Art and the Brain.... It's not just me that thinks it's all the wrong way around!

Noe, A.,(2015) ‘How art reveals the limits of neuroscience’ The Chronicle of Higher Education. Proquest.[Online} Available at: http://ergo.southwales.ac.uk/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1712512696?accountid=15324 (Accessed 17.01.2017)

The difficulty the author has in this essay is that the effects of Art upon the brain are often studied from looking at photographs. This the author suggests rather misses the point of what art and its effects are all about. The author refers to others who thought in a similar way.

‘Art’,… John Dewey , American Philosopher who died in 1952 argued… ‘Is about the experience. And experience, crucially, is not something you get for the price of museum admission. It's more hard-won than that. It is something we achieve through thoughtful and active engagement. He stated that… ‘objects are not triggers for internal events in the nervous system’… Not the brain's activity. Our activity. Not activity inside our head. But activity in the world around us. The concern of science, humanities, and art, is, or ought to be, the active life of the whole, embodied, environmentally and socially situated animal.

The author suggests that science has to think of Art in holistic terms in our lives, then it may stop presenting photographic representations to which its control is asked to respond. He reports that

…’objects themselves, with all their specific, tangible substantiality, play almost no role in neuroscience’ … And , in my opinion, he convincingly argues …‘You may see a woman in the statuette. But you are not in the same state you would be in if you were in the presence of an actual woman… But as we've seen, the assertion that mental states of whatever kind -- love, monetary value, aesthetic bliss -are identical to brain events is not one that has yet been made good on. And anyway, the neural-equivalency thesis -- that seeing something and seeing its picture are states of the same kind -- is taken for granted from the start.

…..Aesthetic responses. We have them not only, as it were, in isolated encounters with works of art (as we might when we are in the brain scanner). We frequently learn to have them, and our responses are informed by what teachers, critics, friends, and family say and think, by what work we have seen before, and by what we do or are interested in doing in relation to the art. Aesthetic responses are not fixed data points but are rather like positions staked out in a conversation, continuing in our day, our lives, and in the historical time of our culture.

…. Encountering a work of art is more like an evening with a friend... Aesthetic responses are also sometimes questions that the art poses to us rather than definitive answers; they are beginnings, opportunities, not data points.

The point rather is that neuroscience has failed to frame a plausible conception of human nature and experience. That work still needs to be done. This suggests an intriguing possibility. Far from being able to explain art from the standpoint of neuroscience, it may be that the order of explanation goes in the other direction. Perhaps it is art that will allow us to forge a more plausible conception of ourselves, one suitable, finally, for grounding a better neuroscience.

Since starting my research into synaesthesia, I have questions the way science conducts studies into the effects of colour upon human emotion, in a passive way.

Like Noe in this essay, I too believe that thinking has to change in order to make more progress. Active outcomes (musicpaintings) can now be offered to science and analysed by computers. There is much evidence that we now have the technology to do this if not yet the imagination to try.

The Painting by Katherine Sherwood at the top of this blog raises questions about the loss of the artist involvement in the understanding of medicine, as well as it being her personal account of the effects of a ‘Cerebral Haemorrhage [that]altered her Art’ Available at: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39862/title/The-Art-of-Brain-Damage/ . Her work incorporating images from the Seals of Solomon mixed with cerebral angiograms serve her powerful painted expressions.