Age of Insight

Kandel focuses mainly on three artists: Klimpt, Schiele, and Kokoschka. Once photography is invented, artists began to move away from realistic depiction in search of a new niche. These artists increasingly started to look inward, at ways of expressing inner life of subject, and also themselves. Also begin to use symbolic elements.  Artists are no longer manual workers, they are instead creators. Picasso and Braque invent cubism, simplifying perspective and deconstructing objects to portray their essence rather than their appearance. They’re seeking figural primitives, the fundamental elements we see in landscapes, objects etc. Mondrian goes as far as non-figural primitives, shapes not even based on anything he’s seeing.

The Austrian modernists are seeking emotional primitives. They sought the elements that evoke strong conscious and unconscious emotional responses to scenes and people, especially hands, faces and bodies.

By making obvious their brushstrokes and painting thickly, they’re drawing attention to the process of creating art, showing art is an illusion.

The revolution in Vienna in the 1900’s: Artists, writers, physicians, scientists, and journalists mingled in cafes and salons in tightly knit circles. Freud champions the view that many of our actions are driven by unconscious drives. The modernist movement revolved around the idea that for art to be truly modern, it had to honestly express unconscious drives that truly rule us, not just surface perceptions. Truth, they thought, is not necessarily beautiful. Artists of this time often exaggerated and distorted the human form to convey states like anxiety, aggression, ecstasy, and sexuality. Drew from Charcot’s hysteria patients photos. They began to paint in flat space because art should not reproduce physical reality, it just can’t. It should strive for more symbolic representation, or just present itself as an object. Flatness demands more of a viewer. It increases our top-down responses by emphasizing the 2D nature of the canvas and the more abstract features of the painting. They also begin to employ exaggeration of “sign stimuli” to great effect. Brain responds more to exaggerated faces and bodies, like a bird that pecks even more at a huge red stripe than the red dot it has evolved to peck at.

Freud: Tries not to make moralistic judgments, and explore the human mind in all its variations. But psychoanalysis was not scientific, not amenable to experimental testing.

Gestalt psychologists: Gestalt is German for construction. Radically new concepts in visual perception: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Our ability to evaluate sensory information and assign it meaning is largely innate. Biggest takeaway from them is that what we see isn’t just to do with the properties of that object, but have to do with it’s interactions with other elements, as well as our past experiences.

Visual processing: begins in the retina, proceeds through lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, and continues through thirty-some visual areas of the cerebral cortex. The parts of an image we use to identify a particular face are processed by cones in the fovea, but emotional state we gather through rods in the periphery, which are sensitive to coarser more holistic elements. Center-surround organization means that the visual system responds to only those parts of an image where the intensity of light changes. The mind fills in contours to continue partial lines, Klimpt often used this principle by occluding parts of the body with large gilded ornamented patches. The brain has a great tolerance for “simplified physics.” We can still understand what is going on in an image even if it’s just a suggestive contour, or really distorted, totally inaccurate colors etc. Our visual processing is highly flexible. We can learn stuff about how the brain processes vision by studying which distortions still leave an image recognizable.

What pathway: receives most of its input from cones in foveas. Carries info about our perception and identification of people, objects, scenes, and colors. Goes from primary visual cortex through several additional relays before reaching inferior temporal cortex, the site of high level visual processing. Uses color and luminance to define objects and people.

Where pathway: goes from primary visual cortex to posterior parietal cortex. Gets most of its info from rods in the peripheral regions of the retina and is specialized for detecting motion and spatial info. Used for guiding movements, including eye movements.

Interesting: at 20 ft or more, the images presented to both eyes is about the same, so we can’t use binocular disparity cues beyond that distance.

Face recognition: In people with congenital prosopagnosia, face recognition areas work, but don’t communicate with rest of brain correctly. Inferior temporal cortex is important, posterior part is low level face processing. So if you damage this, can’t recognize face as a face. Anterior part is high level visual processing, so people with damage to this can see that it’s a face, and even tell what emotion it’s expressing etc but not who it belongs to.

Human faces, as well as hands and bodies are specific Gestalt percepts, we perceive them as a unified whole. Instead of trying to process that stuff from lines, the brain uses a template matching approach. It reconstructs the face from a more abstract, higher-order figural primitive. So perception of a face requires less deconstruction and then reconstruction than other images.

