Neuroscience
What is this thing I call beauty? Not "art" as a social phenomenon based on status or display, or beautiful faces seen merely as biological fitness markers. Rather, the sheer, drawing-in-of-breath beauty of a Handel aria, a Rothko painting, TS Eliot’s poems, or those everyday moments of sun shining through wet, autumn leaves, or even a Powerpoint layout seeming just right. Content itself doesn’t matter – Cezanne’s paintings of apples are not beautiful because one likes apples, and there are beautiful photographs of horrible things. Somewhere there must be something formal, structural, compositional, involving the arrangement of light and shade, of sounds, of words best ordered to say old ideas in new ways. When I see beauty I know it, and others must also see it, or they wouldn’t make the paintings I like or have them hung in galleries. But why then doesn’t everyone see it in the same way?
Chris McManus is Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at UCL. His 2002 book Right Hand, Left Hand won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, the Aventis Prize for popular science writing, and was a finalist for the Descartes Prize in 2004.
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Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
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-Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Neuroesthetics, a term coined by Semir Zeki, is "the attempt to use neuroscience to understand art and aesthetic behaviour" (as defined in an excellent overview by BRAINETHICS). Some would say the venture...
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Today's New York Times has an article about the engineer, Henry Petroski, who, they say, "seems strangely enthusiastic about failure." For him, "... failures in design and construction present perfect teaching opportunities. They are object lessons...
- Color Of The Song: A Look At Synesthesia
Read this article in the Indiana Daily Student here.... On a broader scope, if we associate semantic meanings with what we perceive, then maybe we can understand how our brain reacts to ideas themselves, and, in turn, understand the biological basis...
Neuroscience
Chris McManus: Beauty
What is this thing I call beauty? Not "art" as a social phenomenon based on status or display, or beautiful faces seen merely as biological fitness markers. Rather, the sheer, drawing-in-of-breath beauty of a Handel aria, a Rothko painting, TS Eliot’s poems, or those everyday moments of sun shining through wet, autumn leaves, or even a Powerpoint layout seeming just right. Content itself doesn’t matter – Cezanne’s paintings of apples are not beautiful because one likes apples, and there are beautiful photographs of horrible things. Somewhere there must be something formal, structural, compositional, involving the arrangement of light and shade, of sounds, of words best ordered to say old ideas in new ways. When I see beauty I know it, and others must also see it, or they wouldn’t make the paintings I like or have them hung in galleries. But why then doesn’t everyone see it in the same way?
Chris McManus is Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at UCL. His 2002 book Right Hand, Left Hand won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, the Aventis Prize for popular science writing, and was a finalist for the Descartes Prize in 2004.
--
Return to menu for One Nagging Thing.
- Trying To Predict Who Will Be A Happy Doctor
Being a doctor can be incredibly stressful and more than a fifth of junior physicians wish they'd never taken medicine in the first place. Moreover, there's evidence showing that stressed doctors are bad doctors, so it would make sense if applicants...
- Pain & Paintings: Beholding Beauty Reduces Pain Perception And Laser Evoked Potentials
-Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Neuroesthetics, a term coined by Semir Zeki, is "the attempt to use neuroscience to understand art and aesthetic behaviour" (as defined in an excellent overview by BRAINETHICS). Some would say the venture...
- Three Beautiful Librarian Things
Ok, this is a meme I can get behind: Three Beautiful Things, in which Clare says "[e]very day I want to record three things that have given me pleasure. This 3BT site is the original Three Beautiful Things." How about Three Beautiful Librarian Things?...
- (engineering) Success Through Failure
Today's New York Times has an article about the engineer, Henry Petroski, who, they say, "seems strangely enthusiastic about failure." For him, "... failures in design and construction present perfect teaching opportunities. They are object lessons...
- Color Of The Song: A Look At Synesthesia
Read this article in the Indiana Daily Student here.... On a broader scope, if we associate semantic meanings with what we perceive, then maybe we can understand how our brain reacts to ideas themselves, and, in turn, understand the biological basis...