Semir Zeki Research Articles

From conceptual to literary metaphors

Abstract It is generally agreed that literary metaphors are produced and interpreted by using the same strategies as more conventional, ordinary metaphorical expressions (George Lakoff & Mark Turner 1989; Zoltán Kövecses 2010). However, the aesthetic experience of reading metaphors in literature is a complex phenomenon that remains only partially explained. This paper aims at contributing to the study of the cognitive mechanisms that allow the aesthetic experience when reading poetic metaphors. For this purpose, after a short review of previous research on literary metaphors in the Cognitive Linguistic framework, the main tenets of Neuroaesthetics (Semir Zeki 2001; Vilayanur Ramachandran 2003), an emerging empirical discipline, are presented as referred to the study of visual art. Then, the insights from both fields are compared and applied to the study of metaphors. Results show significant coincidences as empirical research in neuroscience seem to confirm the theories and hypotheses posed by cognitive linguists, as for the way in which the emotional response to poetic metaphors is elicited.

Global Versus Local Theories of Consciousness and the Consciousness Assessment Issue in Brain Organoids

Any attempt at consciousness assessment in organoids requires careful consideration of the theory of consciousness that researchers will rely on when performing this task. In cognitive neuroscience and the clinic, there are tools and theories used to detect and measure consciousness, typically in human beings, but none of them is neither fully consensual nor fit for the biological characteristics of organoids. I discuss the existing attempt relying on the Integrated Information Theory and its models and tools. Then, I revive the distinction between global theories of consciousness and local theories of consciousness as a thought-provoking one for those engaged in the difficult task of adapting models of consciousness to the biological reality of brain organoids. The “microconsciousness theory” of Semir Zeki is taken as an exploratory path and illustration of a theory defending that minimal networks can support a form of consciousness. I suggest that the skepticism prevailing in the neuroscience community regarding the possibility of organoid consciousness relies on some assumptions related to a globalist account of consciousness and that other accounts are worth exploring at this stage.

The Cage Case. Arts and Social Neuroscience.

A great story told by a musician is the basis of the best stage experimentation of the second half of the 20th century. The musician is John Cage, whose work synthesizes the entire system of arts within the extraordinary world of the avant-garde. This great story begins with the experimental artistic activities which were developed in the 1920s, consolidated in the thirties and continued through the post-war period up to the dawn of the fifties. Apart from the socio-historical cross-section Cage’s experimentation provides, it is also a pretext for reflecting on the artist’s work as well as the relationship between neuroscience and art. Important contributions to this topic come from the neuro-scientific-social research on new expressions “of creativity, imagination, genius” (Pecchinenda, 2018). This study is based on the assumption that Cage was the forerunner of neuronal experimentation that would be central to the experiments and research of many other artists. The theoretical reference model can be found in the research of the neuroscientist Kandel et al, whose work was the starting point for this investigation. Kandel grasps the definitive break between scientific logic and humanistic sensitivity in the methodological reductionism practiced by neuroscience and in the experiments of contemporary creativity. According to Kandel, both neuroscience and artistic experimentation have similar objectives and problems, and in some respects seem to develop similar methodological practices. Kandel identifies the use of memory, synthesis and knowledge of the world in authors such as Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Louis, Warhol as well as the New York school of which Cage was an important member. The relationship between art and neuroscience is synthetized in the avant-garde action of Cage and in all the artists who launched continuous attacks against traditional forms. The transition from figurative art to abstraction is “comparable” to the reductionist process that is used in the scientific field to explain complexity and phenomenology. The prolegomena of this discourse are anticipated by a previous work written by Kandel in 2012 and can also be found in other studies on the relationship between neuroscience and art, in particular in the reflections of the neurobiologist and father of neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki. Zeki analyzed artists work as a practice perfectly comparable to the research carried out by neuroscientists. Cage, the focus of this investigation, carried out a sound-stage-vision experimentation affecting theatre, media and art which can be examined from at least two different perspectives. The first concerns the definitive subversion of “innate rules of perception” (Kandel) and the second deals with the relationship between art and neuroscience.

