Comments on: Who is a Neuroscientist?

By: JD

JD — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 03:01:33 +0000

Yes, upon hindsight we see the correlates of prediction and consummation in regards to artist’s insights. But how many truck drivers do you know who have as successful a hit rate as artists? Da Vinci, Galileo, etc., etc., I think there’s a connection here.

“we cannot ignore Albert Einstein, an accomplished violinist who was also a physicist. He once went so far as to say (in Viereck 1929, npn): ―If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.‖ Here we have his conscious recognition of his own duality as an artist-scientist. And at this point we are compelled to wonder if we are really dealing with a unity rather than a duality, a unity greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Something else Einstein said (Henderson in Einstein Archives, 33:257)4 leads to such a conclusion: ―After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity and
4 To clarify, Einstein made this statement in 1923 as recollected by Archibald Henderson in1955.
Forum on Public Policy
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form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.‖ Apparently, the gap did not exist within Einstein‘s mind.

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Tweets that mention Who is a Neuroscientist? : The Beautiful Brain -- Topsy.com — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:25:36 +0000

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By: Dr. M. A. Greenstein

Dr. M. A. Greenstein — Wed, 26 May 2010 05:35:22 +0000

Noah, I quite agree with your effort to tease out the clunkiness of Lehrer’s otherwise lyrical attempt to dash CP Snow’s rusty dualism into the dusty archives of intellectual history.

I have to ask all of us involved in the art/sci discussion: What compels us to want to make the sort of claims to come across in Lehrer’s good writing? Is there a need to unify and substantiate methods of inquiry in the face of an angry anti-intellectual cabal?

I sense something deeper in your question — something that goes to the heart of your Blue Brain film project: What will be the language of the brain/mind once we can simulate the networks of the human brain? Will Psychology, Phenomenology, Epistemology, Cognitive Science, Consciousness Studies be in for a big rethink? I suspect so.

BTW, one of the factoids I love about late 19th century artistic practice — many painters in France, besides Cezanne, were studying new optics, new cultural tech methods of perceiving space (e.g. Manet looking at Hokusai’s wood block prints.)

Terrific site! Great contribution to “neuro-aesthetics!”

By: Noah Hutton

Noah Hutton — Tue, 11 May 2010 02:25:47 +0000

Andy,
Thanks for the comments. Glad to hear we’re on the same wavelength about the book. I hear you about scientific falsification making many realms smaller, but I also think it’s interesting that much of 20th and 21st century science has actually expanded once seemingly contained realms to the point where we now feel more overwhelmed by the amount of unexplored terrain that lies before us, i.e. in cosmology and neuroscience. And likewise I think that if there is any sense that contemporary art is running out of possibilities and material permutations, it need only to turn to these ever-burgeoning areas of human inquiry for a vast pool of subject matter and inspiration.

By: Andy McKenzie

Andy McKenzie — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:01:35 +0000

Hey Noah. Love the site. I just want to say that this is almost exactly what I thought about the book after reading it, even down to the part about psychology instead of neuroscience. But I haven’t been able to formulate my critique into words like you have. Bravo.

Another point is that since so many artists make imprecise claims, it should be easy with the benefit of hindsight to show how some of these are were onto something. It’s the same trap that Michael Lewis has fallen into with The Big Short (bless his soul). Since the subspace of potential outcomes is still vast, and it is only by scienctic falsification that can we can make it smaller.

By: Larry Fleming

Larry Fleming — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:08:01 +0000

Sometimes the sign of a good book. “I did read Proust was Neuroscientist immediately when it was published in 2007, and it left more questions in my mind than the authoritative title suggests it answers”
Science is the art of discovery. Left brain people like myself are great at digging into facts when they are presented. I often stair at a blank piece of paper, waiting for that spark of creativity. Artists have that spark built in and are often the ones that see the science (from their point of view) before the scientist does. It is amazing how we all think from different perspectives and that we don’t see the final picture until we put our collective minds together.