Inner Vision

腦內藝術館
Semir Zeki. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.

Part One: A Function of The Brain and of Art

Chapter 01— The brain's quest for essentials
1. My primary aim to convince the reader that we are at the threshold of a great enterprise, of learning something about the neurobiological basis of one of the most noble and profound of human endeavours. Beyond that, I hope that the pages of this book will constitute a modest contribution and a small step in laying the foundations of a neurology of aesthetics or neuro-esthetics, and thus for an understanding of the biological basis of aesthetic experience.

Chapter 02— Art's quest for essentials
1. To describe the power of art in words constitutes, in the lines of T. S. Eliot, 'a raid on the inarticulate , with shabby equipment'.
2. Thus, Matisse once said that, 'Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of things and beings, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation'.
3. In 1912, the French critic Jacques Riviere wrote: 'The true purpose of painting is to represent objects as they really are, that is to say differently from the way we see them. It tends always to give us their sensible essence, their presence, this is why the image it forms does not resemble their appearance', because the appearance changes from moment to moment.'

Chapter 03— The myth of the 'seeing eye'

Chapter 04— A neurobiological appraisal of Vermeer and Michelangelo
1. This gives ambiguity—which is a characteristic of all great art—a different, and neurological, definition; not the vagueness or uncertainty found in the dictionaries, but on the contrary, certainty—the certainty of many different, and essential, conditions, each of which is equal to the others, all expressed in a single profound painting, profound because it is so faithfully representative of so much.
2. Writing of Cubism, Gleizes and Metzinger tell us that 'Certain forms should remain implicit, so that the mind of the spectator is the chosen place of their concrete birth'.

Chapter 05— The neurology of the Platonic Ideal
1. That art is a search for constancy is in fact implicit in the writings of artists and philosophers, though often couched in terms that make it difficult to elicit this essential message. It is especially interesting to contrast the views of Plato and Hegel, both of whom have had a profound influence on Western thinking. The views of the two on aesthetics in general and painting in particular were almost antipodean. Neither spoke about the brain, its functions or its functioning. Yet these views are perhaps best understood, and even partially reconciled, when viewed in the context of the brain.
2. What he only implied, Schopenhauer made explicit many centuries later, when he wrote that painting should strive 'to obtain knowledge of an object, not as a particular thing but as Platonic Ideal, that is the enduring form of this whole species of things', a statement that a modern neurobiologist could easily accommodate in describing the functions of the visual brain.
3. As John Constable put it in his Discourses: 'the whole beauty and grandeur of Art consists ... in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities of every kind ... [The painter] makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original', the 'abstract idea' being presumably Constable's term for the Platonic Ideal.
4. The brain is interested in particularities, but only with the broader aim of categorising a particularity into a more general scheme.
5. To Aristotle, these 'universals' depended upon repetitive exposure (sensations) which were stored in memory and which, collectively, constituted an 'experience'. Equally more acceptable neurobiologically, because implicitly more dependent upon brain function, are the views of Kant and Hegel. Their view, unlike the Platonic one, exalts art, which it sees as being able to represent reality better than the 'ephemera of sense data', since the latter changes from moment to moment.
6. Whether art succeeds in presenting the real truth, the essentials, or whether it is the only means of getting to that truth in the face of constantly changing and ephemeral sense data, the opposing views are at least united in suggesting that there is (Hegel) or that there should be (Plato and Schopenhauer) a strong relationship between painting and the search for essentials. And my equation, of both the Hegelian Concept and the Platonic Ideal with the brain's stored record, means that the difference between the two, from a neurological point of view, is insignificant. As we shall see, that stored information can become defective as a consequence of neurological diseases; these result in syndromes that are of profound interest in understanding the neurology of art and illuminate, at least in neurological terms, the concept of the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Idea, again without distinguishing between the two.

Chapter 06— The Cubist search for essentials
1. In a statement that does not explicitly mention Synthetic Cubism but must have referring to it, Malevich tells us that 'For an artist like Picasso objective nature is merely the starting point—the motivation—for the creation of new forms, so that the objects themselves can scarcely, if at all, be recognised in the pictures'.

Chapter 07— The modularity of vision
1. Perhaps most important of all, the discovery of functional specialisation has been instrumental in changing our minds about vision as a process, impelling us to consider it as an active process—a physiological search for constants and essentials that makes the brain independent of continual change, and the servility to it, and makes it independent too of the single and fortuitous view. The brain, then, is no mere passive chronicler of the external physical reality but an active participant in generating the visual image, according to its own rules and programs. This is the very role that artists have attributed to art, and the role that some philosophers have wished that painting could have.

Chapter 08— Seeing and understanding

Chapter 09— The modularity of visual aesthetics
1. Colour, as we shall later see, is a construction of the brain. There are no colours in the outside world. This was recognised a long time ago by Newton, who wrote that the 'Rays, to speak properly, have no Colour. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that'.

