- Email: [email protected]
The limitations of a neurological approach to art
Perspectives
Book The limitations of a neurological approach to art The magnificent intellectual achievement of neuroscience has a growing shadow: neuroscientism. Its central thesis is that human consciousness is to be explained in terms of neural activity and that the path to a better understanding of our experiences, our motives, our motivations, and, indeed, our very selves, lies through ever more precise ways of observing the brain activity of conscious individuals. An extreme expression of the faith of neuroscientism is the emergence of a so-called neuroaesthetics that looks to neuroscience to explain aesthetic experience. Neuroaesthetics has attracted adherents from many disciplines. Certain literary critics, musicologists, and art critics are excited by the idea that examination of the brain of a person enjoying a work of art will throw light on what art does, is, and means. Artists, they believe, are unconscious manipulators of our nervous systems, awakening particular regions of the cortex, or particular types of neurons, singly or in combination. I first became aware of neurological approaches to literature when I read a Commentary in the Times Literary Supplement by the novelist A S Byatt (TLS Sept 22, 2006). She argued, on the basis of theories advanced by the neuroscientist Pierre Changeux, that the particular pleasure associated with John Donne’s poems was due to syntactic structures which made them especially effective in stimulating certain kinds of neurons; especially those associated with “reinforced linkages of memory, concepts, and learned formal structures like geometry, algebra, and language”. When I researched the background to her article, I realised that Byatt was speaking for a vast congregation of practitioners of “neuroliterary criticism”. There is an equally thriving academic industry using neuroscience www.thelancet.com Vol 372 July 5, 2008
to explain why certain paintings give us pleasure. Many art critics have been inspired by the eminent neuroscientist Semir Zeki who, in Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999), attributed the distinctive effects of the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and the Fauves to their acting on different kinds of neurons in the visual
“It is disturbing that these often ludicrously tendentious ideas—the reductio ad absurdum of neuroscientism— are being advanced not by some mad autodidact on a park bench but by a serious academic.” pathways. Mondrian, apparently, speaks preferentially to cells in regions V1 and V4, whereas the Fauves stimulate V4 plus the middle frontal convolutions. John Onians in Neuroarthistory takes neuroaesthetics further. He explains the propensity of art historians to espouse certain theories on the basis of the kinds of experiences they themselves may have had. These, he argues, will have shaped their “neural formations” during their period of development. John Ruskin’s skill as an art critic and his emphasis on the relation of art to its environment is connected with his being driven around England in a specially adapted cart by his father who was a wine merchant: as a result “his neural networks will have increasingly predisposed him to reflect on the relation between art and the environment”. The self-observation that made Ernst Gombrich’s art criticism so thoughtful was triggered by “the amount of time he would have spent in London waiting for and traveling on buses and underground trains” during the Second World War “while
the city was being destroyed around him”, which would have reinforced certain connections in his brain. Onians grades art theorists of the past according to the extent to which they anticipate the theories that he and his fellow neuroaestheticians espouse. Aristotle, for example, is praised for seeing the importance of neural plasticity induced by repeated similar experiences. Appollonius of Tyana gets a pat on the back for “acknowledging the way in which the imagination, the emotions and the body are all linked” which is, apparently, a discovery of modern neuroscience. The 19th-century German professor of architecture Adolf Goller is admired because Onians can link Goller’s observations on the effect of new styles of architecture with more recent research on the reinforcement of behaviour in pigeons and rats. Rarely can the past have been condescended to so comprehensively. It is disturbing that these often ludicrously tendentious ideas—the reductio ad absurdum of neuroscientism—are being advanced not by some mad autodidact on a park bench but by a serious academic. Onians was until recently Director of the World Art Research Programme at the University of East Anglia in the UK. It should not be necessary to spell out the fundamental fault with his approach; namely, that it casts no light on the specific nature of the objects and experiences of art or the distinctive contribution of individual artists. Nor does it offer any basis for the evaluation of art as great, good, or bad. In short, neuroaesthetics bypasses everything that art criticism is about. It is perfectly obvious why we might expect neuroaesthetics to remain a sterile as well as an almost comically simplistic exercise, even more misguided than trying to explain
Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki John Onians. Yale University Press, 2008. Pp 225. US$40·00. ISBN 978-0-30012-677-8.
