A view of the gallery space at MUSECPMI.

Visual art and neuroscience are stitched together in a new gallery show in New York City at MUSECPMI, and the results are a mixed bag of intriguing syntheses and frustrating shortcomings. MUSECPMI’s gallery space occupies the sixth and seventh floors of a nondescript office building at Eighth Avenue and 38th Street, and for the past weeks the space has been filled with a collection of paintings, photographs, sculptures, digital projections and interactive stations that all orbit around questions of the mind, identity, and medical imaging of interior spaces.

Curated by two M.D.s, Koan Jeff Baysa and Caitlin Hardy, “Seeing Ourselves” features work by some of the same brain-focused artists and scientists we’ve featured on our pages here at The Beautiful Brain, among many others (Pablo Garcia, Elizabeth Jameson, Jason Snyder). According to the exhibition’s press release, the intent of the show is to

encourage the sharing of institutional knowledge as well as to examine the contexts of these medical images from the perspectives of the humanities, in addition to the sciences. By displaying the most advanced medical imaging examples in conversation with other visual images, and as artwork themselves, the curators blur ingrained distinctions between art and science and encourage audiences outside of the medical communities to appreciate and to be inspired by the remarkable scientific advances. (source)

While excited by this description of a conversation between science and art in the same space, I was disappointed to find that the setup of the conversation seems to have been rushed through and dropped mid-sentence. There are no wall labels placing the scence and art into any sort of context, nor are there even identifying labels next to each piece for the artists’ names or the titles of their works. Scientific projections play on walls with no explanation of what we’re seeing. The tones set by the imagery are interesting, but we need more– even a short description would help. Because the visitor gets no orientation or context, what could have been a groundbreaking exhibition of medical imagery and artistic answers to questions of inner space has been set forth in a strange, partially thought-through manner.

Despite the disappointments in presentation, the visual dialogue established merely by placing of all this work in one space left me hopeful for future brain and art exhibitions in New York. One can imagine Pablo Garcia’s large-scale cortical butterfly pieces– wonderful to see in person for their three-dimensionality– presented next to the very Cajal images and quotations he’s inspired by, for example. I’m grateful to MUSECPMI for the first move in this direction, and eager to see what future shows will bring.

“Seeing Ourselves” at MUSECPMI will be open until Saturday, April 14th. MUSEPCMI is located at at 580 Eighth Avenue, 7th Floor at 38th Street, New York City. The gallery is free and open Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM.

We live in an era where the once perilous bridge between the arts and the brain sciences is now populated by an ever-growing band of eager explorers, who become more sure-footed with every new revelation about human perception and our evolutionary past. When it comes to visual art, pioneers like Zeki, Livingstone, and Ramachandran have pointed out some essential perceptual phenomena underlying the seeing and creating of artworks.

As far as the questions of perceiving and creating art go (disease and disorder are not being discussed here), the initial surprise and delight that perception does indeed happen all in the brain, in multiple stages, and distributed widely though the cortex, has not yet fully worn off. We can call this the primary level of understanding: The brain is involved. We see a sustained chord of this primary level of understanding in popular news media and bloggers responding to fMRI studies that correlate a stimulus or an internally-generated thought with heightened activity (measured as bloodflow by the MRI) in a certain area of the brain. This is the 19^th century botany of current pop brain science. While it’s important to correlate functions with regions, and the scanning techniques are only getting more and more precise, for this discussion it’s a bit like seeing the glowing cities of earth at night from a satellite in orbit (see video below).

To understand how and why these cities glow, we need to hit the streets. There, we see what one could call a secondary level of understanding: The brain is constructed in a certain way, and the way we perceive external forms can reveal something about its internal architecture.

It is at this secondary level where things begin to get very interesting. When it comes to art and science, the scientific revelations about neuronal architecture become so closely tied to the subjectivity of the art that this architecture both perceives and produces that we start to be able to discuss art in a totally new context—at the street-level of the very structures in the brain that give rise to it and then consume it.

