Wave of the Future? Reconsidering the Neuroscientific Turn in Art History

Leonardo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Kate Mondloch
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Taking ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
The Brain

This essay examines the much-contested “neuroscientific turn” in art history, taking the cues of the best of the turn while rejecting its false starts. The most promising transdisciplinary encounters spanning the brain sciences and the humanities begin from the premise that human experience is embodied, but the “body” itself is interwoven across biological, ecological, phenomenological, social and cultural planes. Certain media artworks critically engaged with neuroscience productively model such an approach. Taking Mariko Mori’s brainwave interface and multimedia installation Wave UFO (1999–2002) as a case study, the author explores how works of art may complicate and augment brain science research as well as its dissemination into other social and cultural arenas.

scholarly journals From Unconscious Inference to the Beholder’s Share: Predictive Perception and Human Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil K. Seth
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Bayesian Brain ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Prediction Error Minimization ◽  
The Brain

Science and art have long recognized that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ (PEM) or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this article, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

scholarly journals From unconscious inference to the beholder's share: predictive perception and human experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil Seth
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Bayesian Brain ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Prediction Error Minimization ◽  
The Brain

Science and art have long recognised that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this paper, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

What's All This Furor About an Enchanted Loom?

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 114-118
Author(s):  
Raymond Forbes
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Science Field ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
The Brain

This article explores the gowing interconnections between the brain sciences and the social sciences, It porvides a brief historical summary of the development of brain science, reviews advances in what is currently known about the brain, and dfdescribes where the field stands today. Importantly for those interested in the social sciences, the article also discusses the potential impact of the brain sciences on work in the discipline, indicates why we should care about developments in the brain science field, and provides some practical tools that have come out of the resrarxh, The article concludes with a summary of what the developments might mean for a social sciences practitioner.

Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Long Hoeveler
Keyword(s):  
Human Population ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Human Behaviors ◽  
Sexual Deviancy ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Scientific ideologies swirl throughout Stoker’s two most gothic novels, Dracula (1897) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and this essay will address those ideologies as literary manifestations of just some of the “weird science” that was permeating late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Specifically, the essay examines racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology as they appear in Stoker’s two novels. Stoker owned a copy Johann Caspar Lavater’s five-volume edition of Essays on Physiognomy (1789), and declared himself to be a “believer of the science” of physiognomy. The second major “weird science” infecting the gothic works of Stoker is the new field of criminology, or the bourgeois attempt to codify, control, and exterminate criminal elements in the human population. Stoker drew on both Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal, published in 1890, and the Italian Cesare Lombroso’s work, Uomo Delinquente (1876), a book that was available to Stoker in a two volume French translation published as L’Homme Criminel (1895). Stoker derived a number of his passages about the workings of the brain from the theories of the well-known professor of physiology, W. B. Carpenter, founder of the notion of “unconscious cerebration,” a concept developed in his book Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Finally, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering text on sexuality in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, and invented the scientific study of sex. Of a piece with criminology, sexology attempted to categorize and medicalize human behaviors in such a way that all would become clear to the informed and enlightened bourgeois consciousness. As another weirdly scientific effort to “discipline and punish,” sexology sought to transform crime into perversion, and the man or woman suffering from vampiric tendencies became just another case study of sexual deviancy.

Of the Artistic Nude and Technological Behaviorism

Nuncius ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Della Rocca
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Short Review ◽  
World War ◽  
Related Field ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
The Core ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Material History ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Brain

Neuromorphic technologies lie at the core of 21st century neuroscience, especially in the “big brain science” projects started in 2013 – i.e. the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project. While neuromorphism and the “reverse engineering” of the brain are often presented as a “methodological revolution” in the brain sciences, these concepts have a long history which is strongly interconnected with the developments in neuroscience and the related field of bioengineering since the end of World War II. In this paper I provide a short review of the first generation of “neuromorphic devices” created in the 1960s, by focusing on the work of Leon Harmon and his “neuromime,” whose material history overlapped in a very interesting sense with the visual and artistic culture of the second half of the 20th century.

