I think the motivation is to still the same as when I was younger, to try to understand not only the natural world, but the internal world. And all the neuroscience can do that by literally looking into the brain. It still doesn't get to, at least in my opinion, some more of the emotional aspects to it, even though there are scientists that study emotion.

I would like to feel the emotion and I think art is a good way to precipitate that.

Ose Schwab:

Absolutely. And so then we come to the current project, which is this mental mapping project. And tell me what was the origin of the project idea? What sort of precipitated your desire to pursue this?

Joshua Sariñana:

So I think it was a few things. One, I had come off those two past projects that I discussed and I was directing them. So I think the first project had like 25 people. The second one had about a dozen, and I loved it, and I loved having the capacity to help share people's experiences, but I missed the ability to actually make my own artwork. And so I wanted to do something on my own. I hadn't done it in several years. And with that, I wanted to emphasize things that I had before. It wasn't actually, I wasn't conscious of it as I have gone through multiple projects, it's only been more recent where I understand that a lot of what I'm trying to get through is revealing hidden in networks more or less, whether it's internal representations or people who are not represented well. And because of my background in neuroscience and because of my wants to translate how science works, I focused on these network type of properties or network communication.

And so the current impact of artificial intelligence, primarily large language models, those are based on the brain to some extent how they're connected and to certain processes like vision or motor output. And I finally kind of made the connection like, oh, okay, there are these network properties that are finally coming to fruition in terms of people's popular understanding of it. And I can use that as an entry point to elaborate on network properties of the brain. They share a lot of overlap and other network properties like social connections because a lot of the type of models or formal theories that describe how information traverses across networks, there is overlap across the brain, social networks, artificial intelligence, and even the environments like ecological networks.

Ose Schwab:

Talk to me a little bit about what you hope to achieve with this project, because you said something in one of the interviews that you had that I thought was really interesting, and that is you said something about if you can spark the imagination that can set the stage for learning or understanding, there's some relationship with imagination and understanding. And I know that let's say with climate change and the need for us as a society to mobilize to make changes in our behavior, it requires some awareness, understanding, action, and that is a bit of a challenge,

Joshua Sariñana:

An existential one.

Ose Schwab:

Yes. But I feel that there's something in your hypothesis about how we can activate people that is in this project.

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah, I never want, I hope I don't come off as heavy handed. I

Ose Schwab:

No, not at all. I don't think so. I think it's an artistic project, but it has the potential in my opinion, to reach people.

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah, it is a hard space for me to be in with regard to using scientific principles and even methods and then connecting it to art objects or symbolic representation within those images. And I spent a long time trying to do this, and it's a challenge that I really enjoy. But in terms of my motivations in communicating some sort of idea, I think it is more or less how do we connect our internal world. So our thoughts, and you mentioned imagination, I think it's more about exploration and my projects in general deal with exploration and not really having a very specific goal, just having a very general goal. And you spoke about memory as well. So the part of the brain that I studied in graduate school in my postdoctoral work is the hippocampus, which is encoding or storing or learning information about our experiences and our experiences deal with where something happened, what happened and when it happened.

And a lot of this is really kind of understanding space and time. So you can kind of boil it down further, which actually takes me back to my interest in Einstein and his history's relativity because it really, the integrate space and time and dimensionality, and even actually takes me back to philosophy. I read some work by Emmanuel Kant, and part of his work also really emphasizes the foundation of reality as a space and time. So it's part of the brain, the hippocampus more or less organizes how we understand space or represent it, and then how we integrate or abstract space into time. And these two kind of functions come together in our ability to explore the environment. So when we're exploring the environment, single cells within hippocampus, not just one, but single cells in multitude as a disconnected network in a way, they represent the space we are in.

So if you're occupying a space like we are now, there is a neuron firing to represent that particular space. And as we develop over time, these representation space become actually more abstracted so that you can abstract them to time. So there are time cells, you can abstract them to color and well, I wouldn't say that there are color cells per se, but there are sensory cells that are abstractions of space. And you can kind of really connect this to how we even describe our perceptual world. So if you are an artist, you may have a good understanding of color space. If you are someone who's exploring and hiking, you have a good sense of natural space. So we often kind of add space as an appendage to a lot of ways in which we are exploring and we have to explore in order to understand space and its abstractions.

And so memory is a result, or at least is deeply intertwined with that whole process. So when we're trying to explore our environment, we're developing a context. It could be a room, it can be the hiking trail, it can be your social group. So the part, the hippocampus really builds not only our perception of context, but it connects it to our cognitive processes. That's pretty long-winded. But those are kind of fundamental transformations of the brain as it relates to external information coming in that really make up our internal conscious world or our mental maps. And the goal is to show how that connects to our actions. And that is not an easy thing to do. If you even look at political theory or art theory, there's this whole idea of theory versus practice. There's no verse necessarily. Even though in the brain they're kind of antagonistic to some extent. They must kind of coincide through experience. We can abstract theories or concepts, but no matter what, we're grounded in reality. And I think that people kind of lose touch with that because things become so digital or virtual that we can get rid of space in a particular way.

