A new book by Nobel Prize winner and leading neuroscientist Eric Kandel
A colorful blend of art and science
Seven intellectual essays

When we look at a work of art, we often have an emotional response.
But why they react that way is a complex question.
World-renowned neuroscientist Eric Kandel seeks to establish a science of art appreciation based on psychology and biology.
It concisely presents the relevant knowledge uncovered during the academic journey, while examining it specifically in the context of various works of art.


Beginning with the painters who dazzled Vienna, Austria in the early 20th century, the exhibition covers various trends in modern art, including the paintings of Chagall and Soutine, representing two branches of Jewish culture, and Cubism, which challenged the innate human perception of vision.
While appreciating both familiar and unfamiliar masterpieces, the author consistently focuses on how art and science have influenced each other.


In the process, it is revealed that the brain is a powerful creative machine, and why the ambiguity of modern painting is so fascinating.
It also scientifically elucidates why the brain is drawn to portraits, how eroticism and aggression are closely linked, and what effect texture has on the brain.
The author attempts to integrate art and science through the differences between abstract and figurative art, as well as the contrast between sculpture and painting.

The Viennese modernists confronted traditional attitudes and values ​​with new ways of thinking and emotions, questioning what constitutes reality and what lies beneath the apparent people, objects, and events.
By exploring what lies beneath the surface, empty modernism presented an attitude that characterizes the world we live in today.
--- p.20

Klimt began to incorporate biological symbols into his work.
The rectangle symbolized sperm, and the oval symbolized egg.
We can see these symbols in Danae.
A portrait of a Greek princess who was imprisoned by her father and conceived by Zeus in the form of a golden rain.
If you look closely at the painting, you can see rectangles within the golden raindrops.
Opposite Danae, ovals are visible.
Embryo, a fertilized egg.
Klimt shows Danae transforming sperm into the first stage of life through her reproductive power.
--- p.38

Gombrich extended Chris's concept of ambiguity to visual perception itself.
By doing so, he realized that the brain is not simply a camera, but a creative device.
The brain receives incomplete information from the outside world and completes it.
Our brains evolved to do that.
Many things we take for granted are hardwired into our brains through evolution.
For example, our brain knows that the sun will always be overhead, no matter where we are.
So we expect the light to come from above.
Otherwise, our brains can be fooled.
An example of this is an optical illusion.
--- p.43

Our brains are particularly adept at processing faces.
Darwin pointed out that the face and the emotions it conveys are key to all human interaction.
To some extent, we judge whether we trust or distrust others based on their facial expressions when interacting with them.
They also judge whether to approach or distance themselves from people of the same or opposite sex by looking at their appearance and facial expressions.
--- p.52

Facial recognition is difficult, but we can easily recognize hundreds of faces.
It's even more recognizable when drawn as a cartoon.
This is because our brains respond particularly well to faces with exaggerated features.
Therefore, we are much more likely to recognize a cartoon of the Mona Lisa than the original painting of the Mona Lisa.
Because the cartoon exaggerates the Mona Lisa's features.
--- p.52

Among the miraculous events in Hasidic folklore are animals taking flight, a scene that frequently appears in Chagall's work, and the artist himself is often shown flying.
In fact, the word Luftmensch is often used to describe Chagall, meaning someone who walks on air or whose mind is in another world.
--- p.87

Soutine rarely explicitly portrays Jewish life in his works.
Moreover, unlike Chagall, there was no instance of depicting the mysticism and magic of Jewish thought.
Instead, Soutine approached art from the opposite end of the Jewish ideological spectrum.
It was preoccupied with the fundamental uncertainty and ontological anxiety that characterized the very existence of Jews in Europe and that became particularly evident in the early 20th century.
--- p.91

According to the concept of the principle of peak displacement, the artist not only captures the essence of the individual, but also attempts to amplify it through appropriate exaggeration, thereby more strongly activating the very neural mechanisms that would have been triggered by that person in real life.
(Omitted) In Soutine's work, we can clearly see that the absence of perspective exaggerates the sense of depth and amplifies the colors of the faces he depicts.
Moreover, following van Gogh's example, Soutine reveals an intuitive understanding of this principle by exaggerating the textural properties of the faces he paints.
--- p.103

Scientists have learned a lot about facial representations by studying the brains of people who cannot recognize faces.
This symptom was first described by Jean-Martin Charcot in 1883, and was given a modern name, prosopagnosia, by Joachim Bodamer in 1947.
This disorder is the result of damage to the inferior temporal gyrus.
It may be congenital or may be caused by head injury or disease.
About 10 percent of the population is born with some degree of prosopagnosia.
--- p.109

Computational models of vision suggest that some facial features are defined through contrast.
The eye and forehead areas are examples.
Regardless of lighting conditions, the eyes tend to be darker than the forehead.
Computational models argue that such contrasting features send signals to the brain indicating the presence of a face.
(Omitted) Then it was revealed that the cells respond to the contrast between facial features.
Moreover, most cells were tuned to the contrast between specific pairs of features, with the largest number comparing whether the nose was brighter than either eye.
--- p.111

Modern brain science has revealed that some areas of the cortex, previously thought to be dedicated to visual information processing, are also activated by touch.
Among them, the lateral occipital complex is particularly important.
This cortical area responds to both visual and tactile sensations of the object.
The texture of the object also activates neurons in a neighboring region, the medial occipital cortex.
When an object is perceived by the eyes or hands.
This is why we can easily identify and distinguish between various materials, such as skin, clothing, wood, and metal, even at a glance.
--- p.115

Today, neuroscientists are studying the "fusion of aggression and sexuality" that Freud observed in men and Klimt depicted in Judith.
(Omitted) Anderson discovered that there is a nucleus, or neuronal cluster, in the hypothalamus that contains two groups of neurons.
There is a group responsible for aggression and a group responsible for controlling sexual intercourse.
About 20 percent of the neurons at the boundary between the two groups may be active during intercourse or aggression.
--- p.139

Cubism allowed painters to show that art could exist on a two-dimensional surface like canvas or paper in the same way that it exists in the unconscious mind—independently of nature, time, and space.
This new perspective forever changed the way the artist depicted the world before him.
It also changed the way viewers viewed images, for example, by free-associating with clues such as the outline of the subject, related objects or words, and the title.
--- p.176

By eliminating perspective and full representation in his papier-collé works, Picasso not only dismantled the components of the bottom-up visual process, he invalidated the very premise on which the bottom-up process is based.
As Gestalt psychologists connecting the broken lines, we scan the Cubist painting, examining it for recognizable outlines and objects.
But our efforts are frustrated in the majority of works where broken lines abound.
Such works often require new bottom-up processing rules that do not exist at all, and must be supplemented by creative and extensive top-down processing.
--- p.194

One purpose of art is to allow us to experience aspects of life that we might not normally encounter.
One way to do that is through empathy.
Empathy is strongly expressed in the brain.
When we look at Messerschmidt's head, we can sense what he is feeling.
His head also activates our brain's biological motor system and mirror neuron system, which is responsible for imitation.
So when we look at Messerschmidt's head, we experience the emotions he is describing from within.
Our brain mimics his facial expressions.
You may not show it outwardly, but you experience that feeling.
--- p.221

Interpretation level theory has shown that there is a two-way relationship between psychological distance and abstraction.
Not only are psychologically distant objects and events represented more abstractly in our brains, but abstract interpretations of objects and events also feel more psychologically distant.
This relationship suggests that psychological distance can be used to measure experiential differences in art viewers' subjective interpretations, as well as to quantify differences in the levels of representation that art evokes.

--- p.242