Yesterday I attended interviews of Tsinghua students who want to transfer from another major to psychology. Almost all of it was in Chinese, but at one point, as part of an explanation of her interest in psychology, a student said (in English), “Psychology is the bridge between art and science.”
Well put. Maybe she read that somewhere, but I doubt it. I’d never heard it before. Notice how we think art can be done by anyone yet science can only be done by scientists (in extreme cases, only by physicists). Psychology, especially self-experimentation, may lead us out of that desert.
When I was taking introductory neurobiology with Professor Timothy Goldsmith at Yale, he told us in the first lecture that neurobiology is the interface between the sciences and the humanities.
At my university, you can major in psychology in both arts and science degrees.
I (an art teacher) would argue that most people believe that art can only be done by “artists.” The biggest part of my job is either convincing my students that any one can be an artist, or if that fails convincing them that they are artists.
I certainly held that belief about science and math as a young woman, and have only begun to realize how much the keen observation required in the arts is often a great path to scientific understanding.
I believe that art requires such a subtle, unconscious input that it is easy to see how psychology could be ‘A’ bridge between it an science. Psychology may not be a pseudo-science per se, (I’m a behavioral science major by hobby) but there are certainly large segments of it that even the most experienced psychologists don’t understand – yet there certainly is a deep connection between what can be garnered from analyzing art as it pertains to the science of people. Just as much, there is definitely a provable science behind most of today’s psychology.
Art is a wonderful breath of life to subconscious thinking. As such, used correctly (whatever that means), art can be a doorway into the thinking of people in order to understand the underlying science of what is going on, making it a perfect intermediary just as psychology could explain the science behind art.