Afternoon, everybody. My is under control so long to chair this seminar.
One significant form of speak is so Zeki and yeah, that's very nice.
And I just wanted to explain a little bit first about how this will be structured.
We shall have a talk over approximately half an hour from Speaker.
We will have a brief question and answer session after the end of each talk, and in between the two talks will break for a little bit of refreshment.
I actually really do require the means of refreshments.
So on has been very clear that the refreshments must only be enjoyed when you come back to you see you have
quite a means of refreshment and then come back to your seats and then you will have to sit second talk.
So this is yet another of the very exciting set of smells that some apartment buildings have set
up of neuroscience and its impact on a whole range of disciplines in the arts and humanities.
We have two speakers who are, in my view, really trying not just to present their own view of things,
but actually to explore the boundaries and to see where there is actually a common understanding if such can be found.
Certainly there is an emeritus professor at the university called not emeritus yet.
You're not even. Oh, I'm sorry. We were too young here.
I'm sure someone is made in full on a website as well.
They may have made the mistake elsewhere. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and he's previously held the Henry Penn Fellowship of the Royal Society.
And that from that was succeeded through his chair in neurobiology at UCL, set aside multiple careers and strengths to his research.
His fundamental scientific work has always been groundbreaking.
The visual parts of the cerebral cortex comprises about something like 30% of human neocortex and about 50% in monkeys.
And I think before the efforts of 70 or and perhaps three or four other leading US researchers,
this cortex was essentially undifferentiated terra incognita.
And the anatomical work that certainly started was going on to identify more than 30 distinct areas within this large part of the brain.
Semir went on from that to advance the hypothesis that these different brain areas
might be primarily dedicated to analysing different aspects of the visual world,
most famously separate areas, for example, to analysing motion and colour,
and simply to leave that as a brain hypothesis simply grounded in brain anatomy.
He was actually an early adopter of human brain imaging techniques,
and then he used this to drive forward new lines of research linking perception to particular brain regions.
His work has been identified as setting the agenda for modern visual neuroscience,
and he may be able to identify that quote throughout his career, his life and interest outside the realm of neuroscience.
And this has culminated in his interest in neuroscience as well.
He holds a chair among German literature at the University of Göttingen.
He's currently handed the Gift and Centre for Digital Humanities and a member of the Good Again Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Complementing certainly is his expertise in science. Yeah, now his expertise is firmly crafted in the humanities.
He conducts research into the relationship between mental processes and the structure of literary texts,
seeking laws and regularities that may determine the cultural evolution of literature and literary meaning.
He is acutely aware of the social and political implications of his research,
having written on the about the Great Jewish Enlightenment and the immigration of German scholars to the USA.
In the period between the two books and recently modelling some methods of cognitive science in computer,
computer philology gained influence upon his work and recognising that even for the 19th century,
the entire body of literature is so vast as to escape the classical methods of scholarship he has.
That pose the question of whether automated digital processing to provide insights,
in part because it was only appropriate in the speciality of adopting empirical approaches to certain questions in literature,
including empirical cognitive measurements that were not the other place and in the results laboratory.
This we're very lucky to have two people who would have had established reputations in the main fields of expertise.
Nonetheless, creatively seeking to extend the boundaries of their own field by engaging debate,
discussion and empirical inquiry with those in other fields of research.
So I'm very much looking forward to this afternoon's presentation of improvements and its economy to this presentation.
Thank you very much, Andrew, for your very nice introduction, which I appreciate greatly.
I think I should begin, first of all, by saying what neuroscientists does not do, because I think there's a misunderstanding about your subjects.
Does your aesthetics, does not inquire into what art is or what beauty is.
This is not its domain, nor does it try to define art or beauty or look into the relationship between the two.
These are subjects who are well covered by the historians of art and those of us of aesthetics.
And they do not lend themselves easily to experimentation.
Instead, Neuroprosthetics inquires into questions like,
What are the neural mechanisms that are engaged when you have an aesthetic experience which is as legitimate
a scientific question as asking What are the neural mechanisms that are engaged when you experience colours?
This is especially good comparison because both them you say experiences and subjective experiences.
Now nevertheless, Neuroprosthetics owes a great deal to the humanities and to the historians fine philosophers of aesthetics,
because they have been debating the subject for for 2500 years.
And very often one finds in their writings a good summary of the kind of question that one could ask.
