Paul Cézanne’s preoccupation, and artistic experimentation, with how color modulates form is but a variant of the neurobiological question of how the separate representations of form and color are integrated in

the brain to give us a unitary percept of both (Zeki, 1978 and Livingstone and Hubel, 1988). The experiments of Picasso and Braque in the early, analytic, phase of cubism—of how a form maintains its identity in spite of wide variations in the selleck chemical context in which it is viewed—resolves itself scientifically into the neurobiological problem of form constancy. The quest of Piet Mondrian for the “constant truths concerning forms” (Mondrian, 1941) is an artistic version of the question of what the neural building blocks of all forms are (often presumed to be the orientation-selective cells Rapamycin order of the visual cortex), while kinetic art, which sought to represent motion artistically, reached conclusions that are consistent

with conclusions reached later by neurobiology (Zeki and Lamb, 1994). These are, in a sense, facile rallying points that merely serve to emphasize different approaches to what are, at heart, common questions. More difficult to address are shared questions regarding human experience and what they signify about brain operations and the world in which it has developed. Here the boundary between neurobiological and humanistic questions is faint and separating the two, I believe, does both a disservice even L-NAME HCl if, at present, the relationship between neuroesthetics and the humanities is asymmetric, in that neuroesthetics has a good deal more to gain from the humanities than the latter from us. Many of the critical questions now addressed experimentally by neuroesthetics have been addressed in philosophical discourse for centuries. Prominent among these is the problem of knowledge, a primordial function of the brain and a central issue in philosophy. Using color vision as an example,

Arthur Schopenhauer argued that “a more precise knowledge and firmer conviction of the wholly subjective nature of color contributes to a more profound comprehension of the Kantian doctrine of the likewise subjective, intellectual forms of all knowledge” (Schopenhauer, 1854), since color is a subjective experience that is the result of a transformation of the objective reality of the outside world by rules that govern the operations of the mind (brain). The only knowledge we can therefore have of color is “brain knowledge”. The brain, far from representing colors (or indeed the sensory world) passively and veridically, constructs them through inherited programs (algorithms) (Zeki, 1993).