Encountering art: how we see, think, feel, and create

1994: Putting Neuroaesthetics on the Map -- Neuroaesthetics: Cerebral Attributes and Bodily Ghosts -- Neuroarthistory: On Emotions, Matter, and Time -- Neuroartcriticism: From Lesions to the Work and Vice Versa -- The Brain's Iconoclash -- Brains on Stage.

"Neuroaesthetics, in its widest sense, designates the study of the neural and evolutionary bases of the cognitive and affective processes engaged when an individual contemplates a work of art (painting, musical composition, film, theatrical performance, literary work, and the like), ordinary object, or natural phenomenon from an artistic perspective. As this purportedly inderdisciplinary field developed, however, it has been dominated by neuroscientific research. Encountering Art reorients its focus to the individual in the world, a proper object of study of the humanities, in this case art theory and philosophy. Not just a repackaging of old and new ideas about the self in the wrappings of technology, neuroaesthetics is well positioned to address our current understanding of media and matter. Far from originating in in 1999 (or 2002 or 2004 as different scientific origin accounts have it), the book traces the genealogy of philosophical interest in the brain to antiquity--300 BCE, when the earliest known anatomical drawings of the brain inside the skull were produced in Egypt. In 1504-1507 Leonardo da Vinci made a cast of the brain in an attempt to marry science and philosophy. Today, this discourse has the potential to dismantle assumptions about the separateness of nature and culture--and that of scientific and humanistic methodologies, mathematics and narrative--a position advocated by Eric Kandel in Reductionism in Art and Brain Science"

Includes bibliographical references and index.