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

by Zeki, Semir

Edition: 1st

ISBN13: 9781405185585

ISBN10: 1405185589

Format: Hardcover

Pub. Date: 2008-12-31

Publisher(s): Wiley-Blackwell

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Summary

Splendors and Miseries of the Brain examines the elegant and efficient machinery of the brain, showing that by studying music, art, literature, and love, we can reach important conclusions about how the brain functions. discusses creativity and the search for perfection in the brain examines the power of the unfinished and why it has such a powerful hold on the imagination discusses Platonic concepts in light of the brain shows that aesthetic theories are best understood in terms of the brain discusses the inherited concept of unity-in-love using evidence derived from the world literature of love addresses the role of the synthetic concept in the brain (the synthesis of many experiences) in relation to art, using examples taken from the work of Michelangelo, C_zanne, Balzac, Dante, and others

Author Biography

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 (Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), and has also co-authored a book with the late French painter Balthus, entitled La Quête de l’essentiel (1995).

List of Figures
Abstraction	p. 9
The Brain and its Concepts	p. 21
Inherited Brain Concepts	p. 26
The Distributed Knowledge-Acquiring System of the Brain	p. 35
The Acquired Synthetic Brain Concepts	p. 42
The Synthetic Brain Concept and the Platonic Ideal	p. 46
Creativity and the Source of Perfection in the Brain	p. 50
Ambiguity in the Brain and in Art	p. 61
Processing and Perceptual Sites in the Brain	p. 65
From Unambiguous to Ambiguous Knowledge	p. 73
Higher Levels of Ambiguity	p. 87
Michelangelo and the Non finito
Paul Cezanne and the Unfinished
Unfinished Art in Literature
Conte by Arthur Rimbaud	p. 131
The Brain's Concepts of Love	p. 132
The Neural Correlates of Love	p. 137
Brain Concepts of Unity and Annihilation in Love	p. 150
Sacred and Profane	p. 158
The Metamorphosis of the Brain Concept of Love in Dante	p. 170
Wagner and Tristan and Isolde	p. 182
Thomas Mann and Death in Venice	p. 193
A neurobiological analysis of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents	p. 203
Index	p. 227
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.