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The neuroscience of art

2008; Elsevier BV; Volume: 371; Issue: 9614 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(08)60326-8

1474-547X

Sebastian Faulks,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

The premise of this entertaining book can be simply put: that the work of certain groundbreaking artists anticipated later scientific discoveries. Thus Walt Whitman was before his time when he passionately insisted in his poetry that the mind-body dualism was false, while the broken shapes of Paul Cézanne's paintings were subsequently shown to be an exact representation of how the eye first perceives reality, before the brain interprets it. The mixed reception granted to such works of art in their day was due not only to the demands they made on aesthetic taste but also to the fact that, consciously or not, they represented other truths with which the public was unfamiliar. According to Jonah Lehrer, the effect of Marcel Proust's madeleine in opening the gates of memory depends on the fact that “smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the centre of the brain's long-term memory”. Lehrer goes on to claim that Proust's literary descriptions of the working of memory fit well with the latest scientific theories of the role of prions in forming memories. The process of reconnection means that a memory may be subtly altered by each revisitation, and the sense in which the past is thus fully alive, or evolving, is anticipated by Proust. My recollection is that Proust believed the past to have been in fact more alive than the present, because it was only in the past that the mind's most powerful faculty, the imagination, was properly employed. Lehrer's account of the current state of play in neuroscience is expertly done, and one wishes only that he had not described a madeleine as a “buttery cookie”. Lehrer's contention for Cézanne is that the structures of his paintings accurately represent what the visual cortex senses before its impressions are organised by the brain: “Our vision is made of lines, and Cézanne has made the lines distressingly visible.” This is an attractive thesis, because it helps to explain the otherwise baffling anger with which these paintings, which seem beautiful to us now, were first received in the USA and Europe. It was as though Cézanne had put his finger on a buried nerve. Oliver Sacks famously had a patient whose brain, owing to a cortical lesion, couldn't help him organise the data offered by his eyes: the eponymous man who mistook his wife for a hat. It isn't hard to see the appeal of an artist who could recreate that primitive sensation yet consciously transcend it; a painting on this principle would bring us into contact with our deepest functional nature yet simultaneously console us with the beauty of its own surface. Cézanne's later half-finished paintings may take the process further. As Lehrer puts it, “Cézanne was trying to figure out what the brain would finish for him” and the unfinished paintings are completed by our own brains when we look at them. As Immanuel Kant wrote, “The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception”; and its role in the case of Cézanne's late paintings is not assumed by the artist but, amazingly, given to the viewer. The Cézanne chapter is for my money the best in the book, although all of them are good. The piece on Igor Stravinsky tells us about the violently hostile initial reaction to The Rite of Spring and analyses the neural difficulties posed to the audience by such an unfamiliar sequence of sounds. Although this is a funny story, one feels some sympathy for the concert-goers as we are told what was probably going on inside their brains. All their experience was teaching them to use short-term memory to pick up connections and motifs between the notes they heard. But such patterns were withheld; there was to be no sense of relief when the theme re-emerges from a confused mist. People just didn't know how to listen to it. But they learned. The auditory cortex is a plastic area, capable of being remodelled by the action of dopamine on its cellular mechanisms. Since dopamine malfunction is also connected to auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia, however, it's not surprising that Giacomo Puccini called The Rite of Spring the “work of a madman” and that many of the people who first heard it were intensely upset. Lehrer is a young American who has worked as an assistant to the Nobel-Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel; his first degree was in neuroscience and his second in literature and theology. He brings a certain laboratory rigour to his thesis, and it is exhilarating for a non-scientist reader to have complex ideas explained to him in such a way that he can share in the intellectual game—at least enough to get a handle on the big ideas, even if the micromechanisms that underlie them have to be taken on trust. The wacky word-constructions that Gertrude Stein put together in the 1920s are presented to us as foreshadowing Noam Chomsky's famous theory, first aired in 1956, that sentences are more than the sum of their words because they are shaped by unseen syntactical connections, which Chomsky later called the “deep structure of language”. It doesn't make Stein any more enjoyable to read, alas, but it is interesting to see how Lehrer brings her into line with Chomsky. He might, one feels, have gone further into theories of language, but it is probably enough to suggest that by removing grammar Stein first made people aware of its invisible yet primal force. To me the least convincing of the essays here is the one about Auguste Escoffier, the French chef, whose inventive stocks, made by deglazing pans in which meat bones and vegetables had been cooked, led him to isolate a taste we now recognise as L-glutamate. Although the story is interesting from a historical and chemical point of view, it seems to have been the result of empirical craftsmanship—trial and error with the frying pan—rather than inspired intuition, as in the other cases here. I wasn't entirely convinced, either, that George Eliot's insistence that human beings can change, that they are free to develop in the light of experience, is necessarily connected to the later concept of neural plasticity encoded by the genome. On the other hand, this chapter involves a fascinating account of how, after many setbacks, the idea that our brains do renew and expand themselves was finally proved. And what does it all add up to? If, to move the argument on from Lehrer's excellent examples, it can be shown that William Shakespeare accurately portrayed senile dementia in King Lear or that Charles Dickens's analysis of a minor character in Little Dorrit proceeds on a Freudian basis devant la lettre, does it mean that one would consult them as geriatrician or clinical psychologist, respectively? I think not. But what Lehrer does convincingly suggest is that there may be reasons beyond the aesthetic why great artistic invention can resonate so strongly and troublingly with the public at the time of its unveiling. At such moments, Shakespeare, Dickens, Cézanne, or Proust may have been more than great artists; they may also have been like the man who first shone a torch onto the ceiling of the caves at Altamira. Lehrer's playful and brilliant little book cannot, in scientific terms, prove a point or establish a thesis beyond doubt; but it offers in prose of startling lucidity a great deal for us to think about, and it makes a happy nonsense of many old divides between science and the arts. Proust Was A Neuroscientist would be a fine achievement for any writer; for one still in his twenties, it is extraordinary. To Lehrer I can only repeat the words he himself quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as having written to Walt Whitman when he first read Leaves of Grass: “I give you joy of your free & brave thought…I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”