This secondary level has already seen much scholarly activity, especially by the pioneers mentioned above.

Take one example: We perceive a seamless image of the world despite the presence of a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves our eyes and no photoreceptors exist. If we just passed along every sensory input in earnest to higher regions of the brain, then we should always be aware of a blank spot somewhere in our visual field (there are some simple tests you can do to reveal your blind spot to yourself). But we know this isn’t the case—we’re never aware of any sort of blind spot, unless we’re driving a car and haven’t mastered the angles of our mirrors. The seamlessness of perception must be then a result of a filling-in of the visual world, a constant prediction of the space around us from somewhere in our brain that can figure out what should be there.

This one example hints at the dynamic system of visual perception in the brain; other examples abound. If our brains are constantly predicting what should be in the blind spot, what else are we predicting at every moment, and how do some artists intuitively speak to our predictions?

"Crossing Cultural Borders: Universals in Art and Their Biological Roots" by Charles M. Butter. (CreateSpace, $19.99).

“Crossing Cultural Borders: Universals in Art and Their Biological Roots,” a new book from 40-year NIH and University of Michigan veteran Charles M. Butter, is an ambitious tour through the history of art, from every corner of the globe, organized around the idea that, as Butter puts it, “Artists throughout the ages have exploited the power to generate, inspect and transform images… mental processes that evolved because they provided technological skills that surpassed those of other competing hominids.” Butter isn’t afraid to take this idea to its full realization: “When he created The Knife Thrower, Matisse made creative use of the same mental capacities that our early ancestors exploited when they designed the first spears.”

Cultural Borders is fundamentally an art historical text that peers through the neuroscience of perception as a unifying lens onto all artistic traditions (Butter is not alone in this pursuit: see another “neuroarthistorian,” John Onians, whom I interviewed for a podcast). Butter surveys basic elements of art seen all over the world, and throughout history: symmetry, compositional coherence, symbolism, and the proclivity for ornamentation. At each step of the way he weaves in relevant neuroscience to drive home his central thesis of shared biology as a means to tease out the universals in visual culture.

There are moments of enticing success in this book. I found some of Butter’s more speculative passages, where he is reaching for a biological lynchpin to drive an art historical analysis, to bravely open the door on new avenues for cultural criticism.

At the very end of his chapter on ornamentation, Butter writes, “The contemporary life style which emphasizes functional design in furniture and minimal interior decoration may be a response to the same biological imperative that is responsible for the current attraction to minimalist music and art.” How exciting is the idea that the human brain may have shifted “biological imperatives” throughout history, and that these biological shifts might correlate with shifts in aesthetic taste and the style of our exterior world? Could it be possible that cultures have, at different times, been more interested in different levels of representation, ornamentation, and detail, at the very same times that there was some corresponding “neural imperative” that placed more emphasis on activity in one region of the cortex as opposed to another, or on certain networks of cells as opposed to others? All speculations, but this is where Butter’s text led me.

But at times Cultural Borders is an emboldened adventure into uncertain seas. On one side, it could  spark ire for the art historian who views its rapid surveys of deeply entrenched cultural traditions as a skimping on context and historical detail. There is an enticing urge to unify the disperate artistic traditions of cultures around the world through the lens of shared biology; yet at times this pursuit risks casting aside the nuances of history, the times when perhaps nurture had more of the causal reigns than nature.

