by Jon Lackman | 27 March 2006 | Conferences, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from last Friday’s star-studded “Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind” at Columbia’s Italian Academy: “As the afternoon session got underway, red and blue 3-D glasses were distributed that Margaret Livingstone then used to demonstrate the neural mechanics of depth perception. She also explained how brain processes create the illusion of constant movement in Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie and make the Mona Lisa’s smile seem ever changing. ‘If you think Marge’s talk was the climax of the meeting,’ began the next speaker, V.S. Ramachandran, ‘you could think of mine as the cigarette.’ He tackled ‘artistic hyperboles,’ such as the impossibly curvaceous bodies of Hindu goddesses in Indian sculpture, which ‘optimally titillate the visual centers of the brain.’ His theories rely heavily on Darwin, and Ramachandran didn’t shy from tweaking the man’s latter-day detractors: ‘It’s a bit ironic that our president is pushing this idea of intelligent design when his own existence is a living negation of it.’
In their introductory remarks to the forum, organizers David Freedberg and Eric Kandel said they hoped the conference would help ‘bridge the natural sciences and the humanities.’ The program—weighted heavily toward science—consisted mostly of polished presentations from neurobiologists, followed by extemporaneous responses from various creative types, including David Salle, Richard Meier, and Calvin Klein. Morning sesssions offered biological explanations for … [read more]
