Why we're drawn to simplicity
Why Color Moves Us

World-renowned Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist
Eric Kandel on Neuroscience and Contemporary Art

Eric Kandel, a renowned figure and genius in New York's intellectual world, has published his new book, "Somehow, Neuroscience Is Visible in Art."
In this book, Kandel deepens the connection between figurative art and brain science that he attempted in his previous work, and particularly attempts to integrate modern abstract expressionist art and brain science.
Beginning with William Turner, who stands at the pinnacle of the Abstract Expressionist lineage, the book moves through masterpieces of modern art, from Monet and Kandinsky to Pollock and Rothko, Warhol, and other minimalists, and meticulously delves into the intersection between these works and the exploration of brain science.
In the process, we gain a deeper understanding of the amazing properties and operating mechanisms of the human brain.
Why are we drawn to simple things?
Why do colors move us?
This book demonstrates without reservation that the questions of aesthetics are not so far removed from those of neuroscience, and that new insights await when these two great "cultures" illuminate each other.

Although the artistic process is often described as a pure expression of human imagination, I want to show that abstract artists often achieve their goals using methodologies similar to those employed by scientists.
The New York School abstract expressionist painters of the 1940s and 1950s used such methods to explore the limits of experience and expand the very definition of visual art.

The Eiffel Tower model bought at the gift shop on page 35 can look identical in shape and size to the real Eiffel Tower seen across the Champ de Mars if held close to the eye.
Therefore, the actual source of any three-dimensional object we perceive is essentially uncertain.
Gombrich understood this problem well, citing Berkeley's view that "the world we see is a construction, slowly built by each of us through years of experimentation."

Top-down information on page 37 refers to higher-order mental functions such as cognitive influence and attention, imagery, expectation, and learned visual associations.
Because bottom-up processing can't handle all the confusing information we receive through our senses, the brain must engage top-down processing to resolve the remaining ambiguity.
Based on our experience, we must guess the meaning of the image before us.
The brain does this by constructing and testing hypotheses.
Top-down information places the image in the context of an individual's psychology, allowing the image to have different meanings for different people.

Figure 3.3 on page 51 shows how a cell in the monkey's facial region responds to various images.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these cells respond very well when monkeys are shown pictures of other monkeys (a).
However, they react even more strongly to faces drawn in cartoons (b).
This suggests that, like humans, monkeys react more strongly to cartoons than to real objects, since features are exaggerated in cartoons.

Page 59 Equally important in abstract art is the treatment of color.
Color is important because it helps us identify spatial details of shapes.
Color also has an extraordinary ability to evoke strong emotional responses in the viewer, whether alone or in combination with lines or shapes.

Page 64 Learning is an important means of behavioral adaptation and the only means of social progress.
In fact, there are only two main mechanisms that animals and humans can use to adapt to their environment.
Biological evolution and learning are the key.
Among them, learning is much more efficient.
Changes that occur through biological evolution are slow, often taking thousands of years in advanced organisms.
However, the changes that occur through learning are rapid and can occur repeatedly throughout an individual's lifetime.

On pages 74-75, the neural circuits of the small intestine were revealed to be surprisingly invariant.
Not only do the same cells form reflex circuits in every small organism, but they are connected in the same way.
Each sensory cell and each interneuron is connected only to a specific set of target cells.
These discoveries seemed to be the first to demonstrate what Kant called a simple case of a priori knowledge.
It has been shown that the basic structure of behavior is engraved in the brain under genetic and developmental control.
(Omitted) This realization raised a profound question.
How can learning occur in such precisely wired neural circuits? In other words, if there's no variability in the neural circuitry of behavior, how can behavior be modified? The solution to this seemingly obvious paradox is quite simple.
Learning changes the strength of connections between neurons.
Even if the genetic and developmental programs of a small group meticulously specify each and every connection between cells, making them invariant, they do not determine the "strength" of such connections.
So, as Locke might have predicted, learning acts on the connections in neural circuits to form memories.
Moreover, continuous changes in connection strength are the mechanism by which memories are stored.
In this basic and reduced form we see the reconciliation of nature and nurture, of Kant and Locke.