Burning questions and multiple answers: Ambiguous-unreliable narration and the uncertainties of truth and trust

This article explores how ambiguous-unreliable narration occurs in cinema as a distinct mode of unreliability. In defining ambiguous narration, we build on Semir Zeki’s neurobiological notion of ambiguity, from which we understand ambiguous narration as a mode that presents a series of questions consistently answered in mutually contradictory ways. We pay specific attention to Robert Vogt’s definition of ambiguous-unreliable narration in order to get a grip on the possible storyworlds presented by Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 feature film Burning. The film cues viewers to consider multiple interpretations of diegetic truth, each interpretation tapping into another possible world of events by positing questions with multiple non-hierarchable answers. As such, it becomes clear how Burning plays upon different concepts of ‘truth’. Drawing on the work of Vittorio Bufacchi and Kevin Reuter and Georg Brun, we can see how Burning ambiguates the line between correspondentist and coherentist readings of truth, thereby revealing something significant about truth-assigning strategies. We argue that Burning mimetically evokes post-truth phenomena, a periodizing concept in which the differentiation between fact-based truths, opinions and lies is blurry, creating an ambiguous information environment characterized by an uncertainty of what one can consider (un)trustworthy or (un)reliable. By proposing a cognitive narratological approach, we demonstrate how film storytelling can mimetically evoke this experience of uncertainty. In light of these findings, this research addresses the educative value of ambiguous-unreliable narration within fiction, especially within curricular programmes that incorporate media literacy training.

A Review of The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities

A Review of <i>The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities</i>

Joyce’s Ulysses and the Neuroaesthetics of “Yes”

Artworks and brain-works find their mediated space of connection in the mind—in how the mind imagines. Neuroaesthetics is its disciplinary practice. For us, as narrative theorists, neuroaesthetics helps uncover how the novel, the great verbal art form of the verbal mind, is the aesthetic of consciousness, the aesthetic that tells the mind’s story. James Joyce’s Ulysses, that rarest of novels, unparalleled in its experiments with giving verbal form to consciousness, models how. My claim is that the mind-work of Ulysses throws a spotlight on the “illusions of consciousness.” Drawing on the mind-brain research of Semir Zeki, Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, J. Allan Hobson, and, most of all, Daniel N. Stern, I analyze Ulysses for its revelations and verbal formalizations of consciousness through Joyce’s “yes” and what I’m calling the “‘yes’ mental states” of Ulysses—the synthetic concept generation of Stephen’s mind, the SEEKING system of Bloom’s mind, and the “yes I said yes I will Yes” of Molly’s mind.

Beauty in Architecture: Not a Luxury ‐ Only a Necessity

AbstractCan beauty in architecture nourish the human emotional brain? Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London argues that it does. He goes further in suggesting it should be a quality in all buildings and that humanity has the ability to recognise this beauty across all cultural divides. The appreciation of beauty, no matter where found, is hardwired into our brains.

Crossing boundaries: toward a general model of neuroaesthetics.

Since its dawn in the early 2000s, neuroaesthetics has been flowering as an independent research field (Nadal and Skov, 2013). Its emergence has mostly been driven by researchers who specialize in the study of visual perception and cognition, and who show interest in visual arts. This strong link between neuroaesthetics and vision science is reflected not only by the fact that the term “neuroaesthetics” was coined by the renowned vision researcher Semir Zeki (Zeki and Nash, 1999), but also by recent reviews on neuroaesthetics focusing primarily on aesthetic experiences induced by paintings, abstract patterns, landscapes, faces, architecture, fashion and design objects (Cinzia and Vittorio, 2009; Cela-Conde et al., 2011; Chatterjee, 2011, 2014; Nadal, 2013; Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014). Current models of aesthetic experiences and their brain correlates revolve around the visual modality and include moderators of aesthetic experiences (social, cultural and situational context, personality, expertise etc.) (Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1999; Chatterjee, 2004; Tinio, 2013; Leder and Nadal, 2014; Redies, 2015). These models are not exclusively concerned with the study of beauty or preference, although these concepts are of historical importance, but include a wide range of aesthetic emotions, judgements, and behaviors.

G. Gabrielle StarrFeeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic ExperienceFeeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. G. Gabrielle Starr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. viii+259.

<i>G. Gabrielle Starr</i>Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience<i>Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience</i>. G. Gabrielle Starr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. viii+259.

Brain and art.

