1 00:00:09,360 --> 00:00:17,129 Afternoon, everybody. My is under control so long to chair this seminar. 2 00:00:17,130 --> 00:00:25,250 One significant form of speak is so Zeki and yeah, that's very nice. 3 00:00:26,520 --> 00:00:34,979 And I just wanted to explain a little bit first about how this will be structured. 4 00:00:34,980 --> 00:00:39,540 We shall have a talk over approximately half an hour from Speaker. 5 00:00:40,620 --> 00:00:52,200 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. 6 00:00:52,970 --> 00:00:56,160 I actually really do require the means of refreshments. 7 00:00:56,850 --> 00:01:03,900 So on has been very clear that the refreshments must only be enjoyed when you come back to you see you have 8 00:01:03,960 --> 00:01:10,530 quite a means of refreshment and then come back to your seats and then you will have to sit second talk. 9 00:01:11,730 --> 00:01:19,680 So this is yet another of the very exciting set of smells that some apartment buildings have set 10 00:01:19,680 --> 00:01:28,890 up of neuroscience and its impact on a whole range of disciplines in the arts and humanities. 11 00:01:30,810 --> 00:01:39,270 We have two speakers who are, in my view, really trying not just to present their own view of things, 12 00:01:39,270 --> 00:01:49,980 but actually to explore the boundaries and to see where there is actually a common understanding if such can be found. 13 00:01:51,660 --> 00:01:56,520 Certainly there is an emeritus professor at the university called not emeritus yet. 14 00:01:56,670 --> 00:02:03,450 You're not even. Oh, I'm sorry. We were too young here. 15 00:02:06,630 --> 00:02:12,120 I'm sure someone is made in full on a website as well. 16 00:02:12,120 --> 00:02:22,170 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. 17 00:02:22,500 --> 00:02:32,250 And that from that was succeeded through his chair in neurobiology at UCL, set aside multiple careers and strengths to his research. 18 00:02:32,670 --> 00:02:36,240 His fundamental scientific work has always been groundbreaking. 19 00:02:37,770 --> 00:02:46,140 The visual parts of the cerebral cortex comprises about something like 30% of human neocortex and about 50% in monkeys. 20 00:02:46,710 --> 00:02:51,750 And I think before the efforts of 70 or and perhaps three or four other leading US researchers, 21 00:02:52,110 --> 00:02:57,060 this cortex was essentially undifferentiated terra incognita. 22 00:02:58,140 --> 00:03:07,200 And the anatomical work that certainly started was going on to identify more than 30 distinct areas within this large part of the brain. 23 00:03:08,340 --> 00:03:13,050 Semir went on from that to advance the hypothesis that these different brain areas 24 00:03:13,380 --> 00:03:18,780 might be primarily dedicated to analysing different aspects of the visual world, 25 00:03:19,320 --> 00:03:24,480 most famously separate areas, for example, to analysing motion and colour, 26 00:03:25,800 --> 00:03:31,230 and simply to leave that as a brain hypothesis simply grounded in brain anatomy. 27 00:03:31,530 --> 00:03:34,920 He was actually an early adopter of human brain imaging techniques, 28 00:03:35,310 --> 00:03:41,040 and then he used this to drive forward new lines of research linking perception to particular brain regions. 29 00:03:42,210 --> 00:03:46,950 His work has been identified as setting the agenda for modern visual neuroscience, 30 00:03:47,670 --> 00:03:56,280 and he may be able to identify that quote throughout his career, his life and interest outside the realm of neuroscience. 31 00:03:56,640 --> 00:04:04,110 And this has culminated in his interest in neuroscience as well. 32 00:04:04,860 --> 00:04:08,430 He holds a chair among German literature at the University of Göttingen. 33 00:04:09,190 --> 00:04:15,930 He's currently handed the Gift and Centre for Digital Humanities and a member of the Good Again Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 34 00:04:17,130 --> 00:04:23,820 Complementing certainly is his expertise in science. Yeah, now his expertise is firmly crafted in the humanities. 35 00:04:24,360 --> 00:04:30,600 He conducts research into the relationship between mental processes and the structure of literary texts, 36 00:04:31,020 --> 00:04:37,260 seeking laws and regularities that may determine the cultural evolution of literature and literary meaning. 37 00:04:38,030 --> 00:04:42,060 He is acutely aware of the social and political implications of his research, 38 00:04:42,450 --> 00:04:48,600 having written on the about the Great Jewish Enlightenment and the immigration of German scholars to the USA. 39 00:04:48,900 --> 00:04:54,950 In the period between the two books and recently modelling some methods of cognitive science in computer, 40 00:04:55,060 --> 00:05:01,200 computer philology gained influence upon his work and recognising that even for the 19th century, 41 00:05:01,590 --> 00:05:08,340 the entire body of literature is so vast as to escape the classical methods of scholarship he has. 42 00:05:09,250 --> 00:05:13,900 That pose the question of whether automated digital processing to provide insights, 43 00:05:14,150 --> 00:05:22,690 in part because it was only appropriate in the speciality of adopting empirical approaches to certain questions in literature, 44 00:05:23,110 --> 00:05:28,570 including empirical cognitive measurements that were not the other place and in the results laboratory. 45 00:05:29,170 --> 00:05:34,810 This we're very lucky to have two people who would have had established reputations in the main fields of expertise. 46 00:05:35,270 --> 00:05:41,049 Nonetheless, creatively seeking to extend the boundaries of their own field by engaging debate, 47 00:05:41,050 --> 00:05:45,070 discussion and empirical inquiry with those in other fields of research. 48 00:05:45,370 --> 00:05:53,080 So I'm very much looking forward to this afternoon's presentation of improvements and its economy to this presentation. 49 00:05:53,740 --> 00:05:57,310 Thank you very much, Andrew, for your very nice introduction, which I appreciate greatly. 50 00:05:57,880 --> 00:06:04,450 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. 51 00:06:04,690 --> 00:06:10,240 Does your aesthetics, does not inquire into what art is or what beauty is. 52 00:06:10,630 --> 00:06:18,250 This is not its domain, nor does it try to define art or beauty or look into the relationship between the two. 53 00:06:18,760 --> 00:06:24,130 These are subjects who are well covered by the historians of art and those of us of aesthetics. 54 00:06:24,520 --> 00:06:28,390 And they do not lend themselves easily to experimentation. 55 00:06:28,930 --> 00:06:34,090 Instead, Neuroprosthetics inquires into questions like, 56 00:06:34,900 --> 00:06:42,549 What are the neural mechanisms that are engaged when you have an aesthetic experience which is as legitimate 57 00:06:42,550 --> 00:06:49,600 a scientific question as asking What are the neural mechanisms that are engaged when you experience colours? 58 00:06:50,110 --> 00:06:56,020 This is especially good comparison because both them you say experiences and subjective experiences. 59 00:06:56,490 --> 00:07:05,620 Now nevertheless, Neuroprosthetics owes a great deal to the humanities and to the historians fine philosophers of aesthetics, 60 00:07:06,040 --> 00:07:10,390 because they have been debating the subject for for 2500 years. 