Muqarnas

For example, at one point in his chapter on ornamentation, Butter speculates that “Perhaps Islamic architects were reacting to [Indian shrines] when they ornamented their mosques with uniform shapes, tightly bound together in geometric uniformity.” Butter is reaching for an explanation for the brilliant profusion of surface ornamentation in Islamic art, which he sees in contrast to comparatively ornament-free Greek architecture. The connection between Islamic ornamentation and Indian shrines is set forth with no evidence, and the reader can only assume it’s a speculation. What Butter seems to be referring to here is either Girih or Muqarnas, Islamic methods of  geometric surface patterning that scholars have argued go beyond the purely decorative– they appear to have been charged with spritual and philosophical meaning. And as Islamic art historian Oleg Grabar has observed, Muqarnas was “an entirely Muslim invention…and it is a form used in all kinds of Islamic monuments, not only mosques.” These more complicated Cultural Borders might be better left uncrossed for now.

Art history aside, Butter is at his best when he’s weaving in the science of perception seamlessly with clear-cut visual examples on the page. If anything, I would have liked to see him go further with the level of neuroscience he engaged with. If we are to understand where, why (and when, in history) abstract art appeals to some human brains more so than realism, we want to know more about the cellular architecture of the brains behind those divergent tastes, not just its universal compartmentalized perceptual functions. How are these cells in perceptual and memory areas organized and connected? Which parts of a coalition of firing neurons might abstraction be engaged with, more so than realism?

Though we find ourselves on the primary and secondary levels through much of Butter’s text, there might even be a tertiary level of understanding somewhere ahead in the haze. It’s possible that we may learn the deepest lessons there are to learn about perceiving and creating art not by understanding what happens inside the rooms of the mind through our linguistic descriptions, but by understanding the rules that govern the interior: the dimensions, materials, structure and connectivity of the rooms of the mind that allow what happens inside them to happen.

"The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind" by Dr. A. K. Pradeep. Wiley, $27.95.

We’ve all seen advertisements and commercials that made us smile, laugh and distinctly remember a product, even when we weren’t really sure why. For every company, figuring out how to get more customers to purchase your goods or services seems as much of an art as it is a science. But A.K. Pradeep, Founder and CEO of NeuroFocus, Inc. and author of “The Buying Brain”, wants to convince you that successful marketing is the result of fully understanding the fundamental desires of the subconscious brain. In “The Buying Brain”, Pradeep explores the budding field of neuromarketing and describes its current and future applications. While he makes an impassioned case for his approach and clearly articulates the areas in which it can be integrated (from product development to branding, packaging to social media etc.), “The Buying Brain” suffers from a bit too much self-promotion and never really seems to say anything new and revolutionary about the nexus of marketing and neuroscience. More interestingly, however, I can’t help but wonder whether this new field is a good thing. With all the powerful knowledge of how our brains work, I think it might also be worth considering how we deploy these new technologies, what we’re trying to sell with them and who exactly we’re trying to sell to.

Pradeep begins the book by describing some of the methodologies employed by NeuroFocus, Inc. to more accurately and fully measure brain response to different products and images. NeuroFocus, Inc. seems to rely almost exclusively on EEG sensors, which allow for instant electrical measurements of brain activity on a fairly global scale (and are significantly cheaper than fMRI machines). The book obviously doesn’t go into extreme detail about the company’s methodology, since it’s a proprietary approach, but I wish that it better described which of the millions of data points they knew to discard from their tests, which data points they knew to keep, and how they extrapolated their conclusions from such a massive amount of electrical activity. Pradeep has quite a bit of “skin in the game” when he describes the approach, since the book presents his company’s own methods, but I would be curious to learn more about other product-testing approaches that rely on fMRI or biometric measurements instead.

The first half of “The Buying Brain” lays out a few different market segments (men, baby boomers, mothers etc.), what sort of brain differences exist between them, and how to best capitalize on those opportunities through strategic branding and messaging campaigns. It’s here that Pradeep tends to play a little fast and loose with gender differences (both social and physiological), but it may be that Pradeep was writing this book more for business people than scientists. The second half of the book then describes the different stages of developing and selling different products to those particular sorts of brains, and that’s where the book becomes more interesting. I found it bizarrely fascinating to learn how each step of a consumer’s unique journey (seeing an advertisement, entering a store, noticing the product on the shelf, deciding to purchase it) was studied, measured and programmed so intensely. It’s not something I’m aware of very often (perhaps a sign of how effective modern marketing has become!), but it was interesting to read about the close relationships between smells, store sounds, font size and a whole laundry list of other attributes that could all be measured, reduced and studied scientifically as part of the “total consumer experience”.