Page 81 Each of us likely grows up in different environments, is exposed to different combinations of stimuli, learns different things, and practices motor and perceptual skills in different ways.
Therefore, the structure of the brain will also change in each person's unique way.
We each have slightly different brains because our life experiences are different.
Even identical twins with identical genes will have different brains as they experience different things.
These unique variations in brain structure and genetic makeup are the biological foundation for individual expression.

Page 109 In 1959, neuroscientists discovered an important biological basis for Mondrian's reductionist language.
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who initially worked at Johns Hopkins University and later moved to Harvard University, discovered that individual neurons in the brain's primary visual cortex respond to simple lines and edges oriented in a particular way (vertical, horizontal, cross-hatched, etc.).
These lines are the building blocks of shape and outline.
Ultimately, higher-level areas of the brain assemble these edges and angles into geometric shapes, which become the images represented in the brain.

Page 128 Sight and touch are particularly closely linked.
Bernard Berenson was probably the first art historian to emphasize this.
He argues that “the essence of painting is to stimulate the consciousness of tactile values” and therefore appeals to the tactile imagination through textures and edges as strongly as the actual three-dimensional objects depicted.
He further states that the reduced elements of form (volume, thickness, texture) are the main elements of aesthetic pleasure.
Of course, what Berenson is talking about here is things that create tactile sensations through optical illusions, such as shadows or perspective.
On the other hand, when looking at the work of de Kooning or Soutine, the visual sensation is transformed into sensations of touch, pressure, and grip through the three-dimensional surface of the painting itself.
In this way, the abstraction of visual elements, combined with tactile appeal, can enrich our aesthetic response.

On page 134, Pollock seems to have intuitively understood that the visual brain is a pattern recognition device.
The brain is an expert at extracting meaningful patterns from the input it receives.
This is also true when the input is extremely confusing.
This psychological phenomenon is called pareidolia.
It is a phenomenon in which ambiguous random stimuli are perceived as meaningful.

Page 146 Abstract art also relies on the same assumptions as the earlier Impressionist art.
Simple and sometimes crudely depicted features can sufficiently trigger a perceptual experience, which the viewer later enriches by completing the experience.
Evidence from brain studies suggests that this perceptual completion occurs through highly specific top-down signals projected to the visual cortex.
So what abstract artists claim, and what abstract art itself proves, is that the impression, the sensory stimulation of the retina, is merely a spark that triggers an associative recollection.
Rather than attempting to provide pictorial details, the abstract painter creates 'conditions' that allow the viewer to complete the painting based on his or her own unique experience.
A young woman is said to have said this after seeing a sunset landscape painted by Turner.
“Mr. Turner, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Turner replied.
“Did you ever hope to see it?”

On page 183, Purves summarizes all of this from the perspective we currently understand.
“People cling to the notion that color is an attribute of an object.
In fact, it's something the brain creates." As the dress example clearly shows, color perception is heavily influenced by top-down processing.
Painters exploit this fact, as well as the fact that colors often convey emotions, such as red representing 'love, courage, blood' and green representing 'spring, growth'.
But in all cases, it is ultimately the viewer who gives meaning to color, and the viewer does the same for line and texture.

Why does abstract art pose such a tremendous challenge to the viewer?
It teaches us to see art, and in some sense the world, in a new way.
Abstract art dares to challenge our visual system to interpret images that are fundamentally different from the types of images our brains have evolved to reconstruct.
As Albright points out, we desperately “search” for associations because our survival depends on cognition.
In the absence of strong conceptual cues, we create new associations.
The philosopher David Hume made a similar point.
“The creativity of the mind is nothing other than the mechanism by which we combine, transform, increase, or decrease the materials provided by our senses and experiences.”

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