Art and the New Biology of the Mind: A Symposium Review

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If anything, the canyon has widened over the last 50 years, to the point where scientists and artists are barely within shouting distance of each other. But judging from a fascinating dialogue that unfolded at Columbia University on March 24, 2006, a new group of surveyors has ventured up to the lip of this daunting precipice, with ambitious hopes of building a 21st-century bridge across the divide, one neuron at a time.

The occasion, titled “The New Biology of the Mind,” was a one-day symposium organized by the Louise T. Blouin Foundation, which brought together some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and a similarly accomplished group of visual artists, with the aim of seeing if and how they might have something to say to each other about the creative process.

Columbia neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, who helped plan the event with fellow Columbia Nobel laureate Richard Axel, along with Blouin Foundation chairman and founder Louise MacBain, noted in his introductory remarks that the challenge for the scientists was to see if the biological study of art—from the neural mechanics of visual perception to the emotional responses generated by art to the biology of the creative process itself—is a “workable” academic discipline.

“This is a set of problems we’d love to tackle,” Kandel said. “But what’s in it for the artists?”

That question hung over seven-and-a-half hours of complex, often technical, frequently amusing and occasionally adversarial conversation.

At times, the dialogue had more push and pull than give and take, and the clashing vocabularies of the two constituencies—the different “metrics” of art and science, as artist Terry Winters aptly put it—were so strikingly apparent that you wished for those simultaneous-translation earphones provided to U.N. delegates.

And many artists perceived a structural imbalance to the proceedings: While the neurobiologists arrived with their PowerPoint presentations, their brain scan images—and, to accompany one talk, sets of blue-and-red 3-D glasses so beloved of 1950s movie-goers—the artists, cast primarily as responders and discussants, came without planned talks or agendas.

Still, it was a rich, provocative and sometimes exhilarating exchange. You rarely get to hear Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California, who has helped put the neurobiology of emotion on the cultural map, deconstruct several paintings from the biological perspective, including Picasso’s Guernica and Pollock’s Mural—or, for that matter, witness bemusement and perhaps a trace of skepticism play across the face of David Salle while the painter was taking all this in.

Raymond Dolan of University College London showed functional MRI images of parts of the brain lighting up during the neural embodiment of physical sensations, while reading passages from Joyce’s Dubliners. And Vittorio Gallese of the University of Parma described the behavior of “mirror neurons”—neurons that light up in humans not only when we do a task, but when we watch another person doing the same task or having the same experience.

They might be likened to little neural nodes of empathy sprinkled through the human cortex, and after Gallese finished talking about them, you understood what he meant when he said, “A still life is much less still than people think.” The tag line to his talk (as to many others) could have been: This is your brain on art.

There was a lot from the scientists on the biology of perception, but, as Arthur Danto noted, almost nothing on the meaning of art. There was a lot from the artists on the subjective experience of, for lack of a better word, artistic inspiration, but few clues about the biology of creativity, where it might reside and how it might be stimulated.

Yet just as medical pathologies of the brain have led to spectacular insights into neural processing, several well-known neural handicaps may ultimately shed light on the creative process.