Interestingly, at 3 months, infants are just as good at recognizing different monkey faces as human faces.

Freiwald and Tao: pinpointed 6 regions in monkey’s inferior temporal lobe that responds only to faces, arranged in patches, from back to front, all connected into a unified network (stimulate one and they all become more active). They respond much more strongly to upright faces than upside down. Things like viewing angle and identity is processed progressively. Patches at the back of the head are not able to link different views of an individual together, but ones at the front can. Cells in the middle patches clearly prefer caricatures. Each patch specializes in a particular task of face recognition. Some specialize in recognizing a face from frontal, some in profile, some in how much a face differs from the average face.

Distortion: exaggerated line drawing is often easier to recognize than a real face, and actually activates visual system more than realistic depictions. This was used by the Austrian modernists. They intuitively capitalized on the visual system’s susceptibility to exaggerated facial features and exaggerated hand and body positions. By distorting the physical features of their subjects, the expressionist artists tried both to express and evoke unconscious emotions.

Color: uniquely important in primate brain, but it turns out we don’t really use color to distinguish forms, we use luminance, leaving artists like Van Gogh free to use unrealistic colors to express emotion. We perceive an object’s color 100ms before form or motion.

Perception of beauty: pictures ranked most beautiful activated orbitofrontal region most, motor cortex the least. Ugly pictures vice versa.

Bottom up vs top down: bottom up relies on build-in architecture in early stages of visual system, largely the same for all viewers of art. Top-down relies on mechanisms that assign categories and meaning, prior knowledge, top down processing is unique for every viewer.

Top down processing starts off with a hypothesis about what there is out there to see. We are looking for and paying attention to specific things, determined by our other sensory cues and our memories of past events. The key bottom up systems: dopaminergic, endorphin, noradrenergic, serotonin, cholinergic.

Klimpt: Sees lecture by Zuckerkandl and learns about structure of human gametes, and starts incorporating stylized symbols of them into his work, black rectangles for men, ovoid and floral symbols for women. These symbols are evident in The Kiss. He painted mostly women. His paintings are dreamlike and capture the fragmentary nature of the unconscious psyche.

Kokoschka: Follows Van Gogh in freeing color from its representational function, and uses it for pure expression. Used plain, dark backgrounds to bring out psychological and individual features of his subjects. Did some sexual adolescent portraits. In portraits with his fiancée, like The Wind’s Fiancee he is swept along helplessly in a turbulent sea. Places his subjects in a vaguely defined unstable space, producing a lurching, anxious quality. His portraits have a lot of bilateral asymmetry, indicating internal conflict. His women have large eyes and lips, but are also asymmetrical. This contrast is unsettling. Makes you feel the anxiety yourself.

Schiele: When he was 14, his father died of syphilis, which he got from sex. Could this have led to Schiele’s anxieties about sex? He was influenced by Klimpt early on, like his painting of Gerti, but went away from that style shortly. Did a lot of self-portraits, usually distorted, full of anxiety, often sexual. Did a lot of really sexual adolescent portraits. In sex paintings, the pleasure is overridden by anxiety, the eyes of the participants are empty. Believed that art cannot be immoral. “Since it has in view only the sincerity of observation, it cannot debase itself.”

Schnitzler: Austrian writer of the time, starts writing interior monologue into his work.

Rokitansky: Surface appearances are deceptive; we need to go below the surface. He was a physician who greatly influenced the Austrian scientists and artists of the time.

Creativity: Does creativity stem from conscious access to unconscious forces? People with damage to left hemisphere often have burst of creativity, but might be mostly in people who already have a propensity for it.

Expressionism: characterized by exaggerated imagery and unnatural, symbolic colors to heighten viewer’s subjective feeling. A lot of people didn’t like it at the time, thought it was ugly. We’re seeing a change in what people think art is for.

Emotion: our feelings only exist after brain has interpreted physiological state within current context, and created a construct to make sense of it. Insula evaluates and integrates emotional importance of stimuli, coordinates external sensory info with internal state.

Dopamine: activated by predicted and unexpected rewards. When you expect a reward and there isn’t one, dopamine fluctuates, in this way, it’s a teaching signal.

