The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel shows how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. He illustrates how reductionism-distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller components-has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths.
Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this new book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism--the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components--has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize-winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals.
Kandel's theory of how are our neurons fire in response to abstract art is illuminating. . . . One looks forward to hearing more from Kandel, a most inventive scholar, now that his bridge has been solidly built.