61 00:07:10,720 --> 00:07:17,620 And very often one finds in their writings a good summary of the kind of question that one could ask. 62 00:07:17,620 --> 00:07:23,770 And among the most eminent of those was Clive Bell, English art critic, husband of Vanessa Bell, 63 00:07:24,070 --> 00:07:29,020 who wrote a book called Art in 1914, published in 1914 and several times since, 64 00:07:29,500 --> 00:07:38,530 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. 65 00:07:38,650 --> 00:07:48,430 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, 66 00:07:48,850 --> 00:07:55,870 because either all works of art have some common quality, or when we speak of works of art, we evoke. 67 00:07:55,930 --> 00:08:05,370 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. 68 00:08:05,950 --> 00:08:09,850 So you can transform that question in your biologically into saying, 69 00:08:10,600 --> 00:08:25,030 do all aesthetic experiences derive from different sources such as music and visual art and modelled sources and mathematics? 70 00:08:25,420 --> 00:08:35,140 They all have some. Is there a common mechanism that mediates the aesthetic emotion that's generated by these diverse sources? 71 00:08:36,130 --> 00:08:39,280 Not just, of course, a two, two, two, two, two, two. 72 00:08:39,400 --> 00:08:45,400 Clive Bell This was a resetting emotion was was highly subjective, 73 00:08:45,400 --> 00:08:53,889 but nevertheless he was arts actor explicitly saying so he he sought for some objective 74 00:08:53,890 --> 00:08:59,650 quality in objects and he came to his formulation of what he called significant form. 75 00:09:00,430 --> 00:09:07,720 And what he means by significant form is certain combinations of forms and colours which arouse aesthetic emotion. 76 00:09:10,150 --> 00:09:13,240 These thing defined precisely because he assumes that we all know. 77 00:09:13,840 --> 00:09:23,860 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, 78 00:09:24,250 --> 00:09:28,990 and that it is the function of the artist to circumvent the forms and colours that they should serve all of us. 79 00:09:29,470 --> 00:09:33,130 That is his statement. In fact, he was not alone in this. 80 00:09:33,550 --> 00:09:44,590 Some years his art was published in 1914, but Piet Mondrian in the 1930s wrote that I construct colour and I am sorry. 81 00:09:44,830 --> 00:09:49,720 I construct lines and colour combinations in order to express general beauty. 82 00:09:50,950 --> 00:10:00,670 Now, in the early part of his chapter on on significant form, he does not talk about lines, he talks about forms. 83 00:10:00,970 --> 00:10:04,900 But later on he goes on to talk about lines. 84 00:10:05,170 --> 00:10:09,230 Lines as the simple elements from which you can. All forms. 85 00:10:11,330 --> 00:10:23,390 But what he really is very keen to emphasise is that the construction of these forms from lines, 86 00:10:23,720 --> 00:10:30,020 combination of lines which the artist puts together in such a way as to arouse aesthetic emotions, 87 00:10:30,320 --> 00:10:41,240 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. 88 00:10:41,480 --> 00:10:47,059 Now, of course, he was writing long before the advent of neuroimaging and neurobiology. 89 00:10:47,060 --> 00:10:52,370 But it's interesting in this universe and eternal and common to all and peculiar to them, 90 00:10:52,880 --> 00:10:56,750 and that's another expression there, that that neurobiology, a neuroscientist, 91 00:10:56,750 --> 00:11:08,030 does not underestimate the importance of culture and learning in aesthetic experience, but it supposes that all humans, 92 00:11:08,540 --> 00:11:18,680 regardless of culture and learning and race, have got the same apparatus through which they can experience things aesthetically. 93 00:11:19,010 --> 00:11:23,240 Although what different people experience ethically may depend upon culture and learning. 94 00:11:23,720 --> 00:11:35,390 Hence what Clive Bell was very much emphatic about is that you must never go to an 95 00:11:35,390 --> 00:11:39,980 art historian or a philosopher of aesthetics to understand the aesthetic emotion, 96 00:11:39,980 --> 00:11:47,360 because he said, they know too much. In a new photo album, We Need the Barbarians, he said, quoting Andre Heath. 97 00:11:47,900 --> 00:11:57,440 And so go to children, go to savages, go to ignorant people and show them things and see whether it allows the ascetic emotionalism, 98 00:11:57,830 --> 00:12:07,820 which is not vastly different from a the opening passage of Proust's book Canto Centres, 99 00:12:08,360 --> 00:12:14,120 in which he says, Chap, you just want to play the intelligence every day. 100 00:12:14,120 --> 00:12:18,770 I attach less importance to intelligence because I know that. So he continues in French. 101 00:12:19,160 --> 00:12:30,590 I know that this is all tied intelligence through through conscious memories that one can create things which are very important in art. 102 00:12:31,860 --> 00:12:41,660 No. So Clive Bell then was emphasising line and colour and combinations of lines and colours to create all forms. 103 00:12:42,470 --> 00:12:50,870 He supposed implicitly that there were universal laws, mysterious, important mysterious laws which were common to all humans, 104 00:12:51,290 --> 00:12:57,979 and that you wanted to take out of the equation any reference to to culture and 105 00:12:57,980 --> 00:13:03,290 learning for you want to have something that was old and peculiar to none. 106 00:13:05,030 --> 00:13:15,349 Unfortunately, the neurophysiologist have taken up the seat not not explicitly. 107 00:13:15,350 --> 00:13:23,660 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. 108 00:13:24,260 --> 00:13:27,890 But lines became the sort of building blocks of form. 109 00:13:28,400 --> 00:13:33,229 And Mondrian especially emphasised that Mondrian was the arch reductionist. 110 00:13:33,230 --> 00:13:40,610 I don't know why it is that those who criticise us, the scientists for reductionism never attacked Mondrian because Mondrian said, 111 00:13:41,060 --> 00:13:44,780 I want to know what are the essential constituents of all forms? 112 00:13:44,780 --> 00:13:50,990 And it came down to vertical and horizontal lines, defining form as the plurality of straight lines in rectangular opposition. 113 00:13:51,350 --> 00:13:57,350 I have not never heard anyone criticise Mondrian for being so reductionist in a subject like art, 114 00:13:58,310 --> 00:14:09,680 but the neurophysiologist and the neurobiologist and your anatomists have somehow inherited this idea that the line is 115 00:14:09,680 --> 00:14:18,920 the significant form as a combination of lines and colours that gives you configurations which arouse aesthetic emotion. 116 00:14:19,310 --> 00:14:24,440 And the reason for this arises from the fact that if you are. 117 00:14:26,410 --> 00:14:35,410 She? I need some time to think I can do it. 118 00:14:35,410 --> 00:14:39,820 I think I think I hope that somebody you know from beginning a social assistance. 119 00:14:41,690 --> 00:14:49,420 Okay. The reason for this lies in the simple fact of anatomy that the the retina of the eye, 120 00:14:49,490 --> 00:14:54,270 the through the cortex to a part of the brain called the primary visual cortex. 