And among the most eminent of those was Clive Bell, English art critic, husband of Vanessa Bell,
who wrote a book called Art in 1914, published in 1914 and several times since,
in which he said, and I quote, he tried to develop a complete theory of visual art in the light of which the history of art becomes intelligible.
It gives meaning to words such as good or bad or indifferent on its basis that there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art,
because either all works of art have some common quality, or when we speak of works of art, we evoke.
Now, that's an important sentence, because either all works of art have some common quality, or when we speak of works of art, we do.
So you can transform that question in your biologically into saying,
do all aesthetic experiences derive from different sources such as music and visual art and modelled sources and mathematics?
They all have some. Is there a common mechanism that mediates the aesthetic emotion that's generated by these diverse sources?
Not just, of course, a two, two, two, two, two, two.
Clive Bell This was a resetting emotion was was highly subjective,
but nevertheless he was arts actor explicitly saying so he he sought for some objective
quality in objects and he came to his formulation of what he called significant form.
And what he means by significant form is certain combinations of forms and colours which arouse aesthetic emotion.
These thing defined precisely because he assumes that we all know.
He merely say that it need be agreed. Only that forms arranged according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way,
and that it is the function of the artist to circumvent the forms and colours that they should serve all of us.
That is his statement. In fact, he was not alone in this.
Some years his art was published in 1914, but Piet Mondrian in the 1930s wrote that I construct colour and I am sorry.
I construct lines and colour combinations in order to express general beauty.
Now, in the early part of his chapter on on significant form, he does not talk about lines, he talks about forms.
But later on he goes on to talk about lines.
Lines as the simple elements from which you can. All forms.
But what he really is very keen to emphasise is that the construction of these forms from lines,
combination of lines which the artist puts together in such a way as to arouse aesthetic emotions,
is independent of culture and learning that it has got it's something universal and eternal and is, in his words, common to all and peculiar to none.
Now, of course, he was writing long before the advent of neuroimaging and neurobiology.
But it's interesting in this universe and eternal and common to all and peculiar to them,
and that's another expression there, that that neurobiology, a neuroscientist,
does not underestimate the importance of culture and learning in aesthetic experience, but it supposes that all humans,
regardless of culture and learning and race, have got the same apparatus through which they can experience things aesthetically.
Although what different people experience ethically may depend upon culture and learning.
Hence what Clive Bell was very much emphatic about is that you must never go to an
art historian or a philosopher of aesthetics to understand the aesthetic emotion,
because he said, they know too much. In a new photo album, We Need the Barbarians, he said, quoting Andre Heath.
And so go to children, go to savages, go to ignorant people and show them things and see whether it allows the ascetic emotionalism,
which is not vastly different from a the opening passage of Proust's book Canto Centres,
in which he says, Chap, you just want to play the intelligence every day.
I attach less importance to intelligence because I know that. So he continues in French.
I know that this is all tied intelligence through through conscious memories that one can create things which are very important in art.
No. So Clive Bell then was emphasising line and colour and combinations of lines and colours to create all forms.
He supposed implicitly that there were universal laws, mysterious, important mysterious laws which were common to all humans,
and that you wanted to take out of the equation any reference to to culture and
learning for you want to have something that was old and peculiar to none.
Unfortunately, the neurophysiologist have taken up the seat not not explicitly.
I mean, I think what happens in our culture is that we we absorb certain ways of thinking without being able to say where it came from.
But lines became the sort of building blocks of form.
And Mondrian especially emphasised that Mondrian was the arch reductionist.
I don't know why it is that those who criticise us, the scientists for reductionism never attacked Mondrian because Mondrian said,
I want to know what are the essential constituents of all forms?
And it came down to vertical and horizontal lines, defining form as the plurality of straight lines in rectangular opposition.
I have not never heard anyone criticise Mondrian for being so reductionist in a subject like art,
but the neurophysiologist and the neurobiologist and your anatomists have somehow inherited this idea that the line is
the significant form as a combination of lines and colours that gives you configurations which arouse aesthetic emotion.
And the reason for this arises from the fact that if you are.
She? I need some time to think I can do it.
I think I think I hope that somebody you know from beginning a social assistance.
Okay. The reason for this lies in the simple fact of anatomy that the the retina of the eye,
the through the cortex to a part of the brain called the primary visual cortex.
And in the primary visual cortex, you find a cell.
So it's called the classical feedforward hierarchy, the feedforward hierarchy,
as if there is only one, which is something which I'm going to come to in a moment.