Museums, concerts, dance performances and films attract billions of people worldwide. Indeed, visual art and music have been with us essentially from the beginning of our species. This must mean that Art (and hence, artists) succeed to tap into particular and powerful mechanisms in our brain. This artistic success also means that understanding the phenomenon of Art is a key challenge for modern brain research. Could we understand, in biological terms, the unique and fantastic capabilities of the human brain to both create and enjoy art? In the past decade neuroscience has made a huge leap in developing experimental techniques as well as theoretical frameworks for studying emergent properties following the activity of large neuronal networks. These methods, including MEG, fMRI, sophisticated data analysis approaches and behavioral methods, are increasingly being used in many labs worldwide, with the goal to explore brain mechanisms corresponding to the artistic experience. The 37 articles composing this unique Frontiers Research Topic bring together experimental and theoretical research, linking state-of-the-art knowledge about the brain with the phenomena of Art. It covers a broad scope of topics, contributed by world-renowned experts in vision, audition, somato-sensation, movement, and cinema. Importantly, as we felt that a dialog among artists and scientists is essential and fruitful, we invited a few artists to contribute their insights, as well as their art. In this context, we would like to highlight a key similarity between artists and scientists, in particular neuroscientists. Both art and science seek to explain—each with their own unique set of concepts and tools—the unknown. Both science and art often claim to seek the “truth.” The focus of modern brain research is to unravel the physical basis that underlies the emerging capabilities of the brain—perception, behavior, emotions and brain-related diseases, whereas the arts elaborate intricately and persistently on these brain-related properties including diseases (see several papers in this volume on art and brain damage) exploring, and in this process also expanding, the range of brain's perceptual and emotional capacity. This is a unique forte of the arts, which utilize the powerful capacity of the brain to adaptively (plastically) change following perception and action, and propose new ways to view and interpret the world. Indeed, as highlighted in the present volume, art may invoke new “brain states” that are otherwise less likely to be activated by our day-to-day “reality.” Art therefore serves to explore and expand the potential capacity of the brain, e.g., via the recent invention of abstract art (see this volume). In that sense, brain research and the arts are closely interlinked; modern brain researchers have much new to say about the phenomenon of art from a neuro-scientific perspective (hence the new term “Neuroesthetics” coined in by Semir Zeki), whereas artists have a lot to say about how the brain (they typically use the term “mind,” as do cognitive psychologists) dealing with what it perceives (consciously or unconsciously). This artistic exploration of the mind is well summarized in the surrealistic manifesto by Andre Breton who said “It is by pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thoughts without any control exercised by reason, and beyond aesthetics or moral preoccupation.” Joan Miro said that “art is the search for the alphabet of the mind.” This volume reflects the state of the art search to understand the neurobiological alphabet of the Arts. We hope that the wide range of articles in this volume will be highly attractive to brain researchers, artists and the community at large. Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Feeling, meaning, and intentionality—a critique of the neuroaesthetics of beauty

This article addresses the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. It first, critically, considers one of the most influential approaches to the psychophysics of aesthetic perception, viz. neuroaesthetics. Hereafter, it outlines constitutive tenets of aesthetic perception in terms of a particular intentional relation to the object. The argument comes in three steps. First, I show the inadequacies of the neuroaesthetics of beauty in general and Semir Zeki’s and V.J. Ramachandran’s versions of it in particular. The neuroaesthetics of beauty falls short, because it develops hypotheses of aesthetic experience which have no consequences for the understanding of what art is, that is, how artists produce visual meaning effects in their works. This is so because they make the rewarding feeling of beauty the cornerstone of aesthetic experience. Next, I show why and how aesthetic experience should be defined relative to its object and the tools for meaning-making specific to that object, and not relative to the feeling (of beauty) it may elicit. Finally, I sketch the import this fact may have on a research program in empirical aesthetics.

Non siamo liberi di non innamorarci. Conversazione con Semir Zeki

The interview is based on some thesis of Semir Zeki’s last book, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain. The founder of the International Institute of Neuroaesthetics (London 2001) wrote that a very different kind of knowledge can be acquired by the brain in the experience of art. It seems that he recognizes there can be a kind of “intelligence” in perception, while he writes about microcosciences of perception being located in the same areas where the information coming from the outside is elaborated and perceived. He explains the distinction between inherited “concepts” and acquired synthetic “concepts” of the visual brain. The theory of acquired concepts could also help in explaining the problem of taste: it seems that what we like in our lives is determined by the result (the synthesis) of those probabilities coming from our acquired synthetic brain concepts. Thus there wouldn’t be any free will in our aesthetical and love choices.

Teatro e neuroscienze

In the last decennia, many dialogues have developed by sharing among arts, aesthetics and sciences. The objective is to neuroaesthetics (dating back 1994) by Semir Zeki. To date, the training process of neuroaesthetics is focused on visual arts. Perhaps, the theatre might be the most suitable for neuroscientific studies. Some interesting results have been produced by mutual attention among neurosciences and theatre. Neurosciences are tending to consider the theatre as a natural category. The neural dimension study of intersubjectivity offers food for thought for a naturalization of actor’s tradition. So the theatre is regarded as a social pratice and loses its specificity.