121 00:14:54,710 --> 00:14:59,510 And in the primary visual cortex, you find a cell. 122 00:14:59,510 --> 00:15:04,700 So it's called the classical feedforward hierarchy, the feedforward hierarchy, 123 00:15:04,700 --> 00:15:08,030 as if there is only one, which is something which I'm going to come to in a moment. 124 00:15:09,050 --> 00:15:18,350 And the classical description by human reason of cells in the brain that respond to lines of particular orientation, 125 00:15:18,860 --> 00:15:26,870 in fact, triggered a belief that maybe people like Rembrandt and others were right that you do build up formed from lines. 126 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:32,050 And by the way, by the way, Andrew can correct me if I'm wrong. 127 00:15:33,080 --> 00:15:38,370 I cannot claim to have read every single paper on form published in your body. 128 00:15:38,450 --> 00:15:45,130 But I read a significant number and I haven't seen a single person question this of a single person 129 00:15:45,590 --> 00:15:53,120 that you build that the orientation plates of cells are the building blocks of form in the brain, 130 00:15:53,210 --> 00:16:01,010 just as Mondriaan supposed, are you not? So what happened then is that several cells from the retina were electrocuted. 131 00:16:01,010 --> 00:16:06,260 Nucleus, a flash light in the centre. They're excited, like it's rather inhibited. 132 00:16:06,590 --> 00:16:14,510 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. 133 00:16:14,990 --> 00:16:20,840 And just to make things easier, I will skip the next slide because next one after that. 134 00:16:21,110 --> 00:16:32,749 So then if you've got two or more orientation selective cells converging onto another cell, but with an excitatory inhibitory input. 135 00:16:32,750 --> 00:16:37,220 So this cell with this orientation has gotten excitatory input onto this cell. 136 00:16:37,520 --> 00:16:45,020 And these two have got inhibitory inputs resulting in what they're called the time hyper complex cells now called end stop cells. 137 00:16:45,230 --> 00:16:52,040 So this was a very nice demonstration of the the refusing orientation, 138 00:16:52,040 --> 00:17:01,790 selective the cells as the source for building more complex forms by various kinds of combination of excitation and inhibition. 139 00:17:02,570 --> 00:17:13,220 Now, this is coupled to a belief which is which people often quote, We are so, 140 00:17:13,360 --> 00:17:18,410 so, so responsible for the electrons in good cells to cells of the retina. 141 00:17:18,890 --> 00:17:24,860 And if you combine them, you could excite these centres and the individuals. 142 00:17:24,860 --> 00:17:28,820 You get a stimulus that is orientation selective. 143 00:17:29,120 --> 00:17:35,380 And from these orientations get the cells can build angles and properties and even houses and faces. 144 00:17:35,390 --> 00:17:39,350 I have not read a single paper on facing object discrimination of a single one, 145 00:17:39,830 --> 00:17:46,070 which does not assume that the orientation this are not the building blocks of these. 146 00:17:48,680 --> 00:17:56,930 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. 147 00:17:57,170 --> 00:18:03,140 I mean, as the gestalt people say, the the whole is more than the sum of the parts. 148 00:18:03,560 --> 00:18:06,680 Well, we could start. People did not say that. This is something else. 149 00:18:07,400 --> 00:18:15,650 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. 150 00:18:16,550 --> 00:18:18,980 So this is the. Is the. 151 00:18:21,970 --> 00:18:32,150 That sort of apparently fits in well with Clive Bell's definition of significant form as being constructed from lines and colours. 152 00:18:32,470 --> 00:18:37,930 And this is part mondrian's, one of his many, many illustrations. 153 00:18:38,260 --> 00:18:44,800 You know that Mondrian absolutely abhorred sort of slanted lines. 154 00:18:45,970 --> 00:18:54,460 He once wrote to Windows that say that given the high handed way in which you have treated the and started line, 155 00:18:54,910 --> 00:18:56,980 all collaboration between us must cease. 156 00:18:58,030 --> 00:19:04,780 So he thought because vertical and horizontal he said you find these everywhere and these are the constituents of all forms. 157 00:19:05,650 --> 00:19:11,140 Now, to go back to this picture that the anatomy, 158 00:19:11,260 --> 00:19:21,430 the anatomy dictated very much the way we think about the construction of form the primary visual cortex, 159 00:19:22,150 --> 00:19:25,960 sort of as the sole recipient of signals from the retina. 160 00:19:26,320 --> 00:19:28,510 Indeed was defined by Paul fixation. 161 00:19:28,930 --> 00:19:37,090 It will steer professor of anatomy in life as the sole entry in place of the visible radiation to the organ of psyche. 162 00:19:38,110 --> 00:19:48,440 But I think that there are lots of areas outside the primary visual cortex, which you alluded to, you know, 163 00:19:48,520 --> 00:19:55,480 these areas V to be 3D through V for for colour, face and object recognition areas, VFR for motion. 164 00:19:56,500 --> 00:20:05,530 And supposedly these areas of space and object recognition areas all see the input from the orientation step the cells of V1. 165 00:20:07,360 --> 00:20:12,430 In fact, if you look more carefully at the anatomy. 166 00:20:13,030 --> 00:20:20,500 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, 167 00:20:20,980 --> 00:20:30,610 you would find that the lateral record nucleus, which projects in primary visual cortex, also actually projects to other areas over time. 168 00:20:31,600 --> 00:20:44,050 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. 169 00:20:44,440 --> 00:20:53,530 There are three feedforward systems. V1 is one direct input from the LGM to them and direct input from the them to them. 170 00:20:54,400 --> 00:21:04,330 And if you ask which one has got precedence in this distribution, let's look at temple precedence, for example. 171 00:21:04,660 --> 00:21:07,720 You'll find that in terms of fast motion. 172 00:21:08,350 --> 00:21:13,300 So this is the area which is responsible for motion and this is V1. 173 00:21:13,750 --> 00:21:22,090 If you if you present subject was first motion as in some examples of Connecticut over 20 degrees per second. 174 00:21:22,540 --> 00:21:32,470 The the progressive logjam peaks in V five before it peaks in v1 in the primary visual cortex. 175 00:21:32,610 --> 00:21:36,640 So this is motion v five. This is primary visual cortex v1. 176 00:21:37,060 --> 00:21:39,220 On the other hand, if you do slow motion, 177 00:21:39,640 --> 00:21:52,360 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. 178 00:21:52,360 --> 00:21:55,870 In other words, the anatomy does not give you the full picture. 179 00:21:55,870 --> 00:21:58,360 You've got to supplement that with the physiology, 180 00:21:58,750 --> 00:22:05,410 which basically tells you that there are different functions that are channelled to these areas at different times. 181 00:22:06,400 --> 00:22:11,950 It also is true that if you look at using magnitudes of demography, 182 00:22:11,950 --> 00:22:23,920 which is which is a fancy technique for localising block size, not localising time looking time after you show stimulus. 183 00:22:24,460 --> 00:22:34,300 So if you present people with oriented lines and angles built from these oriented lines, wrong verses, 184 00:22:34,690 --> 00:22:41,860 you find that you get activity in all the specialised visual areas and in V1 at the same time, 185 00:22:42,220 --> 00:22:49,150 at about 45 milliseconds is blessed with 25 to 40 milliseconds. 