And the classical description by human reason of cells in the brain that respond to lines of particular orientation,
in fact, triggered a belief that maybe people like Rembrandt and others were right that you do build up formed from lines.
And by the way, by the way, Andrew can correct me if I'm wrong.
I cannot claim to have read every single paper on form published in your body.
But I read a significant number and I haven't seen a single person question this of a single person
that you build that the orientation plates of cells are the building blocks of form in the brain,
just as Mondriaan supposed, are you not? So what happened then is that several cells from the retina were electrocuted.
Nucleus, a flash light in the centre. They're excited, like it's rather inhibited.
If you bring several cell to converge onto a single cell, then you have a cell that will respond to a line for specific orientation.
And just to make things easier, I will skip the next slide because next one after that.
So then if you've got two or more orientation selective cells converging onto another cell, but with an excitatory inhibitory input.
So this cell with this orientation has gotten excitatory input onto this cell.
And these two have got inhibitory inputs resulting in what they're called the time hyper complex cells now called end stop cells.
So this was a very nice demonstration of the the refusing orientation,
selective the cells as the source for building more complex forms by various kinds of combination of excitation and inhibition.
Now, this is coupled to a belief which is which people often quote, We are so,
so, so responsible for the electrons in good cells to cells of the retina.
And if you combine them, you could excite these centres and the individuals.
You get a stimulus that is orientation selective.
And from these orientations get the cells can build angles and properties and even houses and faces.
I have not read a single paper on facing object discrimination of a single one,
which does not assume that the orientation this are not the building blocks of these.
And often when you talk to them about this, they say to you, well, yes, I mean, it's more than just the lives, of course.
I mean, as the gestalt people say, the the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Well, we could start. People did not say that. This is something else.
If you look at the German translation, they say that the whole is other than the sum of the parts, which gives the singer a different kind of mean.
So this is the. Is the.
That sort of apparently fits in well with Clive Bell's definition of significant form as being constructed from lines and colours.
And this is part mondrian's, one of his many, many illustrations.
You know that Mondrian absolutely abhorred sort of slanted lines.
He once wrote to Windows that say that given the high handed way in which you have treated the and started line,
all collaboration between us must cease.
So he thought because vertical and horizontal he said you find these everywhere and these are the constituents of all forms.
Now, to go back to this picture that the anatomy,
the anatomy dictated very much the way we think about the construction of form the primary visual cortex,
sort of as the sole recipient of signals from the retina.
Indeed was defined by Paul fixation.
It will steer professor of anatomy in life as the sole entry in place of the visible radiation to the organ of psyche.
But I think that there are lots of areas outside the primary visual cortex, which you alluded to, you know,
these areas V to be 3D through V for for colour, face and object recognition areas, VFR for motion.
And supposedly these areas of space and object recognition areas all see the input from the orientation step the cells of V1.
In fact, if you look more carefully at the anatomy.
Now, when I say we look more carefully at the anatomy, I mean, if one were to both look at Anatomy published in 1969 by Brian Craig,
you would find that the lateral record nucleus, which projects in primary visual cortex, also actually projects to other areas over time.
Okay. And coding are also project areas outside so that there is not a single feedforward system to the specialised visual areas which goes for V1.
There are three feedforward systems. V1 is one direct input from the LGM to them and direct input from the them to them.
And if you ask which one has got precedence in this distribution, let's look at temple precedence, for example.
You'll find that in terms of fast motion.
So this is the area which is responsible for motion and this is V1.
If you if you present subject was first motion as in some examples of Connecticut over 20 degrees per second.
The the progressive logjam peaks in V five before it peaks in v1 in the primary visual cortex.
So this is motion v five. This is primary visual cortex v1.
On the other hand, if you do slow motion,
it peaks in v1 in v1 here before and the fourth piece in VR so that there is a temple precedence that is dependent upon the speed of the stimulus.
In other words, the anatomy does not give you the full picture.
You've got to supplement that with the physiology,
which basically tells you that there are different functions that are channelled to these areas at different times.
It also is true that if you look at using magnitudes of demography,
which is which is a fancy technique for localising block size, not localising time looking time after you show stimulus.
So if you present people with oriented lines and angles built from these oriented lines, wrong verses,
you find that you get activity in all the specialised visual areas and in V1 at the same time,
at about 45 milliseconds is blessed with 25 to 40 milliseconds.
And this includes all the areas so that I would come back to two significant form so that there isn't V1 is not privileged as the source
of that building form because we know this area is V three and we too have got lots of cells which are also orientation selective,
although they've got their respond to a larger part of the visual field.
