Splendours And Miseries Of The Brain

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, Cezanne, Balzac, Dante, and others

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 (Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), and has also co-authored a book with the late French painter Balthus, entitled La Quete de l'essentiel (1995).

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 Cézanne 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