19
Perspectives
the genius of a ballet dancer using electromyography. Paintings are treated as mere isolated stimuli or sets of stimuli. Mondrian’s canvasses, for example, are simply means of preferentially exciting V4 pathways. The works and our experiences of them are divorced from their cultural context, and from the viewer’s individual history. Onians’ approach is not only reductive but also mechanistic. If Mondrian’s paintings work in a certain way, it is difficult to see how they took so long to be accepted, how different people evaluate them differently, and how we react to them differently on different occasions. Works of art are not merely sources of stimuli that act on bits of the brain. More than anything else, they engage us as human beings. Their impact will reach deep into our personal depths, which in turn will have been shaped by the culture in which we grew up.
Works of art, what is more, are in dialogue with the broader culture in which they are produced; with other works in the same and different genres; and with the earlier and later works of the same artist. They invite us not only to have experiences but to reflect on our experiences; not merely to have visual tingles but to think about what is before us. In the case of representational works, we are invited to reflect on what is shown, to accept or refuse the symbolic significance, to rejoice in the beauty of the world or deplore its horror. The extraordinary sequence of Rembrandt self-portraits is not merely a succession of lines and coloured surfaces but a profound meditation on the course and tragic beauty of human life. An array of pixels or voxels, lit up or not, hardly captures that. Onians’ art lover is an anhistoric brain, whose activity is not qualitatively different from that of a chimpanzee.
Onians is aware that his approach will not necessarily command immediate acceptance. His tendency to praise those of his predecessors who came closest to his ideas is a preemptive strike on reactionary souls who resist the notion that aesthetics is a branch of neurobiology. He expresses outrage that Semir Zeki has to defend his neurological approach to art. And yet Zeki is much more circumspect. He admits that our knowledge of the brain is “certainly not enough to account in neurological terms for aesthetic experience”. And Onians himself notes that Zeki’s approach “enables him to set aside the emotional content of art, its ability to disturb, arouse and inspire”. This would seem to leave out everything that is of interest in art and so discredit neuroaesthetics.
Raymond Tallis [email protected]
In brief Book Tales of training
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures Vincent Lam. Fourth Estate, 2008. Pp 400. £12·99. ISBN 978-0-007-26380-6.
20
In the story that opens this collection, we meet two students preparing for medical school. Ming and Fitzgerald want to be physicians for “service, humanity, giving”, an explanation that “felt easy and immune from questioning”, if perhaps “somewhat improvised”. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, physician Vincent Lam explores what happens when this improvised idealism meets the reality of medical school, the medical profession, and life in 12 interwoven short stories. Ming fits the stereotype of a highachieving young Asian driven to honour her parents, but she has a dark secret. Fitz says he “likes being obsessed by things”, and knows in his heart that if it wasn’t medicine, it would have been something else. We follow them, and their peers
Chen and Sri, from the near-holy experience of their first dissection to the disillusionment and sleep deprivation of residency. These vivid characters, and in fact everyone who populates this collection— prostitutes, policemen, criminals, the insane, more physicians—evade our expectations, just like real people. The collection’s strongest stories are written from the perspective of Chen, who is, like Lam himself, an emergency physician living in Toronto from a Chinese family who were expatriates in Vietnam. One of these stories, “A Long Migration”, is like a calm, meditative breath between feverish accounts of codes, SARS, and central lines. Chen has just finished his first year of medical school, and spends time with his dying grandfather in Australia. He is hoping to use this time to track
down the truth of conflicting family stories about his grandfather. But the truth is not so easy to find, Chen learns, because his grandfather’s versions of the tales “could shift from morning to evening”. Lam’s description of the old man’s storytelling is an apt metaphor for this riveting, surprising, and often beautiful narrative. “Rarely did a new version of the story require the old one to be untrue”, he writes. “Instead, it was as if the new telling washed the story in a different color, filling in gaps and loose ends so as to invert my previous understanding of the plot.” Coming to terms with such ambiguity, Lam’s stories show, is part of the process of becoming a physician.
