Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness [Kindle Edition]

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Author: Semir Zeki
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Splendors and Miseries of the Brain examines the elegant and efficient machinery of the brain, showing that by studying music, art, literature, and love, we can reach important conclusions about how the brain functions.

• 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

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• File Size: 1138 KB
• Print Length: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (September 23, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
  
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005UQLE18
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #238,251 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness

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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