186 00:22:49,480 --> 00:22:59,950 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 187 00:23:00,310 --> 00:23:09,850 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, 188 00:23:09,850 --> 00:23:13,870 although they've got their respond to a larger part of the visual field. 189 00:23:14,470 --> 00:23:21,010 Similarly, if you look at faces in houses built from oriented lines, you find that if you present. 190 00:23:21,520 --> 00:23:22,509 Subjects with the student. 191 00:23:22,510 --> 00:23:34,510 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 192 00:23:34,660 --> 00:23:44,860 millisecond so that there is no privilege route through v1 but there are multiple feedforward routes to V1 and to these specialised areas. 193 00:23:45,280 --> 00:23:54,730 Now it would be hard to imagine that these indirect inputs to these areas would deal with form, view, shape are just therefore decoration. 194 00:23:54,940 --> 00:24:01,300 They must be contributing in some significant way to the activities of these areas. 195 00:24:02,020 --> 00:24:05,320 And hence the same is true of colour by the way. 196 00:24:05,620 --> 00:24:13,960 So if you if you give people stimuli as they fixate here, this can change to grey, 197 00:24:14,560 --> 00:24:18,970 can change to red, red can change to blue or grey can change to blue. 198 00:24:19,390 --> 00:24:26,860 You again you find that the activity this time in V4 which is specialised for 199 00:24:26,870 --> 00:24:32,590 colour again occurs below 50 milliseconds and probably before it occurs in V1. 200 00:24:33,030 --> 00:24:41,260 If you have the combination of forms and colours which Clive Bell thought as the definition of a significant form, 201 00:24:41,650 --> 00:24:46,690 then you can see that the significant form cannot be constructed in a serial way, 202 00:24:47,230 --> 00:24:57,580 as he implicitly supposed and as physiologists explicitly have stated throughout the past 50 years and continue to do so today. 203 00:24:58,150 --> 00:25:02,830 So if you look then at significant form again in a different light, 204 00:25:03,430 --> 00:25:09,879 we are going to make the supposition based on this evidence, which, by the way, this evidence is not all that new. 205 00:25:09,880 --> 00:25:11,080 I mean, this evidence is new, 206 00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:26,520 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. 207 00:25:27,070 --> 00:25:39,280 So we're going to change the definition of significant form as dependent upon lines and colours to something else. 208 00:25:39,280 --> 00:25:46,090 We're going to say you got a significant configuration. So if you have got a configuration such as. 209 00:25:51,370 --> 00:25:55,210 This this constitutes a significant configuration, right? 210 00:25:55,540 --> 00:26:01,070 It is an assembly of lions which signifies a fence. 211 00:26:02,290 --> 00:26:12,040 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. 212 00:26:12,370 --> 00:26:18,220 Francis Bacon tainted on that. Francis Bacon said, I want to give a visual shock. 213 00:26:18,970 --> 00:26:25,270 So what did he do? He put one eye here and the other eye here, he he mutilated bodies. 214 00:26:25,270 --> 00:26:32,350 He basically he subverted the brain's significant configuration of what faces should be like. 215 00:26:32,730 --> 00:26:42,790 All right. But incidentally, he did not ever subvert the brain's representation of forms outside biological forms. 216 00:26:47,650 --> 00:27:00,660 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, 217 00:27:00,670 --> 00:27:06,550 everything is channelled through V1 and V1 generates the orientation is left to cells. 218 00:27:07,180 --> 00:27:16,550 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. 219 00:27:17,020 --> 00:27:20,470 It is only partly true and therefore not true. 220 00:27:21,400 --> 00:27:29,320 The second one is my model, which would share losses for many years, and that is only partly true and therefore not true. 221 00:27:29,860 --> 00:27:32,380 This is my current model, which is true. 222 00:27:34,090 --> 00:27:46,570 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. 223 00:27:48,070 --> 00:27:57,700 All of these areas V three before and V three and so on are involved in form. 224 00:27:57,700 --> 00:28:02,860 And I have not put here the areas of the brain which are important for object recognition, 225 00:28:03,340 --> 00:28:09,190 latter occipital complex and face recognition, the occipital occipital face area. 226 00:28:09,190 --> 00:28:13,980 The fusiform face area and the objects. 227 00:28:15,170 --> 00:28:18,200 And then objects and faces. 228 00:28:18,370 --> 00:28:21,709 That's right. So all of these receive a direct input. 229 00:28:21,710 --> 00:28:29,810 And I think what determines the activity in these areas is not the building of significant forms from orientations, 230 00:28:29,810 --> 00:28:39,620 connected cells, but a an input that obeys the significant configuration which these areas demand. 231 00:28:39,920 --> 00:28:49,580 So if you take a form, a face, which is much, much less distorted than anything you would find in Francis Bacon, 232 00:28:49,820 --> 00:28:54,200 by the way, first again said, My purpose is to give people a visual shock. 233 00:28:54,920 --> 00:29:06,950 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, 234 00:29:07,370 --> 00:29:12,469 you would get an electrical signal in the brain, which is significantly different from the signal. 235 00:29:12,470 --> 00:29:19,730 You get to a normal face. And the same is true of of body does no form. 236 00:29:19,950 --> 00:29:29,660 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. 237 00:29:30,950 --> 00:29:34,189 There isn't a single form of ever formed from colour. 238 00:29:34,190 --> 00:29:37,820 You can have form from motor, you can have form from depth. 239 00:29:39,380 --> 00:29:42,020 And there are instances in which people, for example, 240 00:29:42,380 --> 00:29:49,040 can become knows it because they cannot recognise a form in static mechanically recognised performance is in motion. 241 00:29:49,250 --> 00:29:57,430 So there are multiple forms. And what I would like to suggest is that we should while paying tribute to Clive Bell, 242 00:29:57,440 --> 00:30:05,570 because I think the significant form was really a very, very important step in talking about these things. 243 00:30:06,410 --> 00:30:14,360 While acknowledging the importance of that, we should change the concept of significant form to a significant configuration. 244 00:30:14,360 --> 00:30:26,929 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 245 00:30:26,930 --> 00:30:33,649 that would specifically light up the areas of the brain which are important for face perception that which, 246 00:30:33,650 --> 00:30:45,950 by the way, you have the face in perceptual because to make music there are there is always another mis reading of the literature, 247 00:30:45,950 --> 00:30:54,050 which is that the area before is strongly implicated in colour. 248 00:30:54,410 --> 00:30:57,709 You also get cells which are orientation selected cells. 249 00:30:57,710 --> 00:31:02,540 We have got much broader acceptance angle, but these are one way or the other. 