How can two mutually exclusive behaviors—mating and fighting—be mediated by the same population of neurons? Anderson found that the difference hinges on the intensity of the stimulus applied. Weak sen...
Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the list...
Emotions—sexuality, aggression, pleasure, fear, and pain—are instinctive processes. They color our lives and help us confront the fundamental challenges of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. We
Philosophical inquiries (the reflections of specially trained observers on the nature of their own patterns of thought) or the insights of great novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor...
Like Picasso and Braque, Mondrian explored the influential ideas of Paul Cézanne, who greatly influenced the analytic Cubists with his idea that all natural forms can be reduced to three figural primi...
It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to e...
Vertical and horizontal lines represented for Mondrian the two opposing life forces: the positive and the negative, the dynamic and the static, the masculine and the feminine. This
Woman I is considered to this day to be one of the most anxiety-producing and disturbing images of a woman in the history of art. In this painting de Kooning, who was reared by an abusive mother, crea...
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (2004), biographers of de Kooning, say that he was caught up in the excitement of the American century and felt he needed to seize the day. They write: Excavation was fir...
One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend,...
The discovery by Hubel and Wiesel of cells that respond to linear stimuli with specific axes of orientation may partly explain our response to Mondrian’s work, but it does not explain the artist’s foc...
We have seen that the region of our brain known as the amygdala orchestrates emotion and that it communicates with the hypothalamus, the region that houses the nerve cells that control instinctive beh...
Different mechanisms underlie short- and long-term memory storage. A single sensory neuron from the siphon skin connects to a motor neuron that innervates the gill. Short-term memory is produced by a...
The results of that work had shown that different patterns of stimulation alter the strength of synaptic connections in different ways. But Tauc and I had not examined how an actual behavior is change...
When repeated shocks and repeated release of serotonin are paired with the firing of the sensory neuron in associative learning, a signal is sent to the nucleus of the sensory neuron. This signal acti...
In the process, he came to understand a crucial principle of brain function: our brain takes the incomplete information about the outside world that it receives from our eyes and makes it complete.
This reductionist vision is reflected in the evolution of his work. Perhaps Mondrian also implicitly realized that by excluding certain angles and focusing only on others he might pique the beholder’s...