Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures Paperback – June 12, 2018

Here, I summarize my thoughts on three books by Eric Kandel: The Disordered Mind, In Search of Memory, and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures. Eric Kandel is a great American scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize. Interestingly, he started his career as a humanities major at Harvard, and he writes very much in that tradition.The books cover various topics, including psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, the molecular basis of memory, and the relationship between the subconscious and art, and incorporate his recollections of his life journey and world history, particularly related to Vienna. While the books focus on different things, they all look at different aspects of the same subject, like taking different views of one elephant.When discussing psychiatric diseases, I like how Dr. Kandel described the root causes and history of schizophrenia and autism. These diseases trace much of their early history to Vienna and some famous early brain scientists there, such as Kraepelin and Asperger. Within the topic of memory, I liked Dr. Kandel's reflection on how memory is stored in synapses from inhibitory and excitatory neurons, and, in parallel fashion, these synaptic memories turn into molecular events and gene expression through activating and repressing transcription factors of the CREB family. Kandel also talks about his own memories. It was striking how Vienna was such a center of scholarship in the early 20th century and so quickly fell into tragedy with the advent of the Nazis and has changed dramatically since then.Finally, I enjoyed reading about Dr. Kandel's relationship between the subconscious and art. He talked about how many recent artists have tried to move beyond the conscious representation of the figure and harness their subconscious and how abstract art can play into our deep mental processes, such as face recognition.Overall, I found these books very interesting reads that give an encompassing picture of both the mind and a great person.

I do not know how this concise, clearly written, well-illustrated synopsis of the relationships of psycho-neurobiology and art appreciation will be received by the general reader. I regard this as an important book, but then I am a medical scientist and an artist already familiar with the experimental and historical evidence of the two associated disciplines. The 20th century saw a new approach to art and mental science, both applying narrow, minimalistic, reduced approaches to grasp the marrow of the larger processes. (Not covered is the Far East Asian form of art whose ink paintings have been for centuries simplistic with sparse lines and broad spaces that the viewer connects and fills in to construct familiar forms.) The primary focus is on how we see, how photon arrays falling on our retina are deconstructed, channeled, analyzed by element and position or orientation, and then associated through memory with learned forms, and how learning requires new synapses and stimulated molecular responsive pathways. Modern art has been an exploration in parallel with neuroscience. Cubism with its combined perspectives and discontinuity, abstract geometric paintings of simple, inherently or acquired emotional colors and color juxtapositions and line paths, and complex arrays of indefinite forms suggestive of texture or movement challenge the viewer, probing deep into the senses and perception. Metaphor was replaced with direct expression; and one artist, Mondrian, had mystical intentions in his later paintings while another, Rothko, whose works many regard as spiritual, had no such objective.Author, Nobel Prize-winner, Eric R. Kandel, whom some viewers of PBS and Charlie Rose know through his series of roundtables on the brain, is mainly a philosophical physicalist, but he does include the feedback looping of bottom-up, emergent reductionism and top-down, organismal holism of learned and experiential associations. Indeed, much of modern art is a mutually dependent creative union of form and receiver, i.e, not what the art is about, but instead what the viewer feels, imagines, or thinks. The book presents seminal examples of artistic insights. Artists, such as Mondrian, Klee, and Kandinsky, wrote essays about the psychological effect of certain artistic techniques and presentations, and Kandel explains the neuroscience behind it. Color fields present a psycho-neurological problem, as people perceive a given color differently, dependent on distance; lighting intensity, hue, and angle; contrast; adjacent hues; and in the instance of color-blindness, neurology. Some artists create optical illusions and stimulate optic centers, with the viewer perceiving shapes, hues, contours, and elevations that are not actually present, further questioning our reality. Other artists take mundane items or icons and craft their forms or images into a different way of seeing, as in Pop Art, bringing sociological and socio-political aspects into fine focus. I hope that this small book finds its way into science and art curricula, interdisciplinary studies, and into the hands of the general reader.

The claim of the Kandel's book there's a connection between artists and their brains was not met. The book describes better the artist and their works than mental processes that created art. Great artists do show their emotions in their works over exposing mental processes that created the works. Did Pablo Picasso feel anything else than anger and sadness in "Guernica". How would anyone know his mental process, reductionism or emergence when creating Guernica? Kandels book describes well arts evolution from realism through abstraction. Any connection to artists mental processing was conjecture, thesis, less than proven ideas.