Anne Harding [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 372 July 5, 2008
Book The limitations of a neurological approach to art The magnificent intellectual achievement of neuroscience has a growing shadow: neuroscientism. Its central thesis is that human consciousness is to be explained in terms of neural activity and that the path to a better understanding of our experiences, our motives, our motivations, and, indeed, our very selves, lies through ever more precise ways of observing the brain activity of conscious individuals. An extreme expression of the faith of neuroscientism is the emergence of a so-called neuroaesthetics that looks to neuroscience to explain aesthetic experience. Neuroaesthetics has attracted adherents from many disciplines. Certain literary critics, musicologists, and art critics are excited by the idea that examination of the brain of a person enjoying a work of art will throw light on what art does, is, and means. Artists, they believe, are unconscious manipulators of our nervous systems, awakening particular regions of the cortex, or particular types of neurons, singly or in combination. I first became aware of neurological approaches to literature when I read a Commentary in the Times Literary Supplement by the novelist A S Byatt (TLS Sept 22, 2006). She argued, on the basis of theories advanced by the neuroscientist Pierre Changeux, that the particular pleasure associated with John Donne’s poems was due to syntactic structures which made them especially effective in stimulating certain kinds of neurons; especially those associated with “reinforced linkages of memory, concepts, and learned formal structures like geometry, algebra, and language”. When I researched the background to her article, I realised that Byatt was speaking for a vast congregation of practitioners of “neuroliterary criticism”. There is an equally thriving academic industry using neuroscience www.thelancet.com Vol 372 July 5, 2008
to explain why certain paintings give us pleasure. Many art critics have been inspired by the eminent neuroscientist Semir Zeki who, in Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999), attributed the distinctive effects of the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and the Fauves to their acting on different kinds of neurons in the visual
“It is disturbing that these often ludicrously tendentious ideas—the reductio ad absurdum of neuroscientism— are being advanced not by some mad autodidact on a park bench but by a serious academic.” pathways. Mondrian, apparently, speaks preferentially to cells in regions V1 and V4, whereas the Fauves stimulate V4 plus the middle frontal convolutions. John Onians in Neuroarthistory takes neuroaesthetics further. He explains the propensity of art historians to espouse certain theories on the basis of the kinds of experiences they themselves may have had. These, he argues, will have shaped their “neural formations” during their period of development. John Ruskin’s skill as an art critic and his emphasis on the relation of art to its environment is connected with his being driven around England in a specially adapted cart by his father who was a wine merchant: as a result “his neural networks will have increasingly predisposed him to reflect on the relation between art and the environment”. The self-observation that made Ernst Gombrich’s art criticism so thoughtful was triggered by “the amount of time he would have spent in London waiting for and traveling on buses and underground trains” during the Second World War “while
the city was being destroyed around him”, which would have reinforced certain connections in his brain. Onians grades art theorists of the past according to the extent to which they anticipate the theories that he and his fellow neuroaestheticians espouse. Aristotle, for example, is praised for seeing the importance of neural plasticity induced by repeated similar experiences. Appollonius of Tyana gets a pat on the back for “acknowledging the way in which the imagination, the emotions and the body are all linked” which is, apparently, a discovery of modern neuroscience. The 19th-century German professor of architecture Adolf Goller is admired because Onians can link Goller’s observations on the effect of new styles of architecture with more recent research on the reinforcement of behaviour in pigeons and rats. Rarely can the past have been condescended to so comprehensively. It is disturbing that these often ludicrously tendentious ideas—the reductio ad absurdum of neuroscientism—are being advanced not by some mad autodidact on a park bench but by a serious academic. Onians was until recently Director of the World Art Research Programme at the University of East Anglia in the UK. It should not be necessary to spell out the fundamental fault with his approach; namely, that it casts no light on the specific nature of the objects and experiences of art or the distinctive contribution of individual artists. Nor does it offer any basis for the evaluation of art as great, good, or bad. In short, neuroaesthetics bypasses everything that art criticism is about. It is perfectly obvious why we might expect neuroaesthetics to remain a sterile as well as an almost comically simplistic exercise, even more misguided than trying to explain
Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki John Onians. Yale University Press, 2008. Pp 225. US$40·00. ISBN 978-0-30012-677-8.