250 00:31:02,540 --> 00:31:10,310 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, 251 00:31:10,550 --> 00:31:14,270 such as what you get in the sphere which are indifferent to current. 252 00:31:14,600 --> 00:31:20,900 So once you translate from significant form to significant configurations, 253 00:31:21,260 --> 00:31:33,860 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. 254 00:31:34,400 --> 00:31:43,280 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. 255 00:31:44,660 --> 00:31:52,550 There are at least three, possibly more, but certainly three which are very well established atomically and very well established physiologically. 256 00:31:53,210 --> 00:32:00,050 Secondly, that there are multiple areas in the brain in which there are orientation state of cells and 257 00:32:00,050 --> 00:32:08,090 each one of these receives parallel inputs by the electronic nucleus via V1 and via a dinner, 258 00:32:08,360 --> 00:32:14,570 and each one probably contributes to the construction of significant configurations in different ways. 259 00:32:15,410 --> 00:32:25,730 So that I think is the way in which I would modify the views of Clive Bell. 260 00:32:26,180 --> 00:32:29,630 But there's one thing about Clive Bell which which remains extremely important. 261 00:32:30,560 --> 00:32:37,220 Clive Bell said all works of art must have something in common. 262 00:32:37,820 --> 00:32:42,920 Otherwise when we talk about works for we merely Jibo is his words. 263 00:32:43,490 --> 00:32:49,910 So do they have something in common? And the answer is I think, Oh no, I don't have it. 264 00:32:49,910 --> 00:32:53,030 You Oh, there is me. 265 00:32:53,030 --> 00:32:56,420 See if I've got I'm sorry about. Oh, there it is. 266 00:32:58,700 --> 00:33:06,209 That puts the wrong place. Could you. 267 00:33:06,210 --> 00:33:11,550 Could you stand? I'll just write down what he did with. 268 00:33:16,270 --> 00:33:20,380 So there is a common region in the brain? 269 00:33:21,640 --> 00:33:27,790 Yes, it's a common region of the brain, which is always active when people experience beauty. 270 00:33:28,150 --> 00:33:31,030 In this case, when experience visual beauty. Now, how have these experiments done? 271 00:33:31,360 --> 00:33:38,680 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. 272 00:33:39,130 --> 00:33:47,410 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. 273 00:33:47,770 --> 00:33:52,600 And so does mathematical beauty. And moral beauty were more of a beauty, I mean, to say. 274 00:33:52,960 --> 00:33:58,360 And don't forget that the Greeks had a single word Kannon to signify both moral and physical beauty. 275 00:33:58,810 --> 00:34:03,670 Right. And the moral beauty, I mean, 276 00:34:03,670 --> 00:34:10,790 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, 277 00:34:10,870 --> 00:34:20,470 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? 278 00:34:21,610 --> 00:34:25,510 He could not define that, nor has anybody else. 279 00:34:25,720 --> 00:34:27,459 But we can do so knew about, 280 00:34:27,460 --> 00:34:35,860 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. 281 00:34:35,920 --> 00:34:48,850 Thank you. So thank you and thank you for inviting me and for the honour to speak after seeing our city. 282 00:34:49,420 --> 00:34:52,900 And it's not only a commonplace to say thank you for that, 283 00:34:53,800 --> 00:35:02,830 for everybody working or coming from the field of literary studies and looking into all these experimental areas, 284 00:35:03,160 --> 00:35:10,210 we feel a little bit unsafe and we're looking to pioneers to help us to stay somehow stable. 285 00:35:10,360 --> 00:35:18,969 And what I try to explain, though, is even if I look sometimes sceptical on this, I think I'm very grateful, 286 00:35:18,970 --> 00:35:26,860 especially to the work of Sabyasachi, that he paved the way to think beyond what is normally done in literary studies. 287 00:35:27,010 --> 00:35:37,720 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. 288 00:35:38,470 --> 00:35:47,020 My point here is, and I take this quote, which shows what is at the heart of his essay. 289 00:35:47,620 --> 00:35:57,009 I think he stresses especially that experiencing art is not something which brings us to the life. 290 00:35:57,010 --> 00:36:07,240 No, its ever leads us to. Well, something which is having soul, something which is beyond the normal way we are living. 291 00:36:07,810 --> 00:36:18,460 All is irrelevant. What is stick to the ordinary life and art is something which brings us completely out of it. 292 00:36:18,730 --> 00:36:27,040 He uses word of aesthetic exhortations and other words for a moment we are shut off from human interest. 293 00:36:27,340 --> 00:36:33,250 Our anticipations and memories are rested. We are lifted above the stream of life. 294 00:36:33,790 --> 00:36:42,279 Well, this is a strong statement, and I think we have to look at this a little bit more carefully because I am sceptical 295 00:36:42,280 --> 00:36:48,340 whether a cliff balance belongs to an specific new romantic understanding of the art, 296 00:36:48,610 --> 00:36:52,810 which has a very strong term or understanding of the arts. 297 00:36:53,110 --> 00:36:58,640 So I thought what could be a work of art, which is a significant form. 298 00:36:58,660 --> 00:37:03,880 And he's he is my concrete suggestion. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. 299 00:37:04,300 --> 00:37:09,100 So if you are a musicologist, you know these details that just briefly go through this. 300 00:37:09,730 --> 00:37:14,620 When Beethoven writes this symphony, it was a complete new way to write music. 301 00:37:15,220 --> 00:37:25,299 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, 302 00:37:25,300 --> 00:37:30,460 so a specific way, how this thematic structure is performed. 303 00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:41,200 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. 304 00:37:41,470 --> 00:37:47,560 He's looking just for one motif and binary combinations of this motif. 305 00:37:47,770 --> 00:38:00,160 He built a full symphony. So one very clear form everybody can understand from the first hearing of this music. 306 00:38:00,610 --> 00:38:09,520 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. 307 00:38:09,670 --> 00:38:17,530 And if you look closely to the way the violins feel on cello, he's using this motif again. 308 00:38:17,860 --> 00:38:24,700 So he's building out of a single motif, a whole symphony. 309 00:38:25,060 --> 00:38:34,300 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. 310 00:38:35,260 --> 00:38:42,910 So this was very uncommon and you and people react to this new symphony style very heavily. 311 00:38:43,450 --> 00:38:49,480 And some said, well, this might be not music or something else, but it was a huge success. 312 00:38:49,630 --> 00:38:59,830 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. 313 00:39:00,100 --> 00:39:07,870 So I take here expert statements by Tom Berlioz and Richard Wagner and what they are talking about. 314 00:39:08,140 --> 00:39:23,469 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. 315 00:39:23,470 --> 00:39:28,510 So if you look especially to Richard Wagner, it's you have strong feelings. 