Reductionism in Art and Brain Science..., Eric R. Kandel
Reductionism in Art and Brain Science..., Eric R. Kandel
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Reductionism in Art and Brain Science
Bridging the Two Cultures

Author: Eric R. Kandel

Narrator: James Anderson Foster

Unabridged: 4 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/30/2018

Synopsis

Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism—the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components—has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize–winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals.

In Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Kandel shows how this radically reductionist approach, applied to the most complex puzzle of our time—the brain—has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art.

About Eric R. Kandel

Eric R. Kandel is the University Professor and Fred Kavli Professor at Columbia University and a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of learning and memory, he is the author of In Search of Memory, a memoir that won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which won the Bruno Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria's highest literary award; and Reductionism in Art and Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, a book about the New York School of abstract art. He is also coauthor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dan on October 14, 2016

In Nobel Prize-winning Columbia Professor Eric Kandel's latest work, he offers an introduction to the idea that the study and practice of Reductionism in modern (visual) art and brain science offers great benefit to both disciplines when treated as two sides of the same coin. He eloquently sums this......more

Goodreads review by Alina on February 04, 2021

“I construct lines and colours on a flat surface in order to express general beauty with utmost awareness. Nature(or that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth......more

Goodreads review by Kamilė on January 22, 2021

Although parts on abstract art lack some erudite nuance (e.g., Kandel retells Clement Greenberg’s accounts on abstract expressionism rather uncritically or presents the classical - predominantly male - canon of abstract expressionism without questioning it), the parts on visual perception and brain......more

Goodreads review by Ignacio on September 08, 2020

An orthodox approach to both art history and neuroscience, and the two sections never seem to connect as well as I'd hope from a book trying to bridge the two cultures. The whole thing seems to just rest on the fact that top down processing is involved in viewing abstract art as opposed to bottom up......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on February 16, 2020

As a self proclaimed hater of modern art and abstraction, this book did make me rethink WHY these works can be considered art. Kandel does an excellent job of dumbing down neuroscience for the casual consumer, and his connections with artists ranging from Jackson Pollock to Chuck Close make sense. T......more

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