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Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010195608 | QP376 Z44 2009 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
Splendors and Miseries of the Brain examines the elegant and efficient machinery of the brain, showing that by studying music, art, literature, and love, we can reach important conclusions about how the brain functions. discusses creativity and the search for perfection in the brain examines the power of the unfinished and why it has such a powerful hold on the imagination discusses Platonic concepts in light of the brain shows that aesthetic theories are best understood in terms of the brain discusses the inherited concept of unity-in-love using evidence derived from the world literature of love addresses the role of the synthetic concept in the brain (the synthesis of many experiences) in relation to art, using examples taken from the work of Michelangelo, Cézanne, Balzac, Dante, and others
Author Notes
Semir Zeki is a visual neurobiologist in the Department of Cognitive Neurology at University College London. Zeki has pioneered the study of the primate visual brain and furthered research on how affective states are generated by visual inputs. He has published extensively in his field, including the books Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999) and A Vision of the Brain (Blackwell Scientific, Oxford), and has also co-authored a book with the late French painter Balthus, entitled La Quête de l'essentiel (1995).
Reviews 1
Choice Review
Part neuroanatomy primer, part literary criticism, and part art history, this interesting, elegant, but strange little book provides a guided tour to Zeki's pursuit of clues to the way the brain processes and organizes information about various forms of love. A polymath who has produced two previous books on the brain--Law and the Brain, which he edited with Oliver Goodenough (2006), and A Vision of the Brain, (1993)--Zeki (visual neurobiology, University College London, UK) begins with the notion that the brain is an all-purpose concept generator. He then introduces the reader to a bit of neuroanatomy and describes how the brain represents concepts such as beauty, love, and perfection. Zeki's ultimate aim is to show that the brain possesses a grand concept of love as unattainable unity. Because actual studies of the brain only hint at such a concept, the author turns to literary representations of love and romance for evidence that such a "brain ideal" has determined how people everywhere, throughout the ages, have thought about and experienced love. Neuroscientists and psychologists may be hesitant to endorse some of Zeki's generalizations, but one cannot but admire the author's creativity and exuberance. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. R. R. Cornelius Vassar College
Table of Contents
| List of Figures |
| Note to the Reader |
| Acknowledgements |
| Introduction |
| Part I Abstraction and the Brain |
| 1 Abstraction |
| 2 The Brain and Its Concepts |
| 3 Inherited Brain Concepts |
| 4 The Distributed Knowledge-Acquiring System of the Brain |
| 5 The Acquired Synthetic Brain Concepts |
| 6 The Synthetic Brain Concept and the Platonic Ideal |
| 7 Creativity and the Source of Perfection in the Brain |
| Part II Brain Concepts and Ambiguity |
| 8 Ambiguity in the Brain and in Art |
| 9 Processing and Perceptual Sites in the Brain |
| 10 From Unambiguous to Ambiguous Knowledge |
| 11 Higher Levels of Ambiguity |
| Part III Unachievable Brain Concepts |
| Introduction |
| 12 Michelangelo and the Non finito |
| 13 Paul C_zanne and the Unfinished |
| 14 Unfinished Art in Literature |
| Part VI Brain Concepts of Love.Conte By Arthur Rimbaud |
| 15 The Brain's Concepts of Love |
| 16 The Neural Correlates of Love |
| 17 Brain Concepts of Unity and Annihilation in Love |
| 18 Sacred and Profane |
| 19 The Metamorphosis of the Brain Concept of Love in Dante |
| 20 Wagner and Tristan und Isolde |
| 21 Thomas Mann and Death in Venice |
| 22 A Neurobiological Analysis of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents |
| Notes |
| Name Index |
| Subject Index |