316 00:39:28,810 --> 00:39:37,450 You have maybe some consolation at the beginning and then you step are you ever late, but you come to joy. 317 00:39:37,460 --> 00:39:41,620 So it's in the end, they all tell a story, something if you hear this. 318 00:39:41,760 --> 00:39:46,740 You see, you have the impression of the past, but ad astra. 319 00:39:46,950 --> 00:39:56,820 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. 320 00:39:57,150 --> 00:40:02,640 So you have a very abstract form, the Fifth Symphony, how it is composed. 321 00:40:03,120 --> 00:40:07,380 But the understanding of the people is in a way of stories. 322 00:40:07,650 --> 00:40:12,660 They talk a lot about sentiments. So they understand they have the meaning. 323 00:40:12,840 --> 00:40:16,710 They do not feel purity. They feel strong sentiments. 324 00:40:17,220 --> 00:40:25,200 So there seems to be a tension between the structure of the work and how the people react and talk about it. 325 00:40:25,890 --> 00:40:30,420 So and this makes sense if we go into the history of music. 326 00:40:30,420 --> 00:40:41,940 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. 327 00:40:42,210 --> 00:40:46,230 It's in contrast, always connected with words. 328 00:40:46,500 --> 00:40:52,050 So Orlando De La Salle, one of the famous composers in early modern times, uses that. 329 00:40:52,290 --> 00:41:02,340 And if you look into other cultures, you often lack the term music because simply there's no single thing like music. 330 00:41:02,460 --> 00:41:09,150 Music is always part of rituals, of social events, whatever, but it's not separate. 331 00:41:09,480 --> 00:41:13,890 So it seems that there's nothing like pure form. 332 00:41:14,160 --> 00:41:20,880 There's a lot of social things going on with a specific meaning, and the meaning is often hear the words. 333 00:41:21,210 --> 00:41:25,740 And that's the same, of course, in the history of art. 334 00:41:26,010 --> 00:41:31,169 If you look at this abstract, art is, of course, the smallest part you can think of. 335 00:41:31,170 --> 00:41:40,820 So the last five or maybe 30 or 40,000 years, if you go back to cave art, you have a lot of faces. 336 00:41:40,830 --> 00:41:44,850 People are interested a lot in the body and in the faces. 337 00:41:45,090 --> 00:41:55,710 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. 338 00:41:56,130 --> 00:42:03,840 So I thought, where might Clive Bell and others take this fascination of a pure art? 339 00:42:04,350 --> 00:42:09,270 And of course, this is my field and this is my first point. 340 00:42:09,600 --> 00:42:13,650 It's a typical 19, around 1900s. 341 00:42:14,070 --> 00:42:19,020 So many artists in Europe are fascinated by romanticism. 342 00:42:19,030 --> 00:42:27,870 So 100 years ago, people like Van Roda for the first time put a musician in the centre of a novel. 343 00:42:27,930 --> 00:42:38,370 This hasn't occurred before in the history of literature, and he has described exactly this experience of a significant form where somebody, 344 00:42:38,370 --> 00:42:46,850 by hearing the music train that transcends transcendence or this experience normally in the world. 345 00:42:46,860 --> 00:42:53,600 So he's like flying over the world is not caring about any specific thing anymore. 346 00:42:53,610 --> 00:42:57,510 So human history and all the mean, it's all gone. 347 00:42:57,750 --> 00:43:08,700 So I think Cliff Bell is a lot of a typical X permanent typical figure in this fascination of 348 00:43:08,700 --> 00:43:17,160 the romanticism around 1900 and has a very strong and my respect a two strong notion of art. 349 00:43:17,520 --> 00:43:22,430 So I would be sceptical to this and I will explain it a little bit more detail. 350 00:43:22,890 --> 00:43:35,820 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, 351 00:43:36,090 --> 00:43:44,729 so we have a clear correlation between works of art to elicit strong feelings and we have a preference 352 00:43:44,730 --> 00:43:52,710 for representation of over abstract paintings and even mathematical formula and photographs work well, 353 00:43:52,920 --> 00:44:00,320 it's not necessary. So Terence asks whether it's necessary to experience works. 354 00:44:00,360 --> 00:44:07,620 No, it works well with photographs. Photographs of nature walking into the forest or something. 355 00:44:07,890 --> 00:44:20,430 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. 356 00:44:20,790 --> 00:44:29,580 And again, the problem is there's no single unitary event in the brain, specialised in aesthetic experience. 357 00:44:29,850 --> 00:44:36,300 So both hemispheres are involved and also within the structure of the hemispheres. 358 00:44:36,570 --> 00:44:41,640 And one region, which is always mentioned is, of course, the. 359 00:44:41,680 --> 00:44:45,470 The prefrontal cortex seems to be of great importance. 360 00:44:45,640 --> 00:44:55,510 Which makes perfect sense because the prefrontal cortex is that evolved during brain evolution, as is the latest part of our brain. 361 00:44:55,870 --> 00:45:07,269 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 362 00:45:07,270 --> 00:45:15,849 activations in this prefrontal cortex areas to understand this and especially is key. 363 00:45:15,850 --> 00:45:26,500 And as I always find literature briefly mentioned here is looking for the media orbitofrontal cortex and especially specifically to this area. 364 00:45:26,510 --> 00:45:37,150 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, 365 00:45:37,270 --> 00:45:51,070 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. 366 00:45:51,550 --> 00:45:57,879 So if we experience art, it seems to be that this reward circuits is important, 367 00:45:57,880 --> 00:46:05,680 that we have the impression, well, this is a pleasure for and perception of an artwork. 368 00:46:06,220 --> 00:46:14,200 And the problem is this activation of this orbitofrontal cortex in the aesthetic 369 00:46:14,200 --> 00:46:18,820 related studies is not evidence for pleasure obtained from aesthetic reaction alone. 370 00:46:19,390 --> 00:46:27,640 So there's not only one pleasure, and it's really hard to understand or to distinguish the pleasure from other forms of pleasure, 371 00:46:27,640 --> 00:46:36,420 as you mentioned already, erotic pleasures. This might be to be distinguished, but it's difficult to think about you. 372 00:46:36,430 --> 00:46:40,690 What a portrait. What is exactly your aesthetic experience? 373 00:46:40,990 --> 00:46:46,710 You watch your face. So this elicits specific areas to understand faces. 374 00:46:46,720 --> 00:46:49,780 If this faces smiles like the Mona Lisa. 375 00:46:50,080 --> 00:46:51,940 This elicits other parts. 376 00:46:52,210 --> 00:47:02,350 So it's difficult to find the specific aesthetic judgement for this simply because there are so many areas involved to understand it. 377 00:47:03,100 --> 00:47:11,440 So in the paper and if you read thinking careful against many who criticise him, 378 00:47:11,740 --> 00:47:21,280 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. 379 00:47:21,610 --> 00:47:24,670 So maybe we are not talking about aesthetic. 380 00:47:25,510 --> 00:47:36,930 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. 381 00:47:36,930 --> 00:47:44,470 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. 382 00:47:44,500 --> 00:47:55,690 You can criticise them and get better finding. Well, this is such a so is a one as specific for aesthetic experience. 383 00:47:56,110 --> 00:47:59,769 That is when a one is involved. We experience beauty something. 