American neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel has written a large and fascinating book about the brain and its relationship to culture.
In it, he tries to understand how the experiments of artists can be useful to neuroscientists and what artists and viewers can learn from scientists about the nature of creativity and the reactions of the viewer. His research is connected with the Viennese Renaissance of the late XNUMXth — early XNUMXth century, with the era when art, medicine, and the natural sciences were rapidly developing. Analyzing the plays of Arthur Schnitzler, the paintings of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, Eric Kandel notes that creative discoveries in the field of sexuality, the mechanisms of empathy, emotions and perception are no less significant than the theories of Freud and other psychologists. The brain is the condition of art, but it also helps to understand the nature of the brain with its experiments, and both of them penetrate into the depths of the unconscious.
AST, Corpus, 720 tr.