Book review |
NEUROLOGY AND THE ARTS
Edited by Frank Clifford Rose
2004. London: Imperial College Press.
Price £65.00 ISBN 1860943683
MEMORY IN LITERATURE
By Suzanne Nalbantian
2003. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Price £15.99 ISBN 1403966877
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ART AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONSCIOUS BRAIN
By Robert Solso
2005: Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Price £29.95 ISBN 0262194848
THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF MUSIC
Edited by Isabelle Peretz and Robert Zatorre
2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Price £35.00 ISBN 0198525206 Secret Harmonies: neurology and the arts
(i) Imagination, art and science
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein, What I Believe
What sets apart us is a life in the mind, the ability to imagine.
Robin Dunbar, The Human Story
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): it is also, of course, a poignant source of alienation from the present. Feats of imagination in art and science—as in our dreams and fantasies and childhood games—take a further long stride: as they ‘body forth/The form of things unknown’ they allow us to contemplate worlds of possibility which transcend our own familiar surroundings, past or present.
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), Lucy's discovery of Narnia through the wardrobe (Lewis, 1950), Harry Potter's magical entry into Diagon Alley (Rowling, 1997), Will's discovery of the true use of his ‘subtle knife’ (Pullman, 1997)—a kind of metaphysical passport that allows him free passage between an infinity of worlds—all symbolize its operation. Although magic is identified as the means of travel from one world to the next in these fictions, the magic which bewitches us really flows from mind to mind. It is no accident that Will can only direct the subtle knife when he achieves a certain kind of single-minded concentration: its power is our power, the power to imagine,
A thousand miles from science, you may be thinking. On the contrary, the source of science is just next door. Take, for example, the early nineteenth-century fossil finds in which the physician–neurologist James Parkinson played a prominent early part (Cadbury, 2001). Parkinson hoped to ‘fathom the different revolutions which had swept over the earth in ages antecedent to all human record or tradition’. Gideon Mantell, the Sussex country doctor who took up this challenge, wrote in a similar vein: ‘we know not the millionth part of the wonders of this beautiful world’. Mantell learned to read the ‘records of creation’, uncovering many ‘wonderful secrets that have so long lain hidden’. The imaginative powers required to frame the outrageous idea that all living things and the earth which sustains them are undergoing constant transformation are of the same order as those required to imagine lands through the looking glass and the wardrobe: glimpses of these other worlds, whether fictional or scientific, give many of us the shiver down the spine which is the peculiarly physical signature of imaginative excitement. So Oliver Sacks, on learning about the periodic table, the ‘key to the universe’, wandered for ‘hours ... in the enchanted garden of Mendeleev’, among truths which ‘produced in my twelve year old self a sort of ecstasy, the sense in Einstein's words that a corner of the great veil had been lifted’ (Sacks, 2001). The ‘other worlds’ of palaeontology, cosmology, particle physics and the human genome project are just as remote from ordinary experience and owe just as much to human imagination as the creations of J. K. Rowling.
Then how do they differ, the sciences and the arts, for clearly they do? They differ in the principal focus of their concern. Artists are preoccupied by our human experience of the world, scientists by the workings of the world as it exists independently of the human mind, insofar as we can grasp these. Where art must therefore be particular, personal, specific, science strives to be objective, impersonal, abstract; where art aims to capture and evoke emotional response, science seeks dispassionate detachment. ‘The arts place humanity in the centre of the universe whether we belong there or not. ... Their quality is measured by their humanness, by the precision of their adherence to human nature. To an overwhelming degree that is what we mean when we speak of the true and beautiful in the arts’ (Wilson, 1998). Accordingly, one of the highest compliments we can pay to a work of art is to call it ‘living’: Rembrandt's portraits breathe on the canvas, eloquent music expresses the living form of feeling. And while science involves a cumulative, progressive project of understanding, albeit subject to paradigm shifts, works of art, like the passages of experience they celebrate or capture, must stand alone: one does not look for ‘progress’