Similarly, if you look at faces in houses built from oriented lines, you find that if you present.
Subjects with the student.
Do you get activity in this area specialise for faces and houses as well as in view on within the same time frame of 25 to 45 minutes
millisecond so that there is no privilege route through v1 but there are multiple feedforward routes to V1 and to these specialised areas.
Now it would be hard to imagine that these indirect inputs to these areas would deal with form, view, shape are just therefore decoration.
They must be contributing in some significant way to the activities of these areas.
And hence the same is true of colour by the way.
So if you if you give people stimuli as they fixate here, this can change to grey,
can change to red, red can change to blue or grey can change to blue.
You again you find that the activity this time in V4 which is specialised for
colour again occurs below 50 milliseconds and probably before it occurs in V1.
If you have the combination of forms and colours which Clive Bell thought as the definition of a significant form,
then you can see that the significant form cannot be constructed in a serial way,
as he implicitly supposed and as physiologists explicitly have stated throughout the past 50 years and continue to do so today.
So if you look then at significant form again in a different light,
we are going to make the supposition based on this evidence, which, by the way, this evidence is not all that new.
I mean, this evidence is new,
but the anatomy has been therefore since 1969 and the supplemented by further papers in UK new are in Japan and France in London in the in 1980.
So we're going to change the definition of significant form as dependent upon lines and colours to something else.
We're going to say you got a significant configuration. So if you have got a configuration such as.
This this constitutes a significant configuration, right?
It is an assembly of lions which signifies a fence.
And we know that if you depart from this kind of configuration, then it will no longer be a face, although certainly be an abnormal faced.
Francis Bacon tainted on that. Francis Bacon said, I want to give a visual shock.
So what did he do? He put one eye here and the other eye here, he he mutilated bodies.
He basically he subverted the brain's significant configuration of what faces should be like.
All right. But incidentally, he did not ever subvert the brain's representation of forms outside biological forms.
So I want to go now back then to to to this diagram and say that that that upper part, a single hierarchical model through V1,
everything is channelled through V1 and V1 generates the orientation is left to cells.
The lines that Clive Bell spoke about and these are combined to give you a complex form that is not true or it is very put differently.
It is only partly true and therefore not true.
The second one is my model, which would share losses for many years, and that is only partly true and therefore not true.
This is my current model, which is true.
So what you have is you have got three feedforward inputs to the individual brain, the primary visual cortex or the specialised areas outside it.
All of these areas V three before and V three and so on are involved in form.
And I have not put here the areas of the brain which are important for object recognition,
latter occipital complex and face recognition, the occipital occipital face area.
The fusiform face area and the objects.
And then objects and faces.
That's right. So all of these receive a direct input.
And I think what determines the activity in these areas is not the building of significant forms from orientations,
connected cells, but a an input that obeys the significant configuration which these areas demand.
So if you take a form, a face, which is much, much less distorted than anything you would find in Francis Bacon,
by the way, first again said, My purpose is to give people a visual shock.
He said that if you take if you take a face which is much less distorted than that, you would have what you would find in France because the painting,
you would get an electrical signal in the brain, which is significantly different from the signal.
You get to a normal face. And the same is true of of body does no form.
That is one of the problems for neurobiology. I suspect it's also a problem for art history and art is form is can be.
There isn't a single form of ever formed from colour.
You can have form from motor, you can have form from depth.
And there are instances in which people, for example,
can become knows it because they cannot recognise a form in static mechanically recognised performance is in motion.
So there are multiple forms. And what I would like to suggest is that we should while paying tribute to Clive Bell,
because I think the significant form was really a very, very important step in talking about these things.
While acknowledging the importance of that, we should change the concept of significant form to a significant configuration.
And then what do we get? We get that the artist must combine features of his creation in such a way as to give a significant configuration
that would specifically light up the areas of the brain which are important for face perception that which,
by the way, you have the face in perceptual because to make music there are there is always another mis reading of the literature,
which is that the area before is strongly implicated in colour.
You also get cells which are orientation selected cells.
We have got much broader acceptance angle, but these are one way or the other.
Also interesting because they have colour, they're kind of cells linked to form the forms of mental cover which are quite separate from other cells,
such as what you get in the sphere which are indifferent to current.
So once you translate from significant form to significant configurations,
you begin to adjust your theory more to the kind of result that neurophysiology in your body has shown up in the past few years.