So if we're on Zoom calls all day long, there are a lot of issues with that in my opinion, but we're kind of transcending the spatial divide, an even temporal divide. So I think in not having the ability to articulate ourselves, whether it's through walking or even through a gesticulation in a conversation or all these unconscious cues, we need to have this grounding in space and in our environment to know that we have an impact. And there are so many indirect impacts that we may not be aware of, in part because things have become so complex in terms of how information travels or how things that are physical travel across the world. So I would like for people to understand that our internal representations have an association with our physical world and that we impact our physical world reciprocally.

And

That I hope, at least with the project, I doubt all of the things I'm saying we'll get through, but is to show that we are within an environment that we're deeply connected to both directly and indirectly. So great. The people took some action about that.

Ose Schwab:

Yeah, I mean for me, looking at some of the scenes that you've depicted and thinking about the space that is in and around Malden where I currently live, I think it helps me to feel connected to a place and even to myself. But I'm curious if you, from a neuroscientific perspective, what you know about the brain and how it is affected by spaces. If there's a difference in how really raw natural spaces affect us versus simply curated parks. Because there's certainly a difference when I walk in the Fells or even some micro woods like Forestdale Cemetery or where there are trees, there's a dense tree, an underbrush where you can almost forget that you're in a city and that has a definite effect on me and my mental condition. And so is there some way that you can explain that or what would you say about that?

Joshua Sariñana:

The first thing comes to mind in terms of natural spaces is that there's more research showing how being in nature helps us kind of settle our mind, but connect also to our space. And it seems like it's a type of ability to develop resilience by being in spaces like that versus either highly curated or say even poorly designed.

Ose Schwab:

Many of those,

Joshua Sariñana:

So many poorly designed spaces that affect our physical body, our kinetics, just the way we position ourselves and hurt our backs or hurt our ankles or hurt our neck by being at a computer for too long, for example. So sometimes when I watch things like on TikTok or Instagram, I come across people who are city designers, for example, and they'll explain things like, here's a sidewalk, you can tell this is poorly design because you can see that on this plane of grass, everyone's walking through and making their own pathway. And I really enjoy that because it shows that people have, I mean, it's all in comparison to a global effect, but in terms of people's behavior want to follow a different trajectory sometimes even when the paths are constructed for us to go in a particular direction. And so I do like that type of resistance, even though it may not be conscious, if you kind of look at, say, using a computer, we have a pad or a mouse that's sometimes a touch screen, and those are super limiting in terms of how we move and because it affects the way we move, it affects the way we think.

And I find it very aggravating actually, that for me to get from one point to the next on a computer is like, it has to go through my wrist. It gets so annoying.

Ose Schwab:

That is funny. Yeah. I think that brings me to this other idea of the pathways or the networks that are kind of fortified. And what I know about the neural networks is that if you repeat certain things, I mean that's what learning is, a repetition. So that then those lines between nodes are more robust and in the same way, I guess those pathways that people create in the grass become that's sort of a physical representation of those pathways, but creating more of the pathways to the natural spaces, meaning helping people become aware of them. I mean, my husband was telling me the other day that when he goes walking in the woods, there's so few people, only the dock walkers, but then you walk on the city main streets, you see tons and tons of people. Do they not know about these places? Why are they not inhabiting them? Is that because of lack of time? And are they missing out of the influences of nature? And what can we as a community, what can I do to help them know about them? Those are questions that emerge for me, living in this pretty densely populated city where I know people are starving for nature,

Joshua Sariñana:

I think it's hard to actually connect urban and natural if you don't know what you're looking for.

And I moved to Malden a few years ago, back at the end of 2020, and I moved here from California and lived in Cambridge for 10 plus years. And for multiple reasons, we moved to Malden. And one thing I wanted to do was explore, and this was in the middle of the pandemic. And so I set out to find spaces that I was aware of, and of course, hopefully that would lead to places that I was not actually aware of. And so there's a fouls, there's pine banks park, there's the river. And from where I can gather that people generally don't know that there's even a river here.

Ose Schwab:

It is true. And some of it is underground. Yeah, that's right.

