Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness

The brain is an evolutionary triumph of neural engineering. Its capacity to seek knowledge and form generalized concepts is boundless. In this ground–breaking new study, Semir Zeki explores the enormously elegant and efficient machinery of the brain to analyze its products in creative disciplines and discover whether or not this intricate system brings different solutions to bear in solving problems in disparate fields.
Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, which is derived from Balzac’s novel of the same name, delves into the brain’s key functions of obtaining knowledge and forming concepts about the world. While these functions have been more thoroughly documented in neurobiology’s traditional disciplines—physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, mathematics, and computer science, to name but a few—Zeki goes beyond these fields to scientifically study the products of the brain in literature, music, art, and other fields. By studying these fields, Zeki shows that we can reach important conclusions about how the brain functions and its common processes. He also examines the heavy price to be paid in terms of human happiness that comes with the exquisite capacity of the brain and shows how misery can ultimately be turned to advantage, due to its intimate link to creativity.

Spis treści:
List of Figures.
Note to the Reader.
Acknowledgements.
Introduction.
Part I. Abstraction and the Brain.
1. Abstraction.
2. The Brain and Its Concepts.
3. Inherited Brain Concepts.
4. The Distributed Knowledge–Acquiring System of the Brain.
5. The Acquired Synthetic Brain Concepts.
6. The Synthetic Brain Concept and the Platonic Ideal.
7. Creativity and the Source of Perfection in the Brain.
Part II. Brain Concepts and Ambiguity.
8. Ambiguity in the Brain and in Art.
9. Processing and Perceptual Sites in the Brain.
10. From Unambiguous to Ambiguous Knowledge.11. Higher Levels of Ambiguity.
Part III. Unachievable Brain Concepts.
Introduction.
12. Michelangelo and the Non finito.
13. Paul Cézanne and the Unfinished.
14. Unfinished Art in Literature.
Part VI. Brain Concepts of Love.
Conte By Arthur Rimbaud.
15. The Brain’s Concepts of Love.
16. The Neural Correlates of Love.
17. Brain Concepts of Unity and Annihilation in Love.
18. Sacred and Profane.
19. The Metamorphosis of the Brain Concept of Love in Dante.
20. Wagner and Tristan und Isolde.
21. Thomas Mann and Death in Venice.
22. A Neurobiological Analysis of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
Notes.
Name Index.
Subject Index

Nota biograficzna:
Semir Zeki is a visual neurobiologist in the Department of Cognitive Neurology at University College London. Zeki has pioneered the study of the primate visual brain and furthered research on how affective states are generated by visual inputs. He has published extensively in his field, including the books Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999) and A Vision of the Brain (Blackwell Scientific, Oxford), and has also co–authored a book with the late French painter Balthus, entitled La Quête de l’essentiel (1995).

Okładka tylna:
The brain is an evolutionary triumph of neural engineering. Its capacity to seek knowledge and form generalized concepts is boundless. In this ground–breaking new study, Semir Zeki explores the enormously elegant and efficient machinery of the brain to analyze its products in creative disciplines and discover whether or not this intricate system brings different solutions to bear in solving problems in disparate fields.
Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, which is derived from Balzac’s novel of the same name, delves into the brain’s key functions of obtaining knowledge and forming concepts about t he world. While these functions have been more thoroughly documented in neurobiology’s traditional disciplines—physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, mathematics, and computer science, to name but a few—Zeki goes beyond these fields to scientifically study the products of the brain in literature, music, art, and other fields. By studying these fields, Zeki shows that we can reach important conclusions about how the brain functions and its common processes. He also examines the heavy price to be paid in terms of human happiness that comes with the exquisite capacity of the brain and shows how misery can ultimately be turned to advantage, due to its intimate link to creativity.