Amygdala: removing amygdala of monkey results in deficits in learned and instinctive fear. Can’t recognize positive or negative reinforcing stimuli like electrical shocks. Direct and indirect pathways to amygdala exist. Direct one goes from thalamus to amygdala, used to unconsciously link sensory data and aspects of an event together. Indirect pathway is slower and more flexible. Actually several pathways, goes from thalamus to amygdala, but through several relays first. Amygdala encodes valence of emotion and intensity.

Orbitofrontal cortex: area of the PFC that sits just above eye sockets. Also called ventromedial PFC. Involved in learning flexible contingencies.

Riegl: Art historian. Emphasized that the historical context in which the art emerged is necessarily to evaluate it. So art doesn’t get at universal truths, it is context dependent. He coined “external coherence” which is that the viewer’s participation is critical for completing the narrative and the picture, saw it in the Dutch artists of the 1600’s. Like “A banquet of officers” in which viewer is an equal participator, they had egalitarian values, unlike the hierarchical Italian painters of the time. So Dutch painters invite viewer into physical space of the painting, Viennese painters invited viewer into the emotional space of the painting.

Art: The deviations of art from reality can’t be arbitrary. It must capture innate brain mechanisms for emotional release. Must exploit a sign stimulus that is capable of releasing a full-blown behavior, and whose exaggeration produces an even stronger behavior. The Austrian modernists provided an exaggerated sign stimulus by taking the average of all faces, subtracting the average face, and amplifying the difference. “Art is best understood as a distillation of pure experience. It therefore provides an excellent and desirable complement to, and enrichment of, the science of mind.”

Consciousness: derives from synchronous activity in the cerebral cortex that is then broadcast globally to critical areas in the prefrontal and parietal cortices. Interestingly, unconscious processing might be more efficient for making complex decisions. In a study presenting participants with lots of variables to consider when choosing the right apartment, ones who thought of it unconsciously choose better.

Intelligence: Looks like there’s lots of different kinds of intelligence that can exist independently of each other, as we can see from savants. Maybe savants have special access to low-level less processed info. Leads them to think differently, work from parts to a whole. That’s why Stephen Wiltshire, for example, can draw whole cityscapes in great detail.

Quotes:

“The biological function of art is that of rehearsal, a training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected.”

“Most earlier nudes look out from the canvas at the viewer, seeking permission for a shared and quiet eroticism, as if they couldn’t be complete sexual beings without a male partner. Klimpt’s nudes on the other hand, are either oblivious to or unconcerned with the male gaze…This dynamic implies not only sexual self-sufficiency on the part of the subject, but also voyeurism on the part of the viewer. Thus, these drawings expose not only the subject’s inward sexual desires, but the viewer’s as well.”

“Nature is different from art: what is ugly in nature we may find beautiful in art.” Kant

Klimpt “combined in his paintings areas of three-dimensional figuration with large swaths of flat, gilded ornamentation, thus creating a stunning and pictorially jarring push-pull effect that further enhances the works’ radiant, sensual aura.

“Our ability to (tolerance of) representations that are less than 3D indicates that we do not experience the visual world as truly 3D.”

“Because we fully appreciate that a painting is a likeness and not a true reality, we unconsciously make but top-down (previously learned) and intuitive (unlearned) corrections in our perception of it.”

“Thus love appears to recruit a motivational system associated with acquiring a reward. It’s more like a drive state-like hunger, thirst, or drug craving-than an emotion.”

“Learning occurs when an actual outcome differs from the predicted outcome.”

Thought Questions:

What are some novel ideas or examples of how to reproduce the vibrant salons of Vienna in the early 1900's? How does the size or structure of a discussion group restrict or enhance what it can accomplish?

It was amazing to hear about the "revolution" in medicine around this time periods, where individuals began bringing the scientific method into medicine. It's easy to think of science and medicine as almost synonymous now that it is astounding how recent it was to make science part of medicine. Are there other professional domains that are not currently scientific, but would benefit from adopting scientific method and will likely be considered applied science in the future?

Did you agree with Kandel's analysis of the artwork? What principles seemed accurate to you, and which seemed like stretches?

How do you think artificial intelligence will transform art? The influence of the concept of the beholder's share removes a lot of the responsibility of art away from the intention of the artist. I could imagine that this principle could be taken to the extreme, with future art being mostly produced by AI. Perhaps the beholder (you and me) will become the focus of all art, and everyone has original artwork decorating their homes that was made just for them, or I could imagine the persona of the artist becoming vastly more important, even than it is now - at least until AI can create convincing personas for itself.