Chapter 10— The pathology of the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Concept
1. So the philosophical question of whether there are ideal forms in nature, external to the human observer, is one to which neurology is indifferent because, in practice, an observer deprived of vision during a critical period after birth cannot recognise even a small number of objects by sight, let alone have a Platonic Ideal or an Hegelian Concept of them.

Part Two: The Art of The Receptive Field

Chapter 11— The receptive field

Chapter 12— Mondrian, Malevich and the neurophysiology of oriented lines
1. Piet Mondrian ended by emphasising the line too, but reached that end from a different beginning and with a different approach. 'Art', he wrote, 'has two main human inclinations ... One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself'. The first is more or less objective, the latter subjective. The first had to be objective because 'Since art is in essence universal, its expression cannot rest on a subjective view' even if 'our human capacities do not allow of a perfectly objective view'. Art, he believed, 'shows us that there are also constant truths concerning forms' and it was the aim of objective art, as he saw it, to reduce all complex forms in this world to one or a few universal forms, the constant elements which would be the constituent of all forms, to 'discover consciously or unconsciously the fundamental laws hidden in reality'.

Chapter 13— Mondrian, Malevich and the neurophysiology of squares and rectangles
1. The fact is that the new forms, consisting largely of lines, squares and rectangles, are admirably suited to stimulate cells in the visual cortex, and the properties of these cells are, to an extent, the pre-existing 'idea' within us.

Chapter 14— Perceptual problems created by the receptive fields

Chapter 15— The neurophysiology of the MetaMalevich and the MetaKandinsky
1. This is but another example in a more general theme that runs throughout this book: that different forms of art excite different groups of cells in the brain, which is one reason why there is a functional specialisation in aesthetics.

Chapter 16— Kinetic art
1. This is not the only example one can give of the brain going beyond the information given, and thus constructing the image according to its own rules.

Part Three: A Neurological Examination of Some Art Forms

Chapter 17— Face imperception or a portrait of prosopagnosia
1. Schopenhauer put it like this: The arts whose aim is the representation of the Idea of man, have as their problem, not only beauty, the character of the species, but also the character of the individual, which is called, par excellence, character, But this is only the case in so far as this character is to be regarded, not as something accidental and quite peculiar to the man as a single individual, but as a side of the Idea of humanity which is specially apparent in this individual, and the representation of which is therefore of assistance in revealing this Idea.

Chapter 18— The physiology of colour vision
1. Although some of them can perceive colours, and even shades of a colour, they are not able to distinguish the shapes to which the colours are attached; they are in the true sense blind to forms. This constitutes another line of evidence to show that colour and form, even though intimately linked together, are processed separately by the brain. But so intimate is the linkage between the two that only extreme pathological conditions can disentangle them. The result is the liberation of colour—the dream of the Fauvists.

Chapter 19— The Fauvist brain
1. The above experiment, by showing that viewing normally coloured natural scenes activates not only the same areas that are activated by viewing abstract coloured scenes but also additional areas as well, demonstrates that there really is a neurological difference between viewing coloured abstract and natural scenes, and abstract scenes do really seem to affect early visual areas without eliciting activity from areas which are active only when we view natural scenes. In a sense, it is an important neurological vindication of the efforts of Mondrian and others to put on canvas the constant elements of all forms and colours.
2. This finding supports the general view I have put forward here and elsewhere, that artists are neurologists, studying the organisation of the visual brain with techniques unique to them and that their work, when exploited scientifically, uncovers laws of cerebral organisation which scientists were previously ignorant of.

Chapter 20— The neurology of abstract and representational art

Chapter 21— Monet's brain

Epilogue
1. My aim in writing this book has been really to convey my feeling that aesthetic theories will only become intelligible and profound once based on the workings of the brain, and that no theory of aesthetics which does not have strong biological foundations is likely to be complete, let alone profound.
2. As a believer in that greatest sentiment of all, love, which holds sway above all else, which propels us towards the heavens and impels us to achieving the highest—a view immortalised in Plato's Symposium—my greatest regret or all is that, at my age and with my experience of the brain, I have to remain silent about the relationship between love and erotic impulses on the on hand and artistic creativity on the other, since they are both self reproductive processes.
3. Finally, I also hope that no one will think that knowledge of what happens in the brain when we look at works of art will demystify and etiolate art, thus reducing it to a formula and degrading the aesthetic experience. The brain is a beautiful organ, whose functioning and formidable feats are undoubtedly the greatest achievements of the slow process of evolution. Knowledge of its operations and of its products, including the works of art which have enriched our cultures and which we so admire, merely enhances the sense of wonder and beauty, because we then begin to admire not only the product but also the organ that is able to produce it.