Eric R. Kandel

All fear of reductionism is a fear of change. We have our philosophies, our models of what is true, and when someone comes along and disturbs that, we don’t like it.

The advance of science has been to break down, to reduce, all processes to their smallest fundamental events. For example, materials were once understood as whole things, then as attribute and extension, then as atoms, then subatomic particles, and finally as field interactions. All of this is true, but it doesn’t help an show more engineer determine the fatigue strength of a piece of steel. Macro properties are not destroyed by understanding micro properties. The same is true of, say, consciousness. If we break it down, understand it in terms of chemistry and electrical interaction that should not stop people using the higher understanding as a model. It remains analysable as a single unit, even when its basis is fully understood in terms of tiny events. Where this advance does cause a problem is when certain philosophies depend on a particular model for their existence. Life is completely understood as chemistry, but that causes problems for any philosophy that requires it to be separate from chemistry. The only people who need to be scared of reductionism in this sense are those whose philosophy is built on “the spark of life”, or some other piece of magic. As for the rest of things, an irregular set of surfaces, red in colour, with a linear green attachment, comprising various mechanisms for the chemical and photosynthetic transfer of energy, is still a rose by any other name, and it still smells as sweet.

Of course as Kandel implicitly suggests it depends on what we mean by 'fear', I suppose. There are actual limits to the utility of reductionism. Like any tools, the answers reductionism gives you depends on the precise nature of the tools you use. As an analogy imagine you have a cylindrical chocolate cake. You take a knife, and make one plane cut that passes through the centre of the cake. How big are the resulting pieces? Theoretically, the answer is that you have two halves. But in reality? In reality, you also have crumbs, and bits stick to the knife. How much of each depends on things like how dry or moist the cake is, how smooth the knife is, etc., etc., etc. We really consider the analogous properties of the analytical tools we use when we perform reductionist science. Even numbers are not immune. Numbers are often treated as if they are somehow incredibly precise, when in fact we use them to mean very different things. 'One' football team has little in common with 'one' maggot, 'one' forest, 'one' universe . . . Even in a more abstract sense, numerical systems do not agree. Fractions and decimals cannot be exactly mapped one to the other, for example. So I don't fear reductionism; but I do find myself bemused as to why this (or any other) scientific method is treated as if infallible; especially by those who can clearly see the problems with treating religious dogma as infallible. All scientific theories are descriptions; no matter how accurate, they are not 'the truth' any more than a map actually is the land it represents. show less

While I am familiar with the rules of composition, I have often wondered why we like odd numbered compositions more than even, why the rule of thirds is the rule of thirds. I mean, we all know that it looks “right” but why? It’s hard-wired, so what’s the why behind the what. I read The Age of Insight hoping to find some answers. While I didn’t find answers to my specific questions, I did learn a lot more about how we are hard-wired not just to value art, but to be artists. I show more learned so much more about how our brain functions and how our brain functions on art and it was fabulous.

Eric Kandel is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, a neuroscientist who knows more about how the brain works than most of the brains in the world united. He is also a polymath who might have majored in History rather than medicine if he had not fallen in love. I do have to say the most romantic gesture I have ever seen in a book is found in this book. I read it and could only say, “Awwwww.” Then I had to tell everyone because it was so sweet. Don’t worry, you’ll recognize it when you come to it.

Kandel looks at how art has been influenced by our growing understanding of the mind and of psychology and how our brains experience and appreciate art. We learn about the conscious, the unconscious and why it’s always a smart thing to go putter around or go for a walk when you’re stuck trying to solve a problem. We learn a lot about fin de siècle Vienna and the social scene that mixed scientists, doctors, and artists together to cross-pollinate and they did – leading to the Expressionist movement and a wild burst of creativity in science, medicine, psychology and art.

Do not be intimidated by the idea of a Nobel neuroscientist writing a book for you to read. Kandel writes beautifully and clearly. He never condescends or dumbs it down, but he distills the central ideas without overloading readers with minute details. He explains processes with clarity and makes effective use of metaphors. It also seems as though neuroscience is unique in the sciences in not creating a taxonomy of exclusion. Here’s an example of what I mean, “Segregation of information begins in the primary visual cortex. There, as we have seen, information is relayed along one of two parallel pathways—the what pathway and the where pathway.” Why they didn’t name the what pathway the flibbertyhoosit I have no idea, but hooray for names that are descriptive. This makes it much easier to follow and so even though I am a lay reader who didn’t even take biology in high school, I had no trouble following the science.

