Some times it is about the plumbing or is it?

[liveart]

An interesting article on Neuroaesthetics

Your Brain on Curves

[Jean Detheux]

Michael,

There often is a problem with neuroscience, so much emphasis is placed on the workings of the brain, it forgets that we are also a body, and not just that, we are a body-in-the-world, and in a “cultural world” at that, "deriving meaning from the experience while projecting meaning into it” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

If the brain were all that it is all about, then we would be trapped in a bit of a vicious circle because we then would be studying the/our brain with the/our brain, and each new discovery would change the situation being studied, an endless loop/circularity.

Two close friends of mine are major players in cognitive science. One teaches cognitive science at two major Western Canada universities, BCU and Simon Fraser (actually, it is fun to list his research interests: Psychology, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Psychology, Decision Making, Embodied Cognition, Metacognition, Distributed Cognition, Cognitive Modelling, Spatial Cognition, Situated Cogniition, Cognitive Architectures, Biopsychology, Visual Analytics, Systems Science, Cognitive Vision, Prediction-based Decisions & Planning, Satisficing & Bounded Rationality, Naturalistic Decision Making, Computer Science, Music, Digital Media, Digital Humanities, Creativity, and Visual Studies).

The other is one of the directors (and scientists) of the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences at the “École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne  in Switzerland (he is also the author of the GL Mixer, a project we started together in Esbjerg, Denmark, at Aalborg University, a few years ago).

Both have become aware of that “vicious circle” some years ago and started familiarizing themselves with Husserl’s Phenomenology (as well as Merleau-Ponty’s approach), and discovered that some of their colleagues were doing likewise. There was/is a need to get out of a rather naïve attitude when it comes to exploring and understanding our lived experience in ways that do not betray its very nature.

Note that the article you refer to hints at that problem (positing the brain as king, as if it could exist without being “in” a body, and without that body being "in” the world). The paper quotes Alva Noë thus: "He says that in emphasizing preference, neuroaesthetics simplifies our response to art. Such an approach leaves out more complicated feelings that art might compel in us."

If we can’t dissociate the workings of our brain from that of the body, and the workings of the body from its “place” in the world (“embodied cognition"), we cannot either dissociate the language of visual art from its long history, history rooted in natural media. Yes, the digital means can open new vistas, but the very language they will contribute to has been honed over thousands of years by all those who worked before us, and their heritage conditions totally the way we can relate to any visual art, digital or not.

Problem is, Art schools used to familiarize Art students to that language by the “slow and painful education of the senses” (I, as well as countless other Art students, spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours studying and copying the masters, drawing “from life,” even studying anatomy, linear perspective and of course Art History, not to mention composition and the likes).

I’ll use one simple example (one could use many others) pointing to the culturally acquired aspect of Art as a language: just as it is the case in children’s drawings, the differences of scale in an image were not (or rarely), prior to the Renaissance and the invention of linear perspective, associated with “placement in space” (big = near, small = far), they were indications of hierarchical importance: big = important, small = less important.

So many representational conventions we take for granted in our society are meaningless in others, or acquire a different meaning because reality is culturally constituted, and differet culture/epochs constitute it differently (need I say “flat earth?”).

So the brain functions in a context, and that context cannot be reduced to the workings of the brain, but if “seen,” that context can give meaning to the functions of the brain.

Zen and other traditions talk about “Bodymind” as a single entity, not splitting body and mind in ways that are endemic in our culture.

More about that here:  What we call 'body' and 'mind' are mere abstractions from an identi....