My introduction to Semir Zeki came in 1992 with a special issue of Scientific American called Mind And Brain. I still have the magazine with the lines I highlighted. I was excited when I read it. Something new was happening. Here are some of the passages I marked:
“The past two decades have brought neurologists many marvelous discoveries about the visual brain. Moreover, they have led to a powerful conceptual change in our view of what the visual brain does…. It is no longer possible to divide the process of seeing from that of understanding as neurologists once imagined, nor is it possible to separate the acquisition of visual knowledge from consciousness.” (Italics are mine)
Zeki concludes that, when seeing and understanding are viewed as one process, “our inquiry into the visual brain takes us into the very heart of humanity’s inquiry into its own nature.”
Since then, Zeki has written extensively, in books and papers, on how a neurobiological understanding of vision contributes to our understanding of artistic creativity. In so doing he pulls the curtain back and gives us a new way to self-reflect. Much of what he writes has impacted how I think about the emergence of mathematics. He convincingly argues that the visual arts can be seen as an extension of the brain’s visual processes and this helps me imagine mathematics as an extension (or at least a reflection) of neurological processes designed to manage perception and thought.
In an essay on artistic creativity and its relationship to visual processes, (Science Magazine, 2001), he ventures even further. Our brain, he explains, is the most variable, (in the Darwinian sense) and therefore the fastest evolving organ we have. While we don’t know the source of its variability, all manner of creative work is an expression of it. Zeki speculates that this variation is also the source of problematic deviant behavior. He believes that neurological studies of art and aesthetics (which he calls neuroesthetics) can help us understand what determines variability in general. Such studies would shed light on the common neural ground that makes it possible for us to appreciate a work of art. I would not be surprised if they also told us something about how we come to recognize the beauty of an equation.
He wrote chapter 2 of the book Neurology of the Arts, edited by F. Clifford Rose. The title of the chapter is Neural Concept Formation and Art: Dante, Michelangelo, Wagner. In it he focuses on the work of three particular figures in our history. But it also contains a good outline of how Zeki ties creative work to biological processes. He explains that abstraction is an essential characteristic “imposed upon the brain by one of its chief functions, namely the acquisition of knowledge.” Looking for the essence of things by using abstraction is what the brain is built to do. This looking for the essence, he argues, is what creative work is about.
How does the brain abstract? This is only partially known and Zeki gives us some examples. There are specialized brain cells that respond preferentially to straight lines at a particular angle. About a particular one of these he says, “The cell, in brief, abstracts for verticality, without being concerned about what is vertical” There are cells that synthesize multiple views of an object into a ‘view-invariant’ image. And there are also cells specialized to respond to particular colors or to motion in a particular direction. These are some of the attributes of retinal impressions that get sent to specialized regions in the brain and are used to construct what we see.
In both pieces, he explains that in its search for generalities, the brain inevitably creates the ideal from the particulars. Once formed, the ideal cannot be found in the world of particulars. This dissatisfaction with all particulars, or this frustration with the material that can never contain the ideal, is what Zeki believes caused Michelangelo to leave work unfinished. The book chapter more fully explores the impact of ideals on our experience, even with regard to love.
It’s hard to talk about ideals without Plato coming to mind. And there are many references to Plato in Zeki’s chapter. But neurobiologists seem to think that Plato didn’t quite have it right. For Plato, the ideal had an independent existence. For neurobiologists, it is an inevitable consequence of the brain’s working on the particulars. What I find striking is that, for both, the particulars are subordinated to the ideal. And Plato’s reverence for the ideals may have been born of an intuitive sense that they are the source of all knowledge, the fundamentally necessary ingredient, outside of our awareness, needed to shape the acquisition of knowledge.
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