Milo de Prieto Doctoral Research Proposal
Milo Jordi de Prieto Desmond
Preliminary Working Draft – October 2025
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Preliminary Working Draft
This is a preliminary working draft intended for discussion with prospective supervisors. Certain sections, particularly those concerning the collaboration with the Faculty of Fine Arts and the creative dissemination of findings, will be expanded and refined in alignment with departmental guidance.
Jump to the layperson’s version
Provisional Title
Biolinguistic Creativity: A Neurocognitive Study of Meaning-Making and Mastery in Fine Art Through Divergent Identity
Abstract
This doctoral research examines the neurobiological infrastructures underlying the human capacity and impulse to make meaning through art and individual creative expression. Drawing on biolinguistics and neuroaesthetics, it advances a working hypothesis that language and creative expression recruit partially shared neurocognitive infrastructures for hierarchical structuring, internal simulation, semantic retrieval, and integrative meaning-making. The study predicts measurable overlap in large-scale network dynamics (for example, indices of network coupling and synchrony, and, where appropriate, cross-modal integration) during meaning construction across linguistic and artistic tasks, while testing how task constraints, especially degree of conventionalization and communicative goals, modulate signal–meaning mapping.
The project examines meaning-making from both production (creative generation) and perception (aesthetic experience), treating them as complementary routes to shared integrative infrastructures and the processes they enable. Methodologically, it uses contrastive populations characterized by embodied, neurodevelopmental, and socio-sexual divergence, because masking demands, chronic adaptation, and sensory and attentional variability (unfolding within a coupled neurobiological and social ecosystem) can provide informative conditions for observing processes of regulation, integration, and authenticity when measured and interpreted carefully.
Within this framework, “fine art” is treated not as a canonical category but as a neurocognitive domain that can recruit and train cross-system integration through structured, context-sensitive, and dynamically adaptive practice. Interpreting findings through a developmental mastery lens, the project aims to clarify how developmental practice relates to neurocognitive integration and to articulate a practical account of “cognitive identity” (an individual’s characteristic profile of meaning-making strategies and constraints) with implications for wellbeing and social participation within an interdependent human ecosystem.
The project integrates empirical investigation with practice-based artistic research. It is designed for interdisciplinary guidance across Neuroscience and Fine Arts, so that experimental design and measurement are developed with scientific rigor while artistic practice serves as a site of inquiry and dissemination. Subject to departmental approval and supervision arrangements, the research will be developed in dialogue with relevant faculty and research groups, with outcomes communicated through academic writing and, where appropriate, exhibitions or other creative works.
Abstract: Layperson Version
This doctoral research studies how the brain creates meaning through art and also everyday, individual creative expression. It asks whether the brain uses some of the same underlying systems when we build meaning with language and when we build meaning through creative work. The project draws on research in biolinguistics and neuroaesthetics to propose a testable idea: language and creative expression may share core processes such as building structured patterns, simulating possibilities, retrieving knowledge, and integrating elements into a coherent whole.
The research looks at meaning-making from two angles. First, it studies production: what happens in the brain when a person creates, performs, writes, designs, or otherwise generates a creative work. Second, it studies perception: what happens when someone experiences a work and forms meaning from it. The project uses “contrastive” groups to help make these processes easier to observe. In particular, it includes people with neurodevelopmental, embodied, and socio-sexual forms of divergence. These life conditions often involve masking, long-term adaptation, and differences in sensory or attentional experience. Those differences can reveal how regulation, integration, and authenticity operate, especially when measured carefully and interpreted responsibly.
In this framework, “fine art” is not treated as a traditional canon or a social status category. It is treated as a demanding cognitive domain that can train the brain’s ability to integrate multiple systems through structured but adaptive practice. A key outcome of the research is a practical account of “cognitive identity.” This refers to an individual’s characteristic way of making meaning, including the strategies they rely on and the constraints they tend to face. The wider aim is to link meaning-making to wellbeing and to the way people participate in society, since human minds develop in constant interaction with others.
This project combines scientific research with art-making as part of the research process. It is intended to be guided across both Neuroscience and Fine Arts, so the scientific parts are designed and measured carefully, and the artistic parts are used to explore ideas and share results. Final supervision and collaboration will depend on departmental approval and formal arrangements. Results will be shared through academic writing and, when appropriate, through exhibitions or other creative works.
The Three Divergences—gender, neuro, and socio-sexual—belong to a broader theoretical program I have been developing for several years and will continue beyond the doctorate. They provide the structural foundation for my larger research into human variation and neural coherence. Within the PhD itself, these divergences serve a strategic role: they supply the conceptual background for understanding how divergent identities exemplify, clarify, or intensify the neuroecological mechanisms I examine through artistic practice. They are not the central object of the dissertation, but the wider architecture from which its questions emerge.
The 3 Divergences in My Research
My research begins by identifying three structural forms of human variation—existential, neurological, and social—that consistently disrupt dominant norms. These Three Divergences demonstrate that complexity, not binary reduction, is the primary structure of human experience and development.
I propose that these lived variations are not liabilities but opportunities. They illuminate the processes and value of neuroecological integration, offering individuals a path toward profound and sustainable wellbeing—what my framework Neural Coherence Ecology defines as Comprehensive Quality of Life. Within this model, people come to understand not only their uniqueness but also how to develop and apply it as a strength. This generates personal benefit and contributes directly to social coherence. The process requires, and reveals, respect for one’s own individuality and for the individuality of others. In turn, it supports a social contract that depends on diversity rather than merely tolerating it.
These divergences also make visible a broader truth: human reality has never been simple, binary, or monochromatic, despite centuries of imposed reduction used for control and social management. Human existence is dynamically varied—across individuals and across time. This variability requires a society capable of offering space, respect, and curiosity for all manifestations of biology and identity.
Finally, this framework positions divergent individuals as essential to human development. Their perceptual, cognitive, and social adaptations act as keys rather than exceptions. When their patterns of experience are integrated into collective understanding, they provide models for living in adaptive growth rather than in the fear-based survival strategies that dominate the modern era.
The Triad: The 3 Divergences in my Art
The Three Divergences form a cycle of human variation, an event horizon. Gender/Sex Divergence, Neurodivergence, and Socio-Sexual Divergence are fluid fields of being, perception, and connection. Their order changes with context. Their relationships form a cycle, not a hierarchy. At any moment, one may lead, another may shape, and a third may respond. Together, they are the horizon of human evolution.
1. Gender/Sex Divergence (Cyan) → “The Body & Being”
Brightest cool tone, sharp boundary, liminal.
It reads as an opening or threshold.
The body is the first imposed boundary in any society.
It is the earliest site of control, surveillance, and classification.
Threshold, body, identity, historical primacy, visual openness.
2. Neurodivergence (Magenta) → “The Mind & Processing”
Deep, synthetic, cognitively dense.
It reads as internalization or processing.
After the body is classified, the mind is judged—perception, attention, behavior. This internal domain often must respond to externally imposed norms.
Cognitive depth, mental infrastructure, perceptual synthesis.
3. Socio-Sexual Divergence (Chartreuse) → “Relational Direction (Desire) & Society”
Brightest overall, attention-grabbing, signal-forward.
It reads as direction, motion, relational engagement.
After body and mind, what remains is social categorization.
Socio-sexual divergence concerns the patterns of attraction, connection, and relationships, the outward vector of the system of human existence.
Relational direction, social salience, signal, movement outward.
This document is a preliminary working draft, intended solely for academic review and discussion with prospective supervisors. It should not be cited or reproduced without the author’s consent.
© 2025 Milo Jordi de Prieto Desmond. All rights reserved.