So let me summarise what I'm saying. The notion that there is a single feedforward system in the brain through the primary visual cortex is wrong.
There are at least three, possibly more, but certainly three which are very well established atomically and very well established physiologically.
Secondly, that there are multiple areas in the brain in which there are orientation state of cells and
each one of these receives parallel inputs by the electronic nucleus via V1 and via a dinner,
and each one probably contributes to the construction of significant configurations in different ways.
So that I think is the way in which I would modify the views of Clive Bell.
But there's one thing about Clive Bell which which remains extremely important.
Clive Bell said all works of art must have something in common.
Otherwise when we talk about works for we merely Jibo is his words.
So do they have something in common? And the answer is I think, Oh no, I don't have it.
You Oh, there is me.
See if I've got I'm sorry about. Oh, there it is.
That puts the wrong place. Could you.
Could you stand? I'll just write down what he did with.
So there is a common region in the brain?
Yes, it's a common region of the brain, which is always active when people experience beauty.
In this case, when experience visual beauty. Now, how have these experiments done?
These experiments are done before and where people are asked to rate visual stimuli according to how beautiful they are on a scale of 1 to 10.
Then they come back to the scanner and rewrite them. And the experience of visual beauty correlates with activity of the musical beauty also there.
And so does mathematical beauty. And moral beauty were more of a beauty, I mean, to say.
And don't forget that the Greeks had a single word Kannon to signify both moral and physical beauty.
Right. And the moral beauty, I mean,
if you look at statements such as he gave up his take for a hungry child or he ate it himself and deprived a hungry child,
that's a sort of a moral statement anywhere. So Clive Bell asks, is there anything common to all things which are rather than aesthetic emotion?
He could not define that, nor has anybody else.
But we can do so knew about,
but only in terms of brain and say that there is one common area of the brain activity in which always correlates with the aesthetic emotions.
Thank you. So thank you and thank you for inviting me and for the honour to speak after seeing our city.
And it's not only a commonplace to say thank you for that,
for everybody working or coming from the field of literary studies and looking into all these experimental areas,
we feel a little bit unsafe and we're looking to pioneers to help us to stay somehow stable.
And what I try to explain, though, is even if I look sometimes sceptical on this, I think I'm very grateful,
especially to the work of Sabyasachi, that he paved the way to think beyond what is normally done in literary studies.
So this is my first remark. So let me start again, of course with Cliff Balance and you all are now familiar with his thinking about significant form.
My point here is, and I take this quote, which shows what is at the heart of his essay.
I think he stresses especially that experiencing art is not something which brings us to the life.
No, its ever leads us to. Well, something which is having soul, something which is beyond the normal way we are living.
All is irrelevant. What is stick to the ordinary life and art is something which brings us completely out of it.
He uses word of aesthetic exhortations and other words for a moment we are shut off from human interest.
Our anticipations and memories are rested. We are lifted above the stream of life.
Well, this is a strong statement, and I think we have to look at this a little bit more carefully because I am sceptical
whether a cliff balance belongs to an specific new romantic understanding of the art,
which has a very strong term or understanding of the arts.
So I thought what could be a work of art, which is a significant form.
And he's he is my concrete suggestion. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
So if you are a musicologist, you know these details that just briefly go through this.
When Beethoven writes this symphony, it was a complete new way to write music.
And why is that? Now, if you have normally music, you have a thematic structure and you have what is called in terms is so not in such form,
so a specific way, how this thematic structure is performed.
What Beethoven has done, and especially in this first movement, is a very well known Dada Dada movement, is that he takes not a theme.
He's looking just for one motif and binary combinations of this motif.
He built a full symphony. So one very clear form everybody can understand from the first hearing of this music.
And then if you look on the transition, so it's here, his is a variation of this motif and this is the second motif.
And if you look closely to the way the violins feel on cello, he's using this motif again.
So he's building out of a single motif, a whole symphony.
And this is building a form which needs no reference to anything else, just to one motif, and you can build out of this art.
So this was very uncommon and you and people react to this new symphony style very heavily.
And some said, well, this might be not music or something else, but it was a huge success.
During one year this the school was sold out and people are interested and this is how they react to it and now look to it.
So I take here expert statements by Tom Berlioz and Richard Wagner and what they are talking about.
Their experience of this significant form is they have strong sentiments, disorderly sentiments, which affects their soul, but it's a kind of a story.
So if you look especially to Richard Wagner, it's you have strong feelings.
