Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain [Hardcover]

Semir Zeki (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0198505191 | ISBN-13: 978-0198505198 | Publication Date: February 17, 2000

What is it that makes a work of art appear to us as beautiful? How do external form and internal perception coalesce to create the distinctive aesthetic pleasures we look to find in the visual arts? In Inner Vision, one of the founders of visual neuroscience, Semir Zeki, offers the first attempt to apply the science of vision to painting and sculpture, revealing how the conception, execution, and appreciation of the visual arts are all shaped by the anatomy of the brain.
Using a range of examples from artists including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Magritte, Mondrian, and Picasso, Zeki takes the reader on an illuminating tour of the way the brain sees, showing how its visual processing shapes art and our response to it. Vision, he writes, is designed to gather knowledge about the world around us, breaking down visual images into their basic components. He describes in fascinating detail how different areas of the brain respond to the basic visual elements, such as color, form, line, and motion, which are also basic elements of art. He further argues that all visual art is expressed through the brain and, whether the artist realizes it or not, must therefore mirror the workings of the brain. Beauty may not be in the eye of the beholder, strictly speaking, but it most certainly is in the brain of the beholder. And Zeki argues that no theory of aesthetics will be complete unless it is substantially based on the activity of the brain.
Beautifully illustrated and vividly written, Inner Vision takes an important first step toward providing a scientific theory of aesthetics.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Why do we find it hard to explain why art is beautiful? Perhaps it is because the visual system of the human brain is much more developed than its language centers, as it has had far longer--millions of years--to evolve. Semir Zeki believes that we can only reach a better understanding of art as we learn more about the operations of the visual brain.

Zeki demonstrates that the simple act of seeing is a profoundly artistic activity. Separating out the mass of geometrical and spectral information received through the eye to arrive at a visual perception is a complex and creative process. Zeki traces the functional similarities of the artist and the seeing brain. "Just as the brain searches for constancies and essentials," Zeki writes, "so does art.... It is those attributes of vision [to which] the brain has assigned specialised processing systems ... that have primacy in art. Among those one can include colour, form, motion, faces, facial expressions and even body language."

Zeki's examples are varied and convincing. For example, he explores the relationship between modern works that have emphasized lines and the reaction of cells in the brain that work on lines of specific orientation. More ambitiously, he even outlines the neurological bases of Fauvism and Cubism!

T.S. Eliot said that using language to discuss art was "a raid on the inarticulate, with shabby equipment." In Inner Vision, that pejorative statement acquires a heroic mantle: no artist worth the name and no one who enjoys visual beauty can afford to ignore the insights contained in this book. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk

Review

"Rigorous and stimulating." -Times Literary Supplement, 11/3/00

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198505191
• ISBN-13: 978-0198505198
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,301,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars this has little to do with art, March 30, 2003

By 

drollere (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Hardcover)

as someone with a doctorate in psychology who has retired to a life of intensive painting, i can say this book falls short in its fundamental premise: if we can identify a distinct visual capability in the brain, that capability forms the basis for visual esthetic judgments. that argument unfortunately goes nowhere, and the result is a thin book with its substantive content spread even thinner.

zeki's argument is roughly that the mind is an active creator of visual experience; that we create visual experience using a variety of "modular" cerebral functions (specific neighborhoods of the brain that detect edges, analyze movement, perceive color, recognize faces); and that art works which "appeal" to these modular capabilities provide the foundation for art. claims that art that becomes "great" if the mind is presented with ambiguous or multiple interpretations, provoking it to "actively create" varied interpretations from the work in view. in this way zeki hopes to reason his way toward a "neurological esthetics," a biologically based prescription of what is beautiful or compelling art.

well, where to begin ... because a brain function is invoked by a stimulus does not make it interesting or great; my review invokes your language capabilities, but that doesn't make my words poetry. a painting does not succeed by creating a variety of specific but competing interpretations, as zeki claims, but by reframing awareness into a realm where the mundane categorizations necessary for behavior are stretched by the exercise of the senses. what counts as beautiful cannot be determined from the quantitative activity of different brain regions. what counts as beautiful depends heavily on cultural expectations, not on physiology ... on and on the objections roll.

in the end, zeki's argument is highly parochial. his examples come from the "edge detection" art of the supremacists or the cubists; the "color perception" art of the fauves, the "movement perception" art of calder, and so on -- simplistic art for simplistic art theories. (someone should ask, where are the edges in monet or turner, the color in kline or velazquez, the movement in vermeer or van dyck?) on the philosophical side, zeki seems willing to cite plato or hegel as straw men to knock down, but seems completely unaware of the many philosophical or social psychological theorists who could enrich his "active construction" view of visual perception. finally, zeki seems not to have had a personal colloquy with practicing artists, who could disabuse him of his naive reading of western art and its traditions.

psychologists will find this book to be unexpectedly thin on the facts of recent neural research and cognitive function, and lacking in philosophical depth. artists will look at zeki's simplistic reading of art and art history, shrug and wonder, what is this guy talking about?

17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What studying brain cells can tell us about art, March 14, 2000

By 

Benedikt Berninger (La Jolla, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Hardcover)

I was deeply fascinated by this book: because it provides compelling evidence that certain aspects of the way we perceive art can be explained by the physiological properties of nerve cells in the visual brain. Zeki illustrates this point most strikingly at examples of modern art. He proposes that many modern artists have unknowingly created visual stimuli that are optimally tailored to the response properties of neurons in specific subregions of the visual processing stream. Zeki's writing is extremely lucid, with a good portion of irony, and excellent illustrations increase the pleasure or reading this book.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brain, Biology and Bueaty, February 18, 2006

By 

J Venugopal "J Venugopal" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Hardcover)

Neuroscientists have for a long been looking inside the brain to understand its function. Semir Zeki, in this book proposes the unconventional idea of looking into the most beautiful products of brain, visual art of instance, to understand the functioning of brain. Citing examples of Shakesphere and Wagner, he goes further to propose that some artists might be thought of as neurologists, "for they at least did know how to probe the mind of humans with the techniques of language and of music and understood perhaps better than most what it takes to move the mind of human". By showing the striking features of the patients studied by himself and others, he gives compelling evidence that vision is not a singular process and there are parts of brain that are dedicated to various functions such as color, form, motion etc. He writes about patients who have damaged a part of the visual brain (V4) and sees the world in dark shades of grey. Similarly, patients with damage in V5 neither see nor understand motion. They only see discontinuous static images. They for instance cannot see the rising level of a drink in a glass and the drink always overflows. Then he describes a patient with damage to a certain region in cortex, who cannot recognize faces. This person can visualize lines and objects but simply cannot recognize faces. All of these abilities that seem so simple and effortless to all of us normal people -- it's only when something goes wrong we realize how extraordinarily subtle the mechanisms of vision really are and how complexly integrated a process it really is.

For readers who are not familiar with visual arts, this book will give you a condensed idea about different branches of paintings and what the painter was trying to achieve. I found it interesting. The book itself has an aesthetic appeal and the publisher deserves kudos for the page layout and cover design. Although I do not share the degree of skepticism that my fellow reviewer drollere has, I think this book has its own limitations. For instance the cases of these patients have been described elsewhere ranging from Steven Pinkers- How Mind Works to some articles/lectures of VS Ramachandran. The concept of `micro consciousness' raised in this book is ill-defined and misleading and it has to be separated from the core consciousness defined by Antonio Damasio.