Poetic Science: Bodies, brains and the art of experimentation

Poetic Science: Bodies, brains and the art of experimentation

What remarkable journeys have people faced head-on against addiction? Here, the focus shifts to a different kind of inner frontier: the intersection of brains, bodies and art, through the many lives of neuroscientist and poet Ian Gibbins. Recorded at Flinders University in Adelaide, the episode tags along as Gibbins moves from dissecting cadavers with medical students to performing his own poetry and electronic compositions.

You’ll hear students’ first reactions to human donors – one notices “they’re still wearing the band-aid for when they died” – and the quiet awe of standing among preserved brains and organs in the anatomy museum. Gibbins explains his work on the autonomic nervous system, those nerves that “bring tears to your eyes, make you blush, make you blanch, give you goosebumps,” and why staying alive is so much harder than dying.

At the same time, he shares pieces like “Bogman” and “Space Invaders”, using first-person monologues and sci‑fi images to show how poetry can embody scientific ideas and emotional experience. What makes this episode stand out is how seamlessly it blends hard science with creative risk-taking. Gibbins insists that both art and science start with uncertainty and imagined possibilities, whether he’s hypothesising about nerve cells or imagining a bog body speaking after centuries underground.

For anyone curious about how one person can head a lab by day and write award‑winning verse by night, this is a rare peek into a mind that refuses to separate logic from lyric. If you’ve ever wondered how language, memory, the brain and the stories we tell about our own bodies all fit together, this conversation might leave you looking at your nerves, your heartbeat and even your sense of self in a fresh way.

What sort of art could your own biology inspire?