(1 reviews)Author: Semir Zeki
ISBN : 9781405185578
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- discusses creativity and the search for perfection in the brain
- examines the power of the unfinished and why it has such a powerful hold on the imagination
- discusses Platonic concepts in light of the brain
- shows that aesthetic theories are best understood in terms of the brain
- discusses the inherited concept of unity-in-love using evidence derived from the world literature of love
- addresses the role of the synthetic concept in the brain (the synthesis of many experiences) in relation to art, using examples taken from the work of Michelangelo, Cézanne, Balzac, Dante, and others
- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (December 31, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1405185570
- ISBN-13: 978-1405185578
- Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 6.1 x 9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness
Note to the Reader ix
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
PART I Abstraction and the Brain 7
1 Abstraction 9
2 The Brain and its Concepts 21
3 Inherited Brain Concepts 26
4 The Distributed Knowledge-Acquiring System of the Brain 35
5 The Acquired Synthetic Brain Concepts 42
6 The Synthetic Brain Concept and the Platonic Ideal 46
7 Creativity and the Source of Perfection in the Brain 50
PART II Brain Concepts and Ambiguity 59
8 Ambiguity in the Brain and in Art 61
9 Processing and Perceptual Sites in the Brain 65
10 From Unambiguous to Ambiguous Knowledge 73
11 Higher Levels of Ambiguity 87
PART III Unachievable Brain Concepts 99
Introduction 101
12 Michelangelo and the Non finito 102
13 Paul Cézanne and the Unfinished 111
14 Unfinished Art in Literature 120
PART IV Brain Concepts of Love 129
Conte by Arthur Rimbaud 131
15 The Brain's Concepts of Love 132
16 The Neural Correlates of Love 137
17 Brain Concepts of Unity and Annihilation in Love 150
18 Sacred and Profane 158
19 The Metamorphosis of the Brain Concept of Love in Dante 170
20 Wagner and Tristan und Isolde 182
21 Thomas Mann and Death in Venice 193
22 A neurobiological analysis of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents 203
Notes 213
Index 227
Semir Zeki is a one-person interdisciplinary team: part neurobiologist, part art historian, and part philosopher. Expanding on his original research into the neurobiology of color vision, Zeki proposes the brain as a knowledge-gathering entity that functions through inherited (biological) and synthetic (experiential) concepts, which organize all sensory data into consciousness. For Zeki, there is no reality outside of the projections created by the knowledge-organizing concepts of the brain. The beauty of his system is that it allows for both a universalized material reality produced by the inherited concepts and shared by every human brain, and individualized perception based on synthetic concepts that are unique and environmental.
This is where things get interesting. Unwilling to limit himself to the evidence provided by current scientific research, Zeki expands his investigation into the products of the brain--philosophy, art, and literature--using them as data with which to reconstruct more complex brain concepts, namely love and beauty. For Zeki, beauty and love are produced by an inherited concept structured by a desire for unity/union with another individual. Unfortunately (and here's the miseries) neither of these inherited concepts can be fulfilled by synthetic lived experience, leaving every human being a tragic victim of unfulfillable biological expectations. According to Zeke, creativity is the brain's way of trying, through art and culture, to either make this gap understandable or to bridge it (and so the splendors).
Not to worry if you don't comprehend the science immediately, Zeki will repeat it many many times.
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