Presenting with Agustin Ibanez at Berlin Science Week.
At this year’s Berlin Science Week, neuroscientist Agustín Ibáñez and Founder of africanDRONE Johnny Miller shared a stage to explore an unexpected connection: what aerial photographs of divided cities and brain scans of aging people might have in common. Their talk, “Unequal Scenes: Communicating Aerial Photography and Neuroscience,” asked how art and science speak to each other, validate each other, and how they can reveal the invisible social, environmental, and biological forces that shape our lives.
Ibáñez is the founding director of the Latin American Brain Health Institute (BrainLat) at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile and a principal investigator with the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) at Trinity College Dublin. Through these institutions, he has built an extensive, transnational network of researchers linking neuroscience with public health, epidemiology, and social science. His research on exposomes, the cumulative environmental exposures that influence brain health, maps how factors like pollution, stress, and inequality can leave biological fingerprints in the mind. His work moves beyond the traditional biomedical model of disease to incorporate how inequality, violence, and chronic stress influence neural development and degeneration.
Miller’s aerial photography from Unequal Scenes parallels Agustín’s approach to understanding neuroscience by visualizing inequality’s imprint on the world’s largest cities. From above, he documents how spatial divides formed by policy, history, and stress mirror the hidden neurological scars of unequal exposomes, revealing how place and power shape both bodies and brains. Over eight years, and through fellowships such as the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, Code for Africa, and the BMW Responsible Leaders Program, Miller has worked to reveal that inequality is not a natural or inevitable outcome. It is designed, reinforced, and sustained by environmental, political, and economic forces. His drone photographs can be seen not just as art but as data, the collection of which forms a visual database of exposure, showing how architecture, planning, and resource distribution orchestrate unequal exposomes that advantage some while constraining others.
At GBHI and through collaborations across the world, Ibáñez has built a framework showing that the brain is not just a biological organ but a social sensor, constantly adapting to the environments and injustices it inhabits. His studies on accelerated brain aging reveal that people living under persistent social stress due to poverty, marginalization, or environmental toxicity often show patterns of neural atrophy or metabolic dysfunction equivalent to individuals years older. These studies demonstrate that even those living in relative affluence within unequal countries such as Chile, South Africa, or Brazil have brains that appear older than those in more equal nations. There is no way to fully insulate oneself from the effects of inequality; our social fabric, political systems, health outcomes, and ability to thrive are all deeply interconnected.
We can also see these patterns from above. Just as we can detect accelerated brain aging in scans, we can observe the visible morphology of inequality through aerial photography, which becomes a kind of macro-neurology, mapping the external anatomy of inequality as clearly as neuroscience maps its internal effects. From altitude, patterns of segregation, pollution, and infrastructure scarcity become legible, providing spatial evidence that complements neural data. By visually documenting where and how inequality is built into the landscape, photography helps translate complex exposome research into intuitive, emotional knowledge.
Moving forward, the shared task is to connect these layers, translating visual and scientific insight into public discourse, policy, and personal reflection. By bridging art and neuroscience, we can move from recognition to response, using images and data to catalyze empathy, inform urban design, and inspire behavioral change at both individual and societal levels. Through talks like this one, and with the support of platforms such as Berlin Science Week and Creative Brain Week, hopefully more partnerships between artists, researchers, policymakers, and communicators will take root and flourish.