Joshua Sariñana:

So some of the research for the project actually was figuring out the history. And then what came through with regard to the larger themes of the project were the idea of networks and pathways. And so I wanted to find literal pathways that were taken and then not taken or hidden. And the idea of hidden comes through in part in terms of representationally in the images is through the river and seeing where it is literally there's water in some of the images or also seeing where the river is in terms of being underground. So there are images of streets that multiple intersections in Mulden Center where the river used to be, and it still is, but underground. And when the sea levels rise to a few feet of those parts are going to flood, it becomes the river again. Or if there's a 48 hour storm, something along those lines. And so it became important for me to explore physically and then also to explore just more of the abstract connections between the city's past and present and future. I think the logo for Malden Wright is strong, past, proud future, and that really stuck in my mind as I was exploring and navigating across these different paths. And these nodes that I'm trying to connect in the project are the physical world. So the pathways I described and the more abstract worlds that we don't see social networks or

Urban networks as it relates to nature, as you mentioned, it's kind of hard. Your husband doesn't see the crossing of those borders. And that's why I interviewed the participants that are represented in the photography. And through those interviews, I'm trying to understand how people explore mentally their connection with the environment, whether urban or natural, and also their social interactions. So that's more of the concept, the internal aspects of representing the external world. And then how do they connect with that? How do they physically move through the world based on their creative process or on their art or creative work? So we have participants that are skaters that work in glitch art, that are writers, that are performing artists do installation work. So they all have to interact with the physical world. And so I want to understand how they think about their work and then how that interacts with their production of the work.

Ose Schwab:

And that's interesting that you chose creative people. Can you define how you would explain creative in this context? What qualifies a person to be creative?

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah. Not an easy question to answer. I've taught some courses on creativity in the brain, and the way in which I boil it down is that the brain literally creates our consciousness and in relation to our interactions with the world. And so kind of starting with that, I wanted to identify people who had the ability to reflect upon things that they create with intention. So the connection between how the brain creates in and of itself, and then how people can actually understand their mental trajectory in creating some sort of art object or performance. So within the scope of the project, I was looking for particular people that either moved like dancers or skaters, for example, and people who worked more in the digital space. So I can see if there's any type of differentiation between the two. But I was also looking for people who had backgrounds in ecology, backgrounds in network based sciences or statistics. So whether not they're working on artificial intelligence or if they're working in understanding genetic networks, I would put that in the bucket of creative intentionality and looking for people who had actually any experience with the pasture in terms of working, say at Monsanto or the Ford Factory, basically places that had a large ecological impact on the environment through pollution. So I didn't find really anyone in the latter group because such a long time ago, but those were generally the groups of people I was looking for.

Ose Schwab:

And I am curious about what you think is relevant in looking at those types of people in terms of the patterns that can emerge and what we can learn from them.

Joshua Sariñana:

So I'm going through analysis of the transcripts, and I interviewed each participant for multiple hours. So there's a lot of really rich information. And I came in with the idea that because I asked specific questions about how do you understand your different environments in nature, your social environments, your digital environments, and then your practice, and to see if there's any type of theme that shows that the way in which people practice regardless of what they do, as long as it's intentional, is it the same way to connect with the environment? All the examples that I gave above. And I'm still in the analysis. So I'm basically more or less assessing the hypothesis that people construct these different environments or contexts internally in a similar fashion. And that even though their practices may be different, that they likely go about it in a similar way. But I'm still doing the analysis, and right now I'm basically at the first stage of the project, which is information gathering and then creating the images.

Ose Schwab:

Just finally, certainly the project as it is currently at uma. And how we connected is these photographs, a series of photographs that are a combination of portraits and city scenes. And those will be on view here at uma, but is there would be more, maybe as you interview more people, more photos, more scenes, more city scenes, will you add to that?

Joshua Sariñana:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. The past couple of projects, including this one, I view as socially engaged our projects. And so not only through the interviews, but I would like to solicit input or feedback from the local community so I have a better understanding of it, not just for me walking around, but learning from people and how they perceive Malden and the surrounding area. So certainly I plan on interviewing more people and identifying more landscapes or cityscapes as it relates to the themes that I'm pulling out of these interviews and talking with you and others, other ways in which I can represent the work and its methods, I've become more clear, which is great, showing my process of highlighting important parts of the transcript or providing the video or audio portions of the interview as it relates to the images. So certainly more to come and I hope to extend this out to further areas like Summerville, for

Ose Schwab:

Example. Well, I really appreciate your work in terms of you making seen the invisible and the things that exist, but we may not pay attention to. I think it's a really important part. In my mind, that's what scientists and artists do help us to see what is really there or what could be there. And so I thank you for your time and for these projects, they a great contribution to our society and understanding.

Joshua Sariñana:

Thank you so much, and I appreciate all the support that Uma has provided and all the conversations you've had. It's been a great learning experience and I really appreciate it.

Ose Schwab:

Thanks for joining another episode of Culture Matters in Malden. That's a wrap on our show. Culture Matters is a production of Urban Media Arts or uma, and is made possible in part by the funding from the Malden Cultural Council, an agency of the Massachusetts Cultural Council. For more information about this and other episodes, visit urban media arts.org/culture Matters.