You have maybe some consolation at the beginning and then you step are you ever late, but you come to joy.
So it's in the end, they all tell a story, something if you hear this.
You see, you have the impression of the past, but ad astra.
So this is, in the end the basic story. And it became very common in 19th century and this bit orphan cart where this was used.
So you have a very abstract form, the Fifth Symphony, how it is composed.
But the understanding of the people is in a way of stories.
They talk a lot about sentiments. So they understand they have the meaning.
They do not feel purity. They feel strong sentiments.
So there seems to be a tension between the structure of the work and how the people react and talk about it.
So and this makes sense if we go into the history of music.
So you are familiar with that. And Professor Seki mentioned this also that most parts of music history is of course not pure instrumental, pure form.
It's in contrast, always connected with words.
So Orlando De La Salle, one of the famous composers in early modern times, uses that.
And if you look into other cultures, you often lack the term music because simply there's no single thing like music.
Music is always part of rituals, of social events, whatever, but it's not separate.
So it seems that there's nothing like pure form.
There's a lot of social things going on with a specific meaning, and the meaning is often hear the words.
And that's the same, of course, in the history of art.
If you look at this abstract, art is, of course, the smallest part you can think of.
So the last five or maybe 30 or 40,000 years, if you go back to cave art, you have a lot of faces.
People are interested a lot in the body and in the faces.
So these kinds of meaning plays a lot of a strong role in art history, and it's not the case that the pure form is of interest.
So I thought, where might Clive Bell and others take this fascination of a pure art?
And of course, this is my field and this is my first point.
It's a typical 19, around 1900s.
So many artists in Europe are fascinated by romanticism.
So 100 years ago, people like Van Roda for the first time put a musician in the centre of a novel.
This hasn't occurred before in the history of literature, and he has described exactly this experience of a significant form where somebody,
by hearing the music train that transcends transcendence or this experience normally in the world.
So he's like flying over the world is not caring about any specific thing anymore.
So human history and all the mean, it's all gone.
So I think Cliff Bell is a lot of a typical X permanent typical figure in this fascination of
the romanticism around 1900 and has a very strong and my respect a two strong notion of art.
So I would be sceptical to this and I will explain it a little bit more detail.
So if we switch from this to the findings of neuroscience and he is very brief of some of those findings and he already talked it,
so we have a clear correlation between works of art to elicit strong feelings and we have a preference
for representation of over abstract paintings and even mathematical formula and photographs work well,
it's not necessary. So Terence asks whether it's necessary to experience works.
No, it works well with photographs. Photographs of nature walking into the forest or something.
You have similar feelings. So there's also a lot of findings since I think he and others worked in this area about the underpinnings of that.
And again, the problem is there's no single unitary event in the brain, specialised in aesthetic experience.
So both hemispheres are involved and also within the structure of the hemispheres.
And one region, which is always mentioned is, of course, the.
The prefrontal cortex seems to be of great importance.
Which makes perfect sense because the prefrontal cortex is that evolved during brain evolution, as is the latest part of our brain.
So this might be find a lot of interest. So and even if you just look at pictures and if I and others we find mostly
activations in this prefrontal cortex areas to understand this and especially is key.
And as I always find literature briefly mentioned here is looking for the media orbitofrontal cortex and especially specifically to this area.
A one you mentioned at the end of his talk might be an area which is always involved when we catch or evaluate or experience work of art,
but not only art, it seems to be wider. So the what he also mentioned is that this area is also part of the reward circuits.
So if we experience art, it seems to be that this reward circuits is important,
that we have the impression, well, this is a pleasure for and perception of an artwork.
And the problem is this activation of this orbitofrontal cortex in the aesthetic
related studies is not evidence for pleasure obtained from aesthetic reaction alone.
So there's not only one pleasure, and it's really hard to understand or to distinguish the pleasure from other forms of pleasure,
as you mentioned already, erotic pleasures. This might be to be distinguished, but it's difficult to think about you.
What a portrait. What is exactly your aesthetic experience?
You watch your face. So this elicits specific areas to understand faces.
If this faces smiles like the Mona Lisa.
This elicits other parts.
So it's difficult to find the specific aesthetic judgement for this simply because there are so many areas involved to understand it.
So in the paper and if you read thinking careful against many who criticise him,
he's very careful and said in the end in the scanner he deals only with the works that is checked by people as beautiful and that's it.
So maybe we are not talking about aesthetic.
