The creative and scientific worlds have finally collided in a hallway on the fourth floor of East Hall.
Tara Lindstrom, an LSA senior, is finishing up a 30-foot painted mural in the biopsychology department in East Hall.
"The faculty in the biopsych department decided to do something to improve the halls," said psychology Prof. Kent Berridge. "Our desire was to have something beautiful, so we passed around the hat and then advertised."
Though at first no one responded to the advertisement, the department eventually commissioned Lindstrom, a fine arts and general studies major.
"They told me their ideas ... and I did a little research and submitted a design," Lindstrom said. "(After they talked about it) they let me go ahead and do it."
The department had specific ideas about what the mural should include.
"The field of psychology spans the evolution of behavior, so we wanted a mural representing that," Berridge said.
"They wanted a portrait (starting with) natural animals in the wild, and then moving towards a lab setting," Lindstrom said. "Each (faculty member) was interested in having what they specialized in represented."
The mural is designed to be viewed in a certain way.
"It carries on from left to right," Lindstrom said. "It's a sequential design."
The mural begins with images of animals in their natural habitat. Then, going from left to right, nature merges with elements of a laboratory, including a "spatial maze" representing a laboratory test. On the lower part of the mural there is a merging of a human brain with a small rodent, showing that the study of animal behavior and the study of the human mind are related.
The center of the mural "captures patterns of time and behavior," Berridge said. Here there are shadow outlines of birds migrating that "capture annual rhythms," he said. The sharp contrast of color are representative of "light-dark cycles" in nature, he said.
"In the center I have a couple of molecules integrated with the birds' flight pattern," Lindstrom said.
The molecules then connect to actual neurons farther to the right, and ends with a giant cross section of a human brain.
"The mural finishes with actual brain activity," Lindstrom said.
LSA junior Rich Lehman said, "It certainly is an amazing painting. It's just too bad it's hidden away where not a lot of people can see it."
Both Lindstrom and Berridge felt that, though words could describe it, nothing written could do the image justice.
"The picture itself is self-explanatory," Lindstrom said. "The best thing is just to see it."
KRISTEN SCHAEFER/Daily
LSA senior Tara Lindstrom, a fine arts and general studies major, gazes up at the mural she recently painted on a fourth floor wall in East Hall.