Insights on Sight

An emphasis on the biological foundations of vision, visual perception and aesthetics is a recent development in art history. At the 2009 meeting of the British Association of Art History in Manchester several sessions took inspiration from the biological sciences, or more precisely, the cognitive neurosciences. At the spearhead of this movement calling on the humanities to accept the brain’s ‘material realities’ are well-established scholars such Barbara Stafford and David Freedberg.1 Both urge their peers to seize on the new and, as they regard it, exciting neuroscientific discoveries that illuminate the cognitive underpinnings of all sorts of cultural objects, including the visual perception of art in history. Stafford and Freedberg understand the exchange between the humanities and neuroscience as one in which these fields fruitfully learn from one another. However, most of their neuroscientist colleagues engaged in the study of vision are far less keen to engage in time-consuming interdisciplinary debates. The reluctance of Semir Zeki and Vilajanur S. Ramachandran, the two most prominent champions of the newly-founded discipline of neuro-aesthetics, to take historical expertise seriously is easy to understand: they believe they have found the key that unlocks all the mysteries of visual perception in the past and present.2 Our apparatus for vision is lodged in the brain, they argue, as proven by investigations into the evolutionary development of this wondrous organ. Unlike the vague and nebulous explanations of philosophers and historians about vision, their scientific work has the advantage (so Ramachandran claims) that it can be experimentally tested. Ergo, knowledge of the neurosciences and its experimental methods (mainly on rats!) is the basic tool for all those working on the history of art, vision and visual perception. From cave art to Damien Hirst, the story of how the brain’s deep structures developed to support human survival will provide the definitive answer to artistic creativity and its perception throughout history.

The (Neuro)-Aesthetics of Caricature: Representations of Reality in Bret Easton Ellis'sLunar Park

Recent research by V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki has used neuroscientific methods to investigate the nature of aesthetic response. By situating their work in the context of post-Kantian aesthetic discourse, this essay demonstrates that such research provides an opportunity to bridge cognitive and artistic approaches to aesthetic experience and offers a provisional theory of art that incorporates both empirical and philosophical traditions. These theories will be considered in relation to Bret Easton Ellis's recent novel Lunar Park (2005), which focuses explicitly on questions of representation and reality. Through a juxtaposition of Ramachandran's emphasis on caricature as a central principle of art and Ellis's focus on distorted and questionable realities, this essay suggests new possibilities for the integration of cognitive science with literary and philosophical criticism.

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain. Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness. 2009. By Semir Zeki. Published by Wiley-Blackwell. 234 pages. Price C$33 approx.

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain. Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness. 2009. By Semir Zeki. Published by Wiley-Blackwell. 234 pages. Price C$33 approx.

Sine ars scientia nihil est: Leonardo da Vinci and beyond

The aim of this article is to reflect on the relationship between art and science so far as it concerns a symposium on neurosciences. We undertake a historical overview of that relationship, paying particular attention to the sui generis case of Leonardo da Vinci, who very often is regarded as the man who worked on art and science with equal ease. We then explain why his idea of merging these two forms of knowledge failed, considering the clear-cut distinction between art and science in his time. With this clarification, we explore the matter today. We look at Raphael's The Transfiguration, in which the representation of the possessed boy is seen by neuroscientists as indicative of an epileptic seizure. We also look at the ideas of neuroscientists Semir Zeki and Vilayanur Ramachandran, who study particular aspects of brain function and suggest a new merging of art and science.

Mind, brain, law and culture

Some foolish folks believe that history matters, that human societies and human behaviours have developed over thousands of years largely because of the elaboration of an increasing complex set of social, cultural and material phenomena that need to be examined on their own terms. The wiser among us, however, understand that we are only animals, and as such are ruled by our biology, just as ineluctably as the ant or the rhesus monkey, and that if we want to understand human action in general, or more specialized realms like the human institution of the law, it is to our biology that we must turn. More specifically, it is mostly our brains that matter, and therefore it is to the elucidation and illumination provided by evolutionary psychobiology and contemporary neuroscience that we need to look for answers. Science, HARD science, will uncover the secret wellsprings of all our actions, and we can then leave behind once and for all the soft speculations of the social sciences and gratefully set aside the empty verbiage of the philosophers. Or perhaps, if we are a bit more charitable and ecumenical, we can incorporate some bits of the harder social sciences, such as economics, game theory and cognitive psychology, while abandoning the fuzzy notions foisted on us by soft-hearted and soft-headed anthropologists, sociologists and historians. LAW AND THE BRAIN By Semir Zeki and Oliver Goodenough 2006. Oxford: Oxford University Press Price: £75.00 ISBN: 978-0-19-85 BRAIN AND CULTURE: NEUROBIOLOGY, IDEOLOGY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE By Bruce E. Wexler 2006. Cambridge MA: MIT Press Price: $34.00/£21.95. ISBN: 0-262-23248-0 Semir Zeki, a London-based neuroscientist, and Oliver Goodenough, an American academic lawyer at the University of Vermont, have assembled a collection of papers embracing this neurobiological perspective and laying out its implications for the law. They, and their contributors, can …