Well, one of the most interesting of his hypothesis is especially his thesis about the area, a one, and he called it also a tentative hypothesis.
Is this very important? If you're in the natural science of working in an experimental way, you're working with hypothesis and they could be wrong.
You can criticise them and get better finding. Well, this is such a so is a one as specific for aesthetic experience.
That is when a one is involved. We experience beauty something.
Is that a clear correlation? Well, even if that is a tentative hypothesis, we can think about it.
My second point would be here. Well, there must be more in it, which is not a counter argument.
But just briefly, why it is so complicated to find the real point here could be that one area be so specifically for aesthetic experience.
So think about like watching a mellotron.
But even a conductor reading a score, a conductor can have strong feelings, chills, good scans, whatever, just by reading a score.
This is possible. So there must be more in it, like real emotions and not as static emotions.
Just emotions. This meaning of to understand works of art.
And this was my first example, what people like Richard Wagner and Dr. Elias are doing with healing music.
They try to make sense out of it and how they do it.
They explain it in terms they show how people interact with the world like we sometimes feel sad.
Then we come to joy and we overcome obstacles and things like that.
This is a very common way to understand things.
So philosophers like Sean Gallagher from Phenomenology often points to that, that in neuroscience,
people underestimate this part of this sense of agencies of ownership and what is broadly.
Social cognition as part of understanding work of art.
And then there's a very weird thing. If we experience art, we are normally limited to this moment.
So you go to the theatre, you go to rehearsal and hear music, watch a mellotron or whatever,
and then you feel maybe sad, but afterwards you go out and have a beer.
That's not a problem. In real life, this is often hard.
If you feel sad, then there's a reason and it's not so easy to overcome.
So how can we switch easily between these states and with the trigger in the brain?
Why we are able to feel really sadness or other feelings and then turn it down and be another person somehow.
But. What we try to do is just briefly to give you a sense and that there's more in it.
If we experience in our cases, of course,
reading literature or hearing qualitative stimuli as we are looking to their peripheral physiological parameters.
And there's a variety of them.
So the dilation of pupil going up and down, you can't control it by your conscious, but also the skin contact tenses.
This is changing during reading and the activities of specific muscles here and the face and the blood flow of course, and the respiration rate.
So if you change your respiration during reading carefully and it's just one, we're refined.
So you have a story which is more suspenseful, you know,
and every piece is the counter examples that exist in Madame Flaubert, in German literature, which is not.
And we asked experts to read this. This is the green line with more something going on, more suspenseful, and and this is more how the pupil dilates.
And the interesting thing is that it's normally going together like here,
but even in a novel where it seems to be boring or not so suspenseful, even here, we're exposed.
Well, there must be something here, and this exactly happens.
So our self-understanding, even our consciousness understanding and our reaction of the body fits together.
That's a typical thing, why the body is involved.
So my second point would be after the a little critique on the idealism behind Cliff Bell is that embodiment should be taken into account.
And my third one is what is in philosophy called the qualia discussion.
So John Searle and others are dealing a lot about this.
So if you look at this simplistic painting of young, not only talking to Schumann,
so if you hear Schumann means your lost of the world is this seems to be exactly what Cliff Bells think.
Then I want to understand, is there really something which distinguish aesthetic experience from other experience?
Well, the findings it's not clear at that point. And there is some findings, especially with literature.
But I came to this later on.
But the interesting thing is that clear to distinguish and I would say, no, it's not clear to distinguish.
We need to understand and this is really maybe one reason why it's so difficult.
That is my experience. I'm reading or I'm hearing to this music and I know that I am the person who experience this and especially in phenomenology.
So Gunter Harvey, the Danish philosopher, thinks about it, needs the self, the person who is involved.
But how can we measure this person who experienced something like that?
There's no at the moment, no, as far as I know, no experimental setting to test this.
But I think this is also part of our experience.
So there could be an evolutionary reason. So just one brief point here by David Newton.
And he tried to claim, but of course,
empirical evidence is hard to get the evolutionary things that we learned from
the overlap of domains during the evolution that we are looking on ourselves,
why we are doing something like experiencing, doing work of art, whatever you call things like that, statues or whatever it is.
So this this domain seems to be before separate and by and by they overlap.
What is exactly meant by that is still unclear, though.
There's a lot of even neuroscientific work done on this problem of conscious and whether this makes some sort of a film, why we are doing something.
But where is it to find in the brain is difficult but just as an argument it and my first
point would be well I would love to have more neuroscientific studies on literature,
which is not the case due to especially experimental limits in this area.