Ultimately, while I learned quite a bit about how neuromarketing is trying to harness some of our recent understandings of the brain, many of the observations in “The Buying Brain” seemed kind of obvious and intuitive: We already know that consumers like simple, clear packaging and we all know how we get overwhelmed in a store when we’re faced with too much choice. Furthermore, I’m not sure that any amount of EEG testing or sample groups will produce iconic, innovative brands like Apple or Nike. The organic production of good artistry and graphic design, in logos, ads and packaging, seems just as (if not more) important in marketing as measuring their effects through sensors.

Finally, I can’t help but wonder whether it’s the best use of our scientific and intellectual capital to learn how to better tailor products to meet our unconscious desires. The subconscious mind is truly a powerful force and not sure that further playing to our base instincts will make us better, more thoughtful consumers. It’s worth remembering that sometimes our natural instincts lead us away from other important issues (eg: what is this product doing to my own health? What is this product doing to the planet?  What message is this product sending to young children?). Perhaps it’s just because I recently watched Morgan Spurlock’s “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold”, but I hope that these breakthroughs in marketing technology are accompanied by a renewed debate over what exactly we’re selling and consuming. My hope is that the market’s best goods and services rise to the top because of their unique value propositions and their thoughtful and positive contributions to the world at large – not simply because their marketing campaigns tickled our primal brains in the right way.

Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree Of Life is not just great, it’s important.

While it is not rare that a film is made with heavy philosophical aims, it isn’t common either.  Of the films that do address big questions, very few use scientific discoveries to frame their stance, barring the eccentric fancies of science fiction.

Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life alludes to ideas about evolution, the origin of life, and the big bang not as footnotes or metaphors for the human experience, but as vital context for it – the closest answers to the age-old question, “What The Hell Am I Doing Here?”

Art has, and will likely always be primarily concerned with the human experience.  Romeo and Juliet, for instance, grapples with the opposing forces of love and tribal allegiance, Pride and Prejudice explores the psychological pressures of social propriety, Beethoven’s 3^rd is a monument to the intensity and complexity of heroism, and the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” mimics the leering psychosis of addiction.  A vague, cursory list like this could go on forever, but needless to say, great works of art don’t just entertain, they cut to the core of humanness.

Artistic expression is an amazing tool for looking at the “whats” and “hows” of humanity – What makes us tick?  How do we cope?  In many cases, one can learn more about psychology by reading literature than they can by reading textbooks.  But what about the “why” questions?  Can art answer those?  Why do we tick? Why do we cope?

Until the most recent couple of centuries, this question, in my view, had an unsatisfying answer – God.  Religion, it seemed, was the only mode of thought that dealt with such puzzles.  Even art often relied on religious imagery to invoke grand ideas. But religion’s lack of any tangible evidence and its cross-cultural incongruities make it a poor tool for reaching a logical answer to any of the “whys.”  Cue the Enlightenment.

The rapid pace of technological advancement and the wide dissemination of the scientific method quickly gave us some pretty good answers.  By Darwin’s time, we could know why we were here in relation to other animals, by Einstein and Hubble’s time we had a good theory concerning the origin of the universe (and saw the invention and flourishing of film), and by the 1950’s, Miller and Urey had given us a front row seat to the origin of life.  Three of life’s biggest “why” questions were much closer to an answer (if not already at one) than they had ever been in the history of human knowledge – Why is the universe here, why is life here, why are people here.

