Guillaume Bottazzi – may 2025
The Surrealism of neurobiologist Jean-Pol Tassin
Jean-Pol Tassin, neurobiologist, director of research at Inserm and addictologist, has written L’inconscient aux commandes. In one of his lectures, he explains that “there are two modes in our brain, an analogue mode and a cognitive mode. The cognitive mode is slow, and acts on neuromodulators or neurotransmitters that are dependent on affectivity“.
I note in his representation of the individual that there are no purely objective thoughts in man, since the cognitive mode depends on our affectivity.
“These may be behavioural regulation systems, or those that produce serotonin and dopamine, for example. Our dreams only last a few seconds and it’s a phase that processes our information analogically, even if we find it hard to believe. Our analogue system is a regression. A lot of people talk about dreams and say all kinds of things. Analogue processing is the absorption in a few milliseconds of elements that have an impact on our brain and that will serve as a reference to impact us later. Children, for example, function in an analogue mode, they don’t have a cognitive mode. This means that they can walk without knowing how. We have neurotransmitters such as neuro adrenalin, which wakes us up, serotonin, which protects us, and dopamine, which ultimately decides the hierarchy of structures so that behavioural behaviour is adapted to our behaviour. So dopamine is not just for the reward circuit. Its modulators are extremely small – 500,000 out of 3 billion – and yet these neurotransmitters are responsible for our modulation and regulation, and therefore have an extremely important psychological effect. Depression, for example, is a depletion of the neurons that regulate dopamine and serotonin. Antidepressants allow these neurons to rest and return to a normal state. When we fall asleep, the regulators gradually shut down during REM sleep, so that cognitive processing is no longer possible because the modulators have stopped. And it’s important that they are stopped because they are extremely fragile and need to recover and rest. The brain works all night in analogy, but as they are fragile they cannot stop for more than twenty to thirty minutes. So we wake up an average of a dozen times a night. When the modulators restart, they trigger cognitive functioning and what happens is that you are in a state of analogy, so you have no perception of what is happening and physiologically, there is a modulator reactivation and between the time you wake up and go back to sleep, you may or may not have a dream. This dream will last from 500 milliseconds to one second to three seconds. This dream does not take place during sleep but during micro-awakenings. Sigmund Freud said that dreams are uncensored, but that’s because it doesn’t have time for censorship. Dream interpretation is linked to the detection of dream symbols. For him, the artist translates his analogical dreams into cognitive terms, and the artist who touches you, touches you analogically, it’s not cognitive. The emotion you get from a work of art comes from the unconscious, from within. The dream comes from real sensations and emotions.”
I note that for him the analogue mode is a mode linked to sensations and emotions.
“Since 1960, the neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet had identified REM sleep, a part of sleep in which we sleep but our eyes move and as they move he considered that we dream during this period and since many people believe it. In reality, you can’t dream during REM sleep because the neuroregulators are inactive. You can have a dream during the micro-awakening that follows”.
To sum up, from the point of view of neurobiologist Jean-Pol Tassin, the analogy is our unconscious. It reveals our affect and our links to a specific experienced environment. It shows the being without filters and without limits and this implies that for him the work of art is a surrealist act that reveals our deepest truth named the unconscious.
The work of art is not surrealist
I had a dream last night that I remember; it intertwined my experiences and my feelings, it exacerbated my fears, and it was mixed with real situations as described by Jean-Pol Tassin.
I’ve never dreamt abstractly, and I don’t paint figurative works. There is no sleepiness, no dreaminess, no aesthetic lightness in my dreams, and precisely not the kind I find in my creations. There is no link with an approach to form, an atmospheric quality to the images or an aesthetic interpretation. There are no dreams that go in the direction of my imagination, and I feel more inspired by observing a landscape when my dreams don’t inspire me.
Gaston Bachelard‘s imaginary world is prior to thought and feeling; it is an imaginary world that is reconstructed and not something that is suffered. This imagination allows us to appropriate spaces, to find ourselves in tune with our history, to recreate ourselves, confronted with the unreality of images, to rebuild and renew ourselves. This imaginary world takes shape while we are awake. It is the fruit of conscious and unconscious reconstruction.
In my opinion, the imaginary is beautiful and comes from an awakened creative act. It is an act of sublimation as described by Sigmund Freud. It’s the transformation of energies that come from outside and inside, it’s the reconstruction of an integrated being that’s trying to surpass itself.
‘Everyone has thought that sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain. We neglect the fact that we are not brains, we are mechanisms, we are integrated, everything we do is integrated with everything else’ explains neuroscientist Paul Shaw from Washington University in St Louis.
Imagination is a mental thing, the fruit of reconstruction, a reinvented universe that helps us to live better and to elevate ourselves. It stimulates us through sensory experiences and creates aesthetic and cognitive activity. An experiment on mice showed that by enriching their environments and encouraging sensory stimulation, their cognitive capacity increased by four per cent in a fortnight. The need to feed our imaginations rather than our dreams seems clear-cut.