Interface Seminar: Neuroscience and Art

If one were to jumble all the disciplines of a modern University up in some giant hat, and just choose two out at random, one fairly seemingly random duo would be Art and Neuroscience. Yet, there are surprisingly strong connections, as the collection "The Artful Minds" - connections that may very well lead us to the heart of symbolic thought itself.

The first article by Merlin Donald points out that "Art should be regarded as a specific kind of cognitive engineering. As a first principle, art is an actively intended to influence the minds of an audience." Furthermore, "Cathedrals, and films, are specific kinds of cognitive machines. Their major social functions are cognitive: they influence memory, shape public behavior, set social norms, and modify the experience of life in their audiences." While that's a pretty broad definition of art - after all, this also includes rather conceptual appartuses such as legal rhetoric and political ideologies whose existence in the rather material world is at least hard to pin down (as opposed, to say a painting), it's at least a good place to begin.

However, Donald then begins with what appears to be (but only on first glance!) rather old-fashioned "computational" reductionism: "All things cognitive - and art is no exception - are ultimately products of brain activity...any complex mental task...is made of up chains of these cognitive components, arranged in functional architectures, or operational hierarchies that resemble the algorithms of computation." However, he escapes this by stating that there exists "Distributed networks...[that] combine the memory storage capacities of many brains with whatever memory technology a given social network has at its disposal, and weaves these into a cognitive system that extends far beyond the individual brain." In other words, culture, which he thinks starts with "mimetic action", or in other words, imitation. I'm not sure if I buy his point that other animals don't have mimesis and that prefrontal cortex "explosion" is absolutely crucial, but obviously culture had to start somewhere. Indeed, I only wish he pursued more the line of thinking he had with distributed networks.

The next chapter by Terrence Deacon of "The Symbolic Species" fame starts with the viewpoint that art is, well, symbolic since it refers to something, such as an emotion or a memory, that is not present in the sign itself. However, symbols are not mere signs "in terms of the arbitrariness of the reference relationship or the use of conventional token as a sign" but "encrypted signs" whose keys are their relationships. And so "because of its mediating system of relationships, symbolic reference gains a degree of disconnection from formal or physical linkage with its ground of reference." and therefore the "potential combination, composition, and juxapositon of symbols make symbolic reference necessarily limitless in its referential capacity."

Deacon has a superb distinction to draw between symbol and sign, one crucial to language. Yet, even a symbol or sign needs a referent, a signified, and I find Deacon's thrust to make distinct emotions as signified to be a bit wrong-headed, after all, one can think symbolically of "Marxism" or "My pet dog Fido" but one does not, when viewing art, think symbolically of "beauty" or "loneliness" - these are directly evoked.

The next chapter is by George Lakoff, my academic grandfather in one of his more Californian phases. His central insight of his cognitive grammar or "embodied theory of metaphor" is that "spatial relationships can decompose into universal cognitive primitives that recur across languages" such that "These primitives are not concrete images that you can see but "schemas" - cognitive structures that fit many scenes that you can see." Therefore, we recognize art as art since we use our evolved spatial groundings to recognize these schemas, so that art is only art because of our "bodies - and mirror neurons, a system of neurons forming a cluster across the premotor and parietal cortices with bidirectional connections. These neurons fire when we perform a coordinated action or see a corresponding action performed." Furthermore, each of these schemas, even the more conceptual ones like "HUMILITY IS DOWN", is just parasitically encoding itself on top of earlier motor neurons.

What I find mildly strange with Lakoff is first, his lack of recognition that his entire schema of "metaphors" is just an embodied version of Shank and Abelson's more or less discredited "Scripts" theory of cognitive psychology and AI. In fact, this theory fell apart because there is no finitely enumberable number of "scripts" - and likewise, despite his attempts otherwise, I refuse to believe there are finitely ennumerable number of "METAPHORS AS SCRIPTS" (using ALL CAPS, as Lakoff likes) that in anyway give us a better understanding of what it means to be human, particularly as most of scripts such as "KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT" are, well, clearly culturally conditioned and not neurally localizable.

The last reading is Zeki's take on ambiguity, where he states that ambiguity results when there are two many possible interpretations: "Usually we just choose the most likely, but this is impossible then both are equally likely and giving each a place on the conscious stage, one at a time, so that we are only conscious of one of the interpretations at any given time. Thus a neurobiologically based definition of ambiguity is the opposite of the dictionary definition; it is not uncertainty, but certainty- the certainty of many, equally plausible interpretations, each one of which is sovereign when it occupies the conscious stage." This has the wonderful consequence of reminding us that our "consciousness" is not a unified thing as such, but "Visual consciousness consists of many micro-consciousnesses that are distributed in time and space." This makes a lot of sense, and Zeki has a lot of evidence to back him up. However, again, like many neuroscientists Zeki tends to be neural reductionist, hoping to find "interpretation" purely in terms of the brain, which leads him and neuroscientists like him to be dangerously close to being the phrenologists of our time. And as any technologists (or Deleuze, or even Hegel) would remind us, exteriorization is just as important as interiorization. In fact, I would bet that exteriorization is more important, and that if there is a secret to our minds (and who knows, maybe art), it is to be found in the interaction of our neurons with the world, and our reshaping of that world. Understanding art is clearly crucial in understanding that reshaping that world - and neuroscience will be increasingly crucial in that understanding of art surprisingly enough.