Splendors and Miseries of the Brain examines the elegant and
efficient machinery of the brain, showing that by studying music,
art, literature, and love, we can reach important conclusions about
how the brain functions.
* discusses creativity and the search for perfection in the
brain
* examines the power of the unfinished and why it has such a
powerful hold on the imagination
* discusses Platonic concepts in light of the brain
* shows that aesthetic theories are best understood in terms of
the brain
* discusses the inherited concept of unity-in-love using evidence
derived from the world literature of love
* addresses the role of the synthetic concept in the brain (the
synthesis of many experiences) in relation to art, using examples
taken from the work of Michelangelo, Cézanne, Balzac, Dante,
and others
Table des matières
List of Figures vii
Note to the Reader ix
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
PART I Abstraction and the Brain 7
1 Abstraction 9
2 The Brain and its Concepts 21
3 Inherited Brain Concepts 26
4 The Distributed Knowledge-Acquiring System of the Brain 35
5 The Acquired Synthetic Brain Concepts 42
6 The Synthetic Brain Concept and the Platonic Ideal 46
7 Creativity and the Source of Perfection in the Brain 50
PART II Brain Concepts and Ambiguity 59
8 Ambiguity in the Brain and in Art 61
9 Processing and Perceptual Sites in the Brain 65
10 From Unambiguous to Ambiguous Knowledge 73
11 Higher Levels of Ambiguity 87
PART III Unachievable Brain Concepts 99
Introduction 101
12 Michelangelo and the Non finito 102
13 Paul Cézanne and the Unfinished 111
14 Unfinished Art in Literature 120
PART IV Brain Concepts of Love 129
Conte by Arthur Rimbaud 131
15 The Brain’s Concepts of Love 132
16 The Neural Correlates of Love 137
17 Brain Concepts of Unity and Annihilation in Love 150
18 Sacred and Profane 158
19 The Metamorphosis of the Brain Concept of Love in Dante
170
20 Wagner and Tristan und Isolde 182
21 Thomas Mann and Death in Venice 193
22 A neurobiological analysis of Freud’s Civilization and its
Discontents 203
Notes 213
Index 227
A propos de l’auteur
Semir Zeki is a visual neurobiologist in the Department of Cognitive Neurology at University College London. Zeki has pioneered the study of the primate visual brain and furthered research on how affective states are generated by visual inputs. He has published extensively in his field, including the books Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999) and A Vision of the Brain (Blackwell Scientific, Oxford), and has also co-authored a book with the late French painter Balthus, entitled La Quête de l’essentiel (1995).
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