Kandel is a beautiful writer and when he writes about art, he is eloquent and authoritative. He talks about emotional reactions to art and you know that he his talking about how art moves him. He has the scientist’s gift of organizing information so the book makes sense in how it presents information. it all hangs together into one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. I enjoyed it so much that I have backtracked and read passages again just for the pleasure of understanding what he is talking about when it’s a topic I should feel intimidated by and for the joy of reading someone who loves art, science, the mind, and wants to bring them all together. He is enthusiastic, excited by the idea of consilience – a unity of knowledge, though doubtful that it can happen in the foreseeable future, but reading this book, you can see the potential even within this one man.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/07/06/9781400068715/ show less

Whereas the face is critical to the expression of the emotion, the hands and body signal how a person is coping with emotion. [302]

Even a brief scan of the hardbound edition makes evident the ambitious scope Kandel brings to this project: the illustrations are a heady mix of art reproductions, diagrams & schematics, photo portraits, and clinical images (including neural scans); the Table of Contents, running to three pages, reveals a wide net bringing in artists & movements, cultural trends, show more psychological research and theorists, and specific topics in neurobiology; and the book closes with near-scholarly Endnotes and Index. Even so, I wasn't anticipating either the depth or breadth of the argument on offer. This is not only an essay on the expression of emotion in art; it is also how our brains process images, and from these images produce emotion, and thereby build a "survival mechanism" which proved key to human civilisation.

Kandel structures his argument methodically and deploys brief, clearly written chapters. Much ground is covered, both artistic influences and schools, scientific literature and experiments, but his discussion is unfailingly lucid. That level of detail, however, tends to leave the reader lost in the wood. Kandel's division of the book into five parts goes a long way to keeping the attentive reader on track; indeed, just reading the section heads orients the reader and hints at the interplay between Kandel's topics of interest. It also supports dipping into specific sections without having full recollection of all preceding chapters: while I intend to re-read the full text eventually, it's useful knowing I can also revisit specific sections and still find it instructive.

Part 1 - A PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND ART OF UNCONSCIOUS EMOTION
Mind and visual arts

Part 2 - A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF VISUAL PERCEPTION AND EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO ART
Mind and visual process

Part 3 - BIOLOGY OF THE BEHOLDER'S VISUAL RESPONSE TO ART
Brain and visual arts

Part 4 - BIOLOGY OF THE BEHOLDER'S EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO ART
Brain and visual process

Part 5 - AN EVOLVING DIALOGUE BETWEEN VISUAL ART AND SCIENCE
Brain and mind and vision, as a means of better understanding human experience

We know now that one of the reasons expressonist art appeals to us so strongly is that we have evolved a remarkably large, social brain. It contains extended representations of faces, hands, bodies, and bodily movement, and as a result we are hardwired to respond unconsciously as well as consciously to exaggerated depictions of these parts of the body and their movement. Moreover, the brain's mirror neuron system, theory-of-mind system, and biological modulators of emotion and empathy endow us with a great capacity for understanding other people's minds and emotions. [500]

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Key to Kandel's achievement are the concise yet detailed chapters on specific aspects of his argument, substituting multiple linked & focused essays for what might elsewise be a meandering and lengthy treatise.

Artists: Gustav Klimt - Oskar Kokoschka - Egon Schiele - Arthur Schnitzler - Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
Psychologists: Sigmund Freud
Medical / Neurobiologists: Carl von Rokitansky - Josef Skoda
Social Scientists / Humanists: Ernst Gombrich show less

A wonderful book that works both as a layman introduction to the new field of neurobiology and a Nobel prize scientist autobiography. Eric Kandel, having dabbled in psychiatry, turned to and devoted himself to the first unpromising new field of the science of the brain. He was present during the progression from physical/electrical to chemical to biochemical experimentation in discovering the mechanics of the brain. His topics are learning and memory which he examined on a genus of sea slugs show more called Aplysia. Lab work not patient interaction was his calling, which reveals itself in the book by a very mechanistic-deterministic approach. He is not squeamish in opening up cat brains, inflicting pain on his subjects to train them This disregard for the feelings of those not close to him fits into his conservative world view, which his liberal New Yorker relatives have trouble to understand.

Some of this harshness is certainly due to his lucky, unlucky personal history. Kandel's Jewish-Galician petit-bourgeois parents immigrated to Vienna where they owned a toy store in Vienna's 18th district (Today, this space is occupied by gourmet cheese store). Smart. sufficiently moneyed and with good local and US connections, the Kandels managed to escape from the worst of the Holocaust. While his parents and his brother suffered from the tragedy of the Second World War, it opened up a career for Eric Kandel, he probably would have been unable to follow in Vienna. Thanks to the support of New York's Jewish community, he received an excellent education and entry into elite universities. His understandable anger against Nazi Austria (and its tainted de-Nazification) results in a too positive retelling of Austrofascism (the regime that ruled Austria prior to the Nazi takeover). Just because the Austrofascists directed their anger against socialists (who often happened to be Jews) and not the members of the bourgeoisie (such as the Kandels) should not serve as an excuse to downplay its evilness. Apart from this small incomplete account of Austria's history, it is a tremendous read that highlights the joy of discovery and to seek large progress by examining the tiny and the simple things. show less