It is these same three questions that Malick confronts in the crucial, celestial segment near the beginning of The Tree of Life.  Before launching into the heart of the film that is a stark, beautifully rendered portrait of childhood set in 1950’s Texas, Malick takes us through the birth of the universe, the birth of life, and the birth of psychologically complex animals.  These scenes bounce from placidity to violence, colorfully depicting nature’s entropic path of change and destruction, and the appearance of cosmological and biological form.  The sequence concludes with portraits of living, feeling creatures on earth (dinosaurs), and hints at their burgeoning minds.  Psychological complexity soon becomes the center of the film (as it is the center of myriad works of art), and, for the young human protagonist, Jack, the why questions come flooding in.  Jack is in a constant state of puzzlement – Why do I feel jealousy?  Why are my parents the way they are? Why do I hate?  Why do I love?  I won’t go too far trying to explain the progression of the film in words.  There are few words in the film itself – the story is primarily told, like other Malick projects, in images and sounds.

While so many other films investigate the proximate causes of our psychological states – “perhaps Jack is jealous because he envies his brother’s stoicism,” and “his parents are who they are because their parents were like this and that” – The Tree of Life doesn’t bother with proximate causes.  Malick’s concerned with ultimate causes. He presents you with the scenes, images, and sounds of a child’s maturation and loss of innocence, you empathize with him and feel his feelings, but you are left not to try and guess why he feels the way he does, but to try and know why.

After witnessing the origin of everything, the viewer has been primed by a sequence that no other modern piece of art before the 1950s could have shown – we didn’t have any good theory on the origin of life yet – and is left to watch a film about a small family of humans not in the context of a town, decade, or country, but in the context of the history of the universe.  I couldn’t help but think – Jack is ultimately the way he is because he, like I, is a product of the natural forces of the universe.

Evolution has shaped humans as the storms of primordial earth shaped its clay, and even with the added caveat of natural selection, we are filled with imperfections, contradictions, and that kludgy machine, the brain, that can only do the best it can to make sense of it all, and usually fails in doing so.  This may not be a satisfying answer to the big questions we have about ourselves, but it certainly puts things in perspective.  Our own minds will always be the center of our personal worlds – we can’t help it – but now, because of science, we are starting to know why our minds behave the way they do.  Science is telling us who we are:  We aren’t beholden to supernatural beings, and have no purpose or place – we are a small branch on the Tree of Life, pushed and pulled by nature’s unyielding winds.

REVIEW: Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey (Princeton University Press, $24.95)

British psychologist Nicolas Humphrey’s Soul Dust is a work of pure theory.  The author fashioned it to be an earth-shattering book, or “the book that shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”  But the earth is quite a massive planet, not easily shattered.  And its shattering would have to be a matter of hard facts, because the fact is that words hardly matter.  I do not want to write about what Soul Dust is not, though.  Humphrey’s hubris and pretension have motivated him to craft a deep and reflective work full of good ideas.  It is a celebration of consciousness.  Because as the Bible says: “(Soul)dust thou art, and unto (soul)dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).  While we are here we ought to recognize our special experience.

Humphrey does unfold a logical argument: that consciousness is “the product of a highly improbable bit of biological engineering: a wonderful artwork of nature that gives rise to all sorts of mysterious impressions in our minds, yet something that has a relatively straightforward physical explanation.”  He is an ardent materialist who insists that miracles do not happen. When conscious experience arises in a person’s mind, it is the outcome of events in the brain.  This bedrock tenet has anchored the exploration of many neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch.  They provide data; Humphrey aims to provide direction.

Why did we evolve to be conscious?  Humphrey writes: “We can be sure it did not happen accidentally.  It must be the result of natural selection favoring genes that underwrite the specialized neural circuits—whatever they actually are—that sustain the illusion of qualia, giving rise to the magical mystery show for the first person.  And it is axiomatic that this will have happened only if those lucky enough to be spectators of this show have somehow been at an advantage in terms of biological survival compared with their less fortunate cousins.”  Unfortunately for hungry theorists, there is no substantial evidence of consciousness in the fossil record.