384 00:47:59,770 --> 00:48:06,820 Is that a clear correlation? Well, even if that is a tentative hypothesis, we can think about it. 385 00:48:06,850 --> 00:48:13,840 My second point would be here. Well, there must be more in it, which is not a counter argument. 386 00:48:14,350 --> 00:48:27,040 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. 387 00:48:27,040 --> 00:48:29,720 So think about like watching a mellotron. 388 00:48:29,980 --> 00:48:40,210 But even a conductor reading a score, a conductor can have strong feelings, chills, good scans, whatever, just by reading a score. 389 00:48:40,810 --> 00:48:49,480 This is possible. So there must be more in it, like real emotions and not as static emotions. 390 00:48:49,660 --> 00:48:57,240 Just emotions. This meaning of to understand works of art. 391 00:48:57,250 --> 00:49:04,210 And this was my first example, what people like Richard Wagner and Dr. Elias are doing with healing music. 392 00:49:04,570 --> 00:49:08,440 They try to make sense out of it and how they do it. 393 00:49:08,860 --> 00:49:16,989 They explain it in terms they show how people interact with the world like we sometimes feel sad. 394 00:49:16,990 --> 00:49:21,850 Then we come to joy and we overcome obstacles and things like that. 395 00:49:22,090 --> 00:49:25,120 This is a very common way to understand things. 396 00:49:25,450 --> 00:49:32,769 So philosophers like Sean Gallagher from Phenomenology often points to that, that in neuroscience, 397 00:49:32,770 --> 00:49:41,460 people underestimate this part of this sense of agencies of ownership and what is broadly. 398 00:49:42,000 --> 00:49:47,100 Social cognition as part of understanding work of art. 399 00:49:47,940 --> 00:49:54,509 And then there's a very weird thing. If we experience art, we are normally limited to this moment. 400 00:49:54,510 --> 00:50:01,950 So you go to the theatre, you go to rehearsal and hear music, watch a mellotron or whatever, 401 00:50:02,400 --> 00:50:09,300 and then you feel maybe sad, but afterwards you go out and have a beer. 402 00:50:09,570 --> 00:50:13,640 That's not a problem. In real life, this is often hard. 403 00:50:13,920 --> 00:50:18,180 If you feel sad, then there's a reason and it's not so easy to overcome. 404 00:50:18,450 --> 00:50:24,690 So how can we switch easily between these states and with the trigger in the brain? 405 00:50:24,900 --> 00:50:34,980 Why we are able to feel really sadness or other feelings and then turn it down and be another person somehow. 406 00:50:35,370 --> 00:50:44,139 But. What we try to do is just briefly to give you a sense and that there's more in it. 407 00:50:44,140 --> 00:50:46,390 If we experience in our cases, of course, 408 00:50:46,390 --> 00:50:53,709 reading literature or hearing qualitative stimuli as we are looking to their peripheral physiological parameters. 409 00:50:53,710 --> 00:50:56,830 And there's a variety of them. 410 00:50:57,070 --> 00:51:05,020 So the dilation of pupil going up and down, you can't control it by your conscious, but also the skin contact tenses. 411 00:51:05,200 --> 00:51:15,159 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. 412 00:51:15,160 --> 00:51:23,320 So if you change your respiration during reading carefully and it's just one, we're refined. 413 00:51:23,830 --> 00:51:28,690 So you have a story which is more suspenseful, you know, 414 00:51:29,140 --> 00:51:34,750 and every piece is the counter examples that exist in Madame Flaubert, in German literature, which is not. 415 00:51:35,080 --> 00:51:49,200 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. 416 00:51:49,690 --> 00:51:54,130 And the interesting thing is that it's normally going together like here, 417 00:51:54,730 --> 00:52:02,770 but even in a novel where it seems to be boring or not so suspenseful, even here, we're exposed. 418 00:52:02,920 --> 00:52:06,579 Well, there must be something here, and this exactly happens. 419 00:52:06,580 --> 00:52:14,260 So our self-understanding, even our consciousness understanding and our reaction of the body fits together. 420 00:52:14,380 --> 00:52:18,340 That's a typical thing, why the body is involved. 421 00:52:18,370 --> 00:52:28,540 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. 422 00:52:29,860 --> 00:52:35,710 And my third one is what is in philosophy called the qualia discussion. 423 00:52:35,950 --> 00:52:39,640 So John Searle and others are dealing a lot about this. 424 00:52:39,970 --> 00:52:44,740 So if you look at this simplistic painting of young, not only talking to Schumann, 425 00:52:44,740 --> 00:52:50,480 so if you hear Schumann means your lost of the world is this seems to be exactly what Cliff Bells think. 426 00:52:51,040 --> 00:52:59,950 Then I want to understand, is there really something which distinguish aesthetic experience from other experience? 427 00:53:00,430 --> 00:53:07,600 Well, the findings it's not clear at that point. And there is some findings, especially with literature. 428 00:53:07,900 --> 00:53:11,740 But I came to this later on. 429 00:53:12,280 --> 00:53:19,240 But the interesting thing is that clear to distinguish and I would say, no, it's not clear to distinguish. 430 00:53:20,680 --> 00:53:25,750 We need to understand and this is really maybe one reason why it's so difficult. 431 00:53:26,110 --> 00:53:38,439 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. 432 00:53:38,440 --> 00:53:45,970 So Gunter Harvey, the Danish philosopher, thinks about it, needs the self, the person who is involved. 433 00:53:46,210 --> 00:53:50,680 But how can we measure this person who experienced something like that? 434 00:53:50,890 --> 00:53:57,550 There's no at the moment, no, as far as I know, no experimental setting to test this. 435 00:53:57,790 --> 00:54:03,580 But I think this is also part of our experience. 436 00:54:04,120 --> 00:54:09,970 So there could be an evolutionary reason. So just one brief point here by David Newton. 437 00:54:10,240 --> 00:54:13,330 And he tried to claim, but of course, 438 00:54:13,510 --> 00:54:19,960 empirical evidence is hard to get the evolutionary things that we learned from 439 00:54:20,170 --> 00:54:26,500 the overlap of domains during the evolution that we are looking on ourselves, 440 00:54:26,650 --> 00:54:37,450 why we are doing something like experiencing, doing work of art, whatever you call things like that, statues or whatever it is. 441 00:54:37,720 --> 00:54:46,000 So this this domain seems to be before separate and by and by they overlap. 442 00:54:46,950 --> 00:54:50,109 What is exactly meant by that is still unclear, though. 443 00:54:50,110 --> 00:55:01,570 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. 444 00:55:01,960 --> 00:55:09,470 But where is it to find in the brain is difficult but just as an argument it and my first 445 00:55:09,550 --> 00:55:15,670 point would be well I would love to have more neuroscientific studies on literature, 446 00:55:15,700 --> 00:55:21,280 which is not the case due to especially experimental limits in this area. 447 00:55:22,060 --> 00:55:29,770 So think about we know that we need different brain regions to understand a story makes perfect sense. 448 00:55:29,770 --> 00:55:32,860 We have characters, we have goals in this story. 