Attention to Affective Pictures in Closed Head Injury: Event-Related Brain Potentials and Cardiac Responses

We examined whether closed head injury patients show altered patterns of selective attention to stimulus categories that naturally evoke differential responses in healthy people. Self-reported rating and electrophysiological (event-related potentials [ERPs], heart rate [HR]) responses to affective pictures were studied in patients with mild head injury (n = 20; CT/MRI negative), in patients with predominantly frontal brain lesions (n = 12; CT/MRI confirmed), and in healthy controls (n = 20). Affective valence similarly modulated HR and ERP responses in all groups, but group differences occurred that were independent of picture valence. The attenuation of P3-slow wave amplitudes in the mild head injury group indicates a reduction in the engagement of attentional resources to the task. In contrast, the general enhancement of ERP amplitudes at occipital sites in the group with primarily frontal brain injury may reflect disinhibition of input at sensory receptive areas, possibly due to a deficit in top-down modulation performed by anterior control systems. Support for this research was provided to A.-K. Solbakk by the Research Council of Norway, grant no. 109500/320. The authors are grateful to Søren Jakob Bakke for evaluating the CT and MRI scans of the brain injured participants. We thank Magnus Lindgren for valuable help and advice in the preparation of this article. We also thank Kaisa Hartikainen, Robert T. Knight, and Semir Zeki for helpful comments on this manuscript. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestion on a previous draft of this article.

What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art

I am pursuing the impossible. I want to paint the made in connection with this research about air. how the response to art objects reveals fundaClaude Monet mental perceptual abilities. The reason is that art is designed to exploit, that is, to emphasize and encourage the use of, our perceptual abilINTRODUCTION ities, sometimes in tandem, sometimes working alone. Thus works of art reflect differIt has for many years been a working assumpent properties of our visual system, Margaret tion in psychology that we can learn a great deal Livingstone tells us, providing a kind of cruabout perception by studying the viewer's cible in which those properties might be response to works of visual art. A general distilled.' Semir Zeki cites Constable's claim perceptual theory should be able to explain the that painting is a science and should be perceiver's response to various types of visual pursued as an inquiry into the of nature; stimuli. Thus it should tell us how we are able and for Zeki, the relevant generalizations are the to recognize the poppies in Monet's paintings laws of the brain.2 Artists are experimentaland understand perceptually a great deal of ists, he argues, in whose works diverse percepwhat Vermeer's A Lady at the Virginals with a tual functions are dissociated; thus artworks are Gentleman is about. However, beyond the comlike brain images in which various functions mitment to what has been called experimental have been localized. If the belief that science aesthetics, there is often a further assumption: can shed light on art is what underwrites experithat our responses to visual artworks can be mental aesthetics, then aesthetic experimentalespecially revealing of the fundamental principles ism is the belief that art can shed light on of perception or cognition, in terms of which matters of science. Indeed, on this view, art is a the responses are supposed to be explained. science; a science of the senses with which Paintings and drawings are not just one class of psychology and neurology might work hand-instimuli that must be accounted for. They are hand. particularly important cases that may tell us In what follows, I want to consider some more about our perceptual abilities than ordirecent work in which the assumptions of experinary objects usually can. mental aesthetics and aesthetic experimentalism This assumption has lately become apparent have been combined. I shall argue that, although in accounts of art in terms of the operations of the importance of art perception for cognitive the brain. There are studies of picture recogscience is, in these cases, not entirely clear, nition in cognitive neuroscience, where the some useful implications have begun to emerge. pictures in question are works of art, and in And while the philosophical significance of such studies, the explanandum is the aesthetic scientific discoveries has sometimes been exagresponse. Moreover, several claims have been gerated, this work shows that cognitive science