Neuroaesthetics
Project: What happened to nature?

Apparently neuroaesthetics are the new black, and Professor Raymond Tallis thinks it's wrong. His column ends...

Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

So what then? Don't even try to use it til we've got it down pat? Wait until a good professor tells you?



That's just a taster from episode 1 1 More Human Than Human... The whole series of How Art Made the World is worth watching but episodes 2 The Day Pictures Were Born and 4 - Once Upon A Time are the most interesting on this neuroaesthetics front.

Why the same isn't true for literature I've no idea. Why neuroaesthetics cannot include the social I cannot fathom at all? Episode four obviously shows that it can and does, indeed episode one shows that, possibly, it is our ancestors sitting the the dark, in sensory depriving caves that leads them, in part at least, into drawing on the walls what they see in their minds' eyes, as part of shamanic social practices.

MInd you, if neuroaesthetics is the new black, then that is where we should go to sit in caves and develop transhumanic practices of art for a new age. For poets and painters both, maybe together, mmmh, that does sound social.

Fri, Apr 11, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: epiphany, neurology, neuroaesthetics
Sent to project: What happened to nature?

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Neuro Art History
Project: What happened to nature?

A new book on the influence on art of our ability to perceive depending on the different cultural environments we grow up in, sounds fascinating, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki by John Onians.

I haven't read the book but I did hear the interview with the author.



The idea that perspective was developed in Florence because they had lots of large stone course 'Roman' buildings, all with parallel lines disappearing into a vanishing point and that this architecture also meant there was a ready market for works with such perspective is fascinating.

That's one example of the thesis in the book.

Mon, Mar 3, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: neurology
Sent to project: What happened to nature?

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