19
Perspectives
the genius of a ballet dancer using electromyography. Paintings are treated as mere isolated stimuli or sets of stimuli. Mondrian’s canvasses, for example, are simply means of preferentially exciting V4 pathways. The works and our experiences of them are divorced from their cultural context, and from the viewer’s individual history. Onians’ approach is not only reductive but also mechanistic. If Mondrian’s paintings work in a certain way, it is difficult to see how they took so long to be accepted, how different people evaluate them differently, and how we react to them differently on different occasions. Works of art are not merely sources of stimuli that act on bits of the brain. More than anything else, they engage us as human beings. Their impact will reach deep into our personal depths, which in turn will have been shaped by the culture in which we grew up.
Works of art, what is more, are in dialogue with the broader culture in which they are produced; with other works in the same and different genres; and with the earlier and later works of the same artist. They invite us not only to have experiences but to reflect on our experiences; not merely to have visual tingles but to think about what is before us. In the case of representational works, we are invited to reflect on what is shown, to accept or refuse the symbolic significance, to rejoice in the beauty of the world or deplore its horror. The extraordinary sequence of Rembrandt self-portraits is not merely a succession of lines and coloured surfaces but a profound meditation on the course and tragic beauty of human life. An array of pixels or voxels, lit up or not, hardly captures that. Onians’ art lover is an anhistoric brain, whose activity is not qualitatively different from that of a chimpanzee.
Onians is aware that his approach will not necessarily command immediate acceptance. His tendency to praise those of his predecessors who came closest to his ideas is a preemptive strike on reactionary souls who resist the notion that aesthetics is a branch of neurobiology. He expresses outrage that Semir Zeki has to defend his neurological approach to art. And yet Zeki is much more circumspect. He admits that our knowledge of the brain is “certainly not enough to account in neurological terms for aesthetic experience”. And Onians himself notes that Zeki’s approach “enables him to set aside the emotional content of art, its ability to disturb, arouse and inspire”. This would seem to leave out everything that is of interest in art and so discredit neuroaesthetics.
Raymond Tallis [email protected]
In brief Book Tales of training
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures Vincent Lam. Fourth Estate, 2008. Pp 400. £12·99. ISBN 978-0-007-26380-6.
20
In the story that opens this collection, we meet two students preparing for medical school. Ming and Fitzgerald want to be physicians for “service, humanity, giving”, an explanation that “felt easy and immune from questioning”, if perhaps “somewhat improvised”. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, physician Vincent Lam explores what happens when this improvised idealism meets the reality of medical school, the medical profession, and life in 12 interwoven short stories. Ming fits the stereotype of a highachieving young Asian driven to honour her parents, but she has a dark secret. Fitz says he “likes being obsessed by things”, and knows in his heart that if it wasn’t medicine, it would have been something else. We follow them, and their peers
Chen and Sri, from the near-holy experience of their first dissection to the disillusionment and sleep deprivation of residency. These vivid characters, and in fact everyone who populates this collection— prostitutes, policemen, criminals, the insane, more physicians—evade our expectations, just like real people. The collection’s strongest stories are written from the perspective of Chen, who is, like Lam himself, an emergency physician living in Toronto from a Chinese family who were expatriates in Vietnam. One of these stories, “A Long Migration”, is like a calm, meditative breath between feverish accounts of codes, SARS, and central lines. Chen has just finished his first year of medical school, and spends time with his dying grandfather in Australia. He is hoping to use this time to track
down the truth of conflicting family stories about his grandfather. But the truth is not so easy to find, Chen learns, because his grandfather’s versions of the tales “could shift from morning to evening”. Lam’s description of the old man’s storytelling is an apt metaphor for this riveting, surprising, and often beautiful narrative. “Rarely did a new version of the story require the old one to be untrue”, he writes. “Instead, it was as if the new telling washed the story in a different color, filling in gaps and loose ends so as to invert my previous understanding of the plot.” Coming to terms with such ambiguity, Lam’s stories show, is part of the process of becoming a physician.
Anne Harding [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 372 July 5, 2008