ACADEMIC SYMPOSIA

ART & THE BRAIN
Sept. 9, 2006 Session Information:

Location & RegistrationScheduleSpeakersAbstracts
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ART & THE BRAIN
April 17-18, 2007 Session Information:

Location & RegistrationSchedule SpeakersAbstractsHotel Information
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THE PHILLIPS
FIRST BOOK PRIZE

CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS

Art & The Brain

April 17 - 18, 2007 Session
Speaker Abstracts


NARENDRA AHUJA

“A Vocabulary for Visual Understanding of Scenes”
This talk is about understanding of image and video content from basic image properties. It describes a tree organization of regions occupying an image as the basic vocabulary of scene description. Regions, their layout, their interior structures, and their photometric variations together comprise a description of the image appearance. The tree structure is used to discover and learn canonical models of arbitrary objects that occur frequently in an image set, thus discovering a theme of the set. We will present examples of how the tree can be derived from image data, and how it can be used in image analysis and scene understanding.

NICOLAS J. BULLOT

"Altering the Mind/Brain’s Base Routines Through Aesthetic Attention"
The presentation suggests that interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of philosophy and sciences of the mind/brain is relevant to the study of artistic phenomena. More specifically, it proposes that cognitive sciences, combined with humanities, can help us obtain a better understanding of the differences between ordinary and aesthetic perceptual cognition.

To that aim, the first section introduces a conceptual framework grounded in the concept of an “artistic apparatus.” This concept refers to the system formed by (i) a situation for perceptual-motor anchoring (encompassing a set of targets such as objects, agents, or events that can be perceived or manipulated) and (ii) a set of human agents who explore such situation and adopt aesthetic attitudes (or perform aesthetic actions) directed at the targets present in the anchoring situation. A second section develops some implications of the externalist idea that interactions between agents and situations modify and constrain agents’ attention and perceptual experience. A third section introduces a hypothesis according to which a distinctive feature of many artistic anchoring situations (especially in modern art) is that they operate as modifiers (or inhibitors) of base routines controlling object-directed attention (Bullot 2003, 2005). In other terms, works of art seem to make a variety of tools available to “frustrate” or “foil” our most automatic and habitual perceptual and cognitive acts.

The framework outlines an account of the control of attention by such a class of works of art. It describes the differences existing between ordinary object perception and aesthetic attention directed at artistic objects. On a second level of reading, the present analysis is an attempt to understand and defend the “experimental” traditions developed during the history of modern art.



NEAL COHEN

Will lead an informal discussion panel among the day's speakers.


GREGORY CURRIE

"Empathy and the Simulation of Bodily Movement"
I begin with an episode in the history of aesthetic thinking: the Einfuhlung theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attempting a brief survey of its principles and problems. Much that is said by advocates of this approach has natural affinities with very recent work on simulated, implicit or (in some formulations) imagined movement involving the operation of motoric areas of the brain. Is this connection a model for what has been called "neuroaesthetics"? I suggest reasons for hesitancy on that question, distinguishing between a neurologically informed aesthetics (a good thing) and a neurologically constituted aesthetics (not such a good thing). Finally, in a burst of irresponsible speculation likely to bring philosophy into disrepute, I suggest that ideas from the Einfuhlung theory and from contemporary perspectives on spatial and bodily imagining suggest an hypothesis about the causes of some psychopathologies.



NANCY KANWISHER

"Special Categories of Visual Experience: Faces, Places, and Bodies"
Visual art is perceived in the brain, not the eye. This means that our perceptual experience of visual art, like our perceptual experience of the real world, is constructed and shaped by the computational machinery in the brain. I will discuss research from my lab and other labs that suggests that three visual categories are privileged in the brain: faces, places, and bodies. These categories are “special” in the sense that the human brain contains cortical regions specialized for processing each of these three categories. I will describe the evidence for this claim, and consider the implications for perceptual experience and visual art.



V.S. RAMACHANDRAN

Topic To Be Announced


JENEFER ROBINSON

"What Emotions are and How They Respond to Music"
The “cognitive appraisal” theory of emotion has trouble accounting for the way that music arouses emotions in listeners. When I feel sad on listening to sad music, for example, it isn’t because I “appraise” the situation as one in which I have suffered a loss. In this paper I attempt to offer a partial explanation for how music arouses emotion. First I defend a view of emotion in which physiological and motor changes and “action tendencies” play a large role. Then I show that there are multiple ways in which the same piece of music can evoke listeners’ emotions: by having personal associations and memories evoked; by being moved by the beauty of form and exquisite craftsmanship; by being surprised, bewildered, satisfied, relieved etc. by developments in the musical structure as it unfolds; by emotional reactions to what is expressed by the music; and finally, by what I call the “Jazzercise effect,” the direct effect of the music on motor and autonomic systems, which is then interpreted as an emotional reaction. The "Jazzercise effect" can perhaps be understood as a version of “emotional contagion.” Since all these modes of emotion elicitation are occurring simultaneously, it is not surprising that music is often said to arouse emotions that are ambiguous or even ineffable.

 

SEMIR ZEKI

"The Brain's Concept of Form and its Expression in Art"
One of the most important attributes of any visual system, including the form system, is that of constancy. This refers to the fact that objects retain their identity when viewed in different lighting conditions, or from different angles or distances. This remarkable feat is achieved by the brain because it is able to form a concept of objects. In its early, analytical, phase Cubism tried to mimic this by eliminating all particular viewing conditions with results that did not satisfy. Piet Mondrian, instead, sought for the constant elements in all forms, implying that there is a sort of building block from which all forms are constituted. His experiments led him to the conclusion that the straight line is the constituent and he defined form as "the plurality of straight lines in rectangular opposition." The straight line and the rectangle constituted by straight lines became a prominent feature of paintings, from the Suprematist art of Kazimir Malevich to the compositions of Barnett Newman and many others.

In the 1960s, physiologists discovered that a characteristic of the visual form system is the presence of cells that are orientation selective, ones that respond selectively to given orientations only. These orientation selective cells came to be considered the physiological building blocks of form in the cerebral cortex. The general idea grew that the construction of form in the brain is a piecemeal process, with cells responding to oriented lines feeding cells that respond to more complex entities, in hierarchical fashion.

More recent physiological and human imaging experiments have shown that there are several parallel form systems, and that artists have exploited each one of these selectively.