So think about we know that we need different brain regions to understand a story makes perfect sense.
We have characters, we have goals in this story.
We have events. We have to track time and. So on. Of course, this is a lot going on at the same time.
Again, the medial prefrontal cortex is seems to be, as far as I know, the literature, a very important part of it.
And it changes. So in the long run, if you read a lot of literature, it changes somehow your personality trait,
especially by fiction, but not as a same level by non-fiction reading.
And it's not quite clear why fiction reading alters more the personality trait than fiction reading.
And in comparison and I show you briefly at the end here some findings of that, that real and fiction action seems to, if you compare it,
have some differences and how we handle why we read something which is unreal or fictional and something which is in the reality moot.
So to give you some just to brief examples.
So Michael Valentine, a writer and neuroscience scientist in Denmark,
he is the first I know who ran an experiment with the whole story on the ugly duckling he uses,
and he looks how the heart rate alters during hearing its auditory stimuli.
Julia During the whole story and before he gave again the ratings.
This is the blue line. You can see the dotted line here.
And they found a huge overlap between the understanding where expecting this is important,
there will be in faster heartbeats and then it's going down and this fits exactly to the findings.
Why do they do that? They look also into the brain, which parts are involved.
Of course, understanding words needs other areas of the brain.
Then visual cues and so word, understanding and narratives seems to be correlated.
Details we can discuss later on. And the second experiment I want to show you is this is five months or the Arto Jacobs
scope around and he wants to understand what's the difference between fact and fiction.
And it's clear that if we read texts in the under the condition that this text is about facts and reality,
then there is a faster response in decision to some of the behavioural level is different.
And there seems to be different parts involved in comparison to the fact conditions.
So there seems to be maybe not aesthetics,
but if we understand this text is not really dealing with what I have to do in the next moments or how I have to react,
then we treated this text differently. This is not tactics, but the difference between fact and fiction.
And of course, they try to find the differences in the brain regions again.
So the warm colours here, the red ones,
is looking for where the real condition people read and uses these areas more than the
blue here is for those where they think this story is just a made up and it's not real.
So there are differences, but still it's difficult to interpret this.
And if we looking into the fantasy scale, so we have commonly used questionnaires where we try to test people, how they are transported by stories.
They just test the fantasy scale test. And we look into the parts of the prefrontal cortex here on the y axis.
Then we see that people who are more transported use this more these areas.
So again, maybe we are not talking about aesthetics.
Maybe we are talking about how people could be involved in stories, in artworks.
But it could be not only artworks, it could be many more things and the things getting more and more complicated because we know,
especially in literary study, that we are not only having literature, we have a bunch of stories from our first glimpse.
So the mother and child, eye and body dialogues shown by Angel, myself and others, three of the newborn babies have they have some sort of story.
And what came up here is life stories.
So we build up our stories by using our experience, putting them into narratives and building up these narratives.
Were more elaborate TV versions up and up.
And they're coming. Of course, kids books and other things into it.
And maybe literature is only on the top of it.
And maybe we are looking for a ghost if we are looking for aesthetics, because it's so much rooted into our life history,
into our experience and into action that I suggest maybe we should call it more a social cognition approach to the arts.
This is my simple suggestion here and here.
Some question which is going in the steps of Professor Psyche.
Of course, I would love to know more about literature into new aesthetic in especially of this area.
A one is of importance. I would love to compare life stories with literature.
Maybe these differences aren't so big as normal is expected from a to high end notion of aesthetics.
I think we should integrate peripheral physiological measurements also because it shows how much we are involved.
By understanding literature,
maybe we can look for the very rare examples of deficits and lesions to understand what is necessary to make sense of literature and other arts.
And I would also be very much interested to let people just think about anaesthetic experience, a strong aesthetic experience.
If the simple imagination changes something,
whether we can find something that makes a difference just by thinking about I experience a specific piece of music or artwork or whatever it is,
not watching it just and then looking into the brains.
Well, I will close with a significant form and you can check whether this is some form of aesthetic experience.
So Hemingway was asked whether he can talk, whether he can write a short story in six words.
Maybe some of you are familiar with that. And we think about because it's good for experimental use to have short stories,
six words to tell a story which moves us, which is important, especially of some of you, depending on your background.
So he is his solution for, say, two words.
Baby shoes for words. Never born.
Yeah. Okay. For me, it's a touching story.
Maybe not for all of us, but it's a story. So thank you.