Nicholas Humphrey

Brains—ashes to ashes—are perishable as we are.  We usually examine language or art, emergent properties of consciousness—which is itself an emergent property of the brain.  Skull size cannot really tell this story.  The truth about the evolution of consciousness may prove impossible to prove.  Humphrey’s theory is suggests that at some point existing sensory feedback loops were adjusted to give rise to phenomenal states.  Who knows?  Perhaps this can be investigated, perhaps not.  The words are not yet full of meaning.

Humphrey dedicates a the second part of his book to the importance of consciousness.  ”I think that what the natural history reveals is that consciousness,” he writes, “makes life more worth living.”  Consciousness gives us ego, an illusion that motivates us to strive throughout life, despite death.  Consciousness gives us “the pleasures of being there as who you are and are becoming.”  Humphrey is most comfortable and convincing in this psychological realm.  His main point about science is to look at the problem of consciousness, magic trick that it is, from a different perspective.  Although he leaves that work for the scientists, Humphrey has done a service for our epistemology.  There must be dual foci—micro and meta—in order to solve difficult problems.  It was a pleasure to engage with the book Soul Dust, just as it is a pleasure to peel and eat a ripe orange or meet a beautiful smiling dog.  Open your eyes, open a book, but somehow, however, never ever forget:  This is awesome.

“Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century” By Carl Schoonover; Foreword by Jonah Lehrer. Published by Abrams, 2010. [amazon]

You should never judge a book by the cover — unless that book is an Abrams book.  The American company was the first to publish art and illustrated books, which have been resting on coffee tables and standing out on shelves since 1949.  We have all —at one time or another, perhaps unknowingly — flipped through an Abrams Book.

Perhaps it was Graffiti World or Vanity Fair: The Portraits or Earth from Above or The Art of Walt Disney.  Pick a famous artist — maybe Monet, Manet, Magritte, Matisse, Modigliani, Michelangelo, Munch, or John Vincent Millais or Marlene Mocquèt (to mention merely Ms) — and treasure copies of his or her work on the glossy-faced pages your own handheld, hardcover gallery.  Most recently, someone at Abrams had the bright idea to collect in a traditional art book the most beautiful scientific images of the brain. Columbia University neuroscience Ph.D student Carl Schoonover became the author of the project, which is now the newly-released Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams, $35).  Its cover — intricate, colorful, and breath-taking — is indeed a reflection of the revelatory richness inside the book itself.

But you should never — ever — judge a brain by its cover.  This is the message of Portraits of the Mind (as well as 2009′s Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul, and this magazine).  To the naked eye, that three-pound mass of colorless, wrinkled tissue  looks utterly unappealing to most anyone who is not a hungry zombie.  The ancient Egyptians, for example, chucked the brain out during mummification because it was considered unnecessary for the afterlife.  The mind, on the other hand, has traditionally been represented by a spectacular mess of tangled philosophical, psychological, and literary theories clogged with dense wastes of words — with the -itis and the -osis­ and the -ism — that are in a way creative and often incessantly discussable but entirely fanciful and irrelevant to the question of truth.  Because the mind is the brain; the brain is the mind.  No need to invent  before we first observe.  And — as it turns out — that ugly-looking lump inside our skull is in fact more wonderful and awesome than in our wildest dreams.

>Click images to enlarge.

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The stunning visual data on the pages of Portraits of the Mind — from drawn to digital —  demonstrate that we are made of magnificent matter.  Though the book also provides valuable context with essays from leading scientists and captions from Mr. Schoonover, its pictures are worth more than any number of words anywhere.

But if we want words, let them be poetry:  ’Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”  So ends “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.  Portraits of the Mind by Carl Schoonover is proof that — under the unsightly cover of the most complex organ in the known universe — this romantic ideal is reality.  Our brains are truly oh-so-beautiful.