What makes neuroethics possible?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Full Range ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Successful Development ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Brain

Since its emergence in the early 2000s, neuroethics has become a recognized, institutionalized and professionalized field. A central strategy for its successful development has been the claim that it must be an autonomous discipline, distinct in particular from bioethics. Such claim has been justified by the conviction, sustained since the 1990s by the capabilities attributed to neuroimaging technologies, that somehow ‘the mind is the brain’, that the brain sciences can illuminate the full range of human experience and behavior, and that neuroscientific knowledge will have dramatic implications for views of the human, and challenge supposedly established beliefs and practices in domains ranging from self and personhood to the political organization of society. This article examines how that conviction functions as neuroethics’ ideological condition of possibility.

scholarly journals A Case Study of Transfer of Lesion-Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soundarya Krishnan ◽  
Rishab Khincha ◽  
Lovekesh Vig ◽  
Tirtharaj Dash ◽  
Ashwin Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Transfer Learning ◽  
Brain Lesion ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Lung Lesion ◽  
The Body ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Model Transfer ◽  
The Brain

All organs in the human body are susceptible to cancer, and we now have a growing store of images of lesions in different parts of the body. This, along with the acknowledged ability of neural-network methods to analyse image data, would suggest that accurate models for lesions can now be constructed by a deep neural network. However an important difficulty arises from the lack of annotated images from various parts of the body. Our proposed approach to address the issue of scarce training data for a target organ is to apply a form of transfer learning: that is, to adapt a model constructed for one organ to another for which there are minimal or no annotations. After consultation with medical specialists, we note that there are several discriminating visual features between malignant and benign lesions that occur consistently across organs. Therefore, in principle, these features boost the case for transfer learning on lesion images across organs. However, this has never been previously investigated. In this paper, we investigate whether lesion knowledge can be transferred across organs. Specifically, as a case study,we examine the transfer of a lesion model from the brain to lungs and lungs to the brain. We evaluate the efficacy of transfer of a brain-lesion model to the lung, and the transfer of a lung-lesion model to the brain by comparing against a model constructed: (a) without model-transfer(i.e.random weights); and (b) using model-transfer from a lesion-agnostic dataset (ImageNet). In all cases, our lesion models perform substantially better. These results point to the potential utility of transferring lesion-knowledge across organs other than those considered here.

Architectural Affordances

2021 ◽  
pp. 230-234
Author(s):  
Zakaria Djebbara ◽  
Klaus Gramann
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Action Potentials ◽  
Sensory Feedback ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Functional Relation ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Action And Perception ◽  
The Brain

In the article discussed in this chapter, the authors describe a framework of neuroaesthetics for architectural experiences that considers sensory feedback stemming from movement central for the experience of the built environment. As we move through space when experiencing architecture, our sensory impressions change, rendering the body and the brain as nondissociable agents of aesthetic experience. This interaction is described by the term affordance. The authors cast the human experience of the built environment to be predicated on the functional relation between action and perception and developed a neuroscientific experiment on architectural transitions to investigate how the human brain reflects architectural affordances. They found that varying sizes of transitions, reflecting different affordances, impact early perceptual processes, suggesting that our perception is indeed colored by the action potentials afforded by the composed space. In conclusion, the shape of space resonates with our embodied predictions regarding movement.

scholarly journals HOW WERE THE TAPESTRIES IN THE SALA DI SATURNO OF PITTI PALACE ARRANGED? GEOMATICS AND VIRTUAL REALITY FOR ART CURATORS

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Conti ◽  
Grazia Tucci ◽  
Valentina Bonora ◽  
Lidia Fiorini
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Art History ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
3D Model ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Temporary Exhibitions

Three-dimensional acquisition techniques, reality-based modelling and virtual reality are tools used in Digital Humanities prevalently for displaying the results of a study, but they can also suggest new methods of investigation to humanities scholars. In a case study regarding art history, these techniques made it possible to recreate the layout of the Sala di Saturno in Pitti Palace (Florence) in the 17th century, based on information obtained from archive documents on the tapestries designed for that hall and a 3D model expressly elaborated with geomatic techniques. The results were summarised in a video showed in 2019 during the exhibition on tapestries dedicated to Cosimo I de' Medici. A tool was also developed to assist exhibition and museum curators in their work. Through virtual reality, they can design temporary exhibitions or modify the display of the works of art in a museum in a realistic way, using visually and metrically accurate models of the pieces and exhibition rooms.

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