449 00:55:33,580 --> 00:55:39,580 We have events. We have to track time and. So on. Of course, this is a lot going on at the same time. 450 00:55:39,940 --> 00:55:49,990 Again, the medial prefrontal cortex is seems to be, as far as I know, the literature, a very important part of it. 451 00:55:50,700 --> 00:55:58,090 And it changes. So in the long run, if you read a lot of literature, it changes somehow your personality trait, 452 00:55:58,990 --> 00:56:07,000 especially by fiction, but not as a same level by non-fiction reading. 453 00:56:07,010 --> 00:56:14,020 And it's not quite clear why fiction reading alters more the personality trait than fiction reading. 454 00:56:15,040 --> 00:56:26,700 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, 455 00:56:27,070 --> 00:56:40,420 have some differences and how we handle why we read something which is unreal or fictional and something which is in the reality moot. 456 00:56:40,540 --> 00:56:43,720 So to give you some just to brief examples. 457 00:56:43,960 --> 00:56:49,450 So Michael Valentine, a writer and neuroscience scientist in Denmark, 458 00:56:49,840 --> 00:56:56,080 he is the first I know who ran an experiment with the whole story on the ugly duckling he uses, 459 00:56:56,470 --> 00:57:03,970 and he looks how the heart rate alters during hearing its auditory stimuli. 460 00:57:04,300 --> 00:57:09,910 Julia During the whole story and before he gave again the ratings. 461 00:57:09,910 --> 00:57:13,060 This is the blue line. You can see the dotted line here. 462 00:57:13,480 --> 00:57:21,250 And they found a huge overlap between the understanding where expecting this is important, 463 00:57:21,250 --> 00:57:29,800 there will be in faster heartbeats and then it's going down and this fits exactly to the findings. 464 00:57:30,070 --> 00:57:34,720 Why do they do that? They look also into the brain, which parts are involved. 465 00:57:35,020 --> 00:57:39,400 Of course, understanding words needs other areas of the brain. 466 00:57:39,610 --> 00:57:46,060 Then visual cues and so word, understanding and narratives seems to be correlated. 467 00:57:46,330 --> 00:57:56,399 Details we can discuss later on. And the second experiment I want to show you is this is five months or the Arto Jacobs 468 00:57:56,400 --> 00:58:01,810 scope around and he wants to understand what's the difference between fact and fiction. 469 00:58:02,230 --> 00:58:10,300 And it's clear that if we read texts in the under the condition that this text is about facts and reality, 470 00:58:10,630 --> 00:58:18,160 then there is a faster response in decision to some of the behavioural level is different. 471 00:58:18,430 --> 00:58:25,300 And there seems to be different parts involved in comparison to the fact conditions. 472 00:58:25,510 --> 00:58:28,060 So there seems to be maybe not aesthetics, 473 00:58:28,330 --> 00:58:36,430 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, 474 00:58:36,850 --> 00:58:44,650 then we treated this text differently. This is not tactics, but the difference between fact and fiction. 475 00:58:45,190 --> 00:58:50,620 And of course, they try to find the differences in the brain regions again. 476 00:58:50,980 --> 00:58:54,370 So the warm colours here, the red ones, 477 00:58:54,730 --> 00:59:02,920 is looking for where the real condition people read and uses these areas more than the 478 00:59:03,400 --> 00:59:10,690 blue here is for those where they think this story is just a made up and it's not real. 479 00:59:10,990 --> 00:59:17,120 So there are differences, but still it's difficult to interpret this. 480 00:59:17,830 --> 00:59:28,930 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. 481 00:59:29,590 --> 00:59:37,780 They just test the fantasy scale test. And we look into the parts of the prefrontal cortex here on the y axis. 482 00:59:38,020 --> 00:59:42,910 Then we see that people who are more transported use this more these areas. 483 00:59:43,230 --> 00:59:46,570 So again, maybe we are not talking about aesthetics. 484 00:59:46,570 --> 00:59:52,149 Maybe we are talking about how people could be involved in stories, in artworks. 485 00:59:52,150 --> 01:00:00,459 But it could be not only artworks, it could be many more things and the things getting more and more complicated because we know, 486 01:00:00,460 --> 01:00:12,100 especially in literary study, that we are not only having literature, we have a bunch of stories from our first glimpse. 487 01:00:12,100 --> 01:00:22,480 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. 488 01:00:22,930 --> 01:00:25,719 And what came up here is life stories. 489 01:00:25,720 --> 01:00:35,710 So we build up our stories by using our experience, putting them into narratives and building up these narratives. 490 01:00:36,120 --> 01:00:39,240 Were more elaborate TV versions up and up. 491 01:00:39,630 --> 01:00:44,460 And they're coming. Of course, kids books and other things into it. 492 01:00:44,880 --> 01:00:48,000 And maybe literature is only on the top of it. 493 01:00:48,300 --> 01:00:59,070 And maybe we are looking for a ghost if we are looking for aesthetics, because it's so much rooted into our life history, 494 01:00:59,340 --> 01:01:09,310 into our experience and into action that I suggest maybe we should call it more a social cognition approach to the arts. 495 01:01:09,330 --> 01:01:12,950 This is my simple suggestion here and here. 496 01:01:12,970 --> 01:01:17,760 Some question which is going in the steps of Professor Psyche. 497 01:01:18,510 --> 01:01:25,020 Of course, I would love to know more about literature into new aesthetic in especially of this area. 498 01:01:25,240 --> 01:01:32,100 A one is of importance. I would love to compare life stories with literature. 499 01:01:32,370 --> 01:01:41,430 Maybe these differences aren't so big as normal is expected from a to high end notion of aesthetics. 500 01:01:42,540 --> 01:01:50,430 I think we should integrate peripheral physiological measurements also because it shows how much we are involved. 501 01:01:50,850 --> 01:01:52,650 By understanding literature, 502 01:01:54,390 --> 01:02:07,350 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. 503 01:02:08,880 --> 01:02:18,030 And I would also be very much interested to let people just think about anaesthetic experience, a strong aesthetic experience. 504 01:02:18,030 --> 01:02:23,940 If the simple imagination changes something, 505 01:02:24,240 --> 01:02:36,600 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, 506 01:02:36,990 --> 01:02:40,740 not watching it just and then looking into the brains. 507 01:02:42,390 --> 01:02:51,300 Well, I will close with a significant form and you can check whether this is some form of aesthetic experience. 508 01:02:51,510 --> 01:02:58,430 So Hemingway was asked whether he can talk, whether he can write a short story in six words. 509 01:02:58,440 --> 01:03:05,250 Maybe some of you are familiar with that. And we think about because it's good for experimental use to have short stories, 510 01:03:05,820 --> 01:03:15,120 six words to tell a story which moves us, which is important, especially of some of you, depending on your background. 511 01:03:15,450 --> 01:03:21,240 So he is his solution for, say, two words. 512 01:03:23,810 --> 01:03:29,490 Baby shoes for words. Never born. 513 01:03:31,110 --> 01:03:35,430 Yeah. Okay. For me, it's a touching story. 514 01:03:35,940 --> 01:03:40,020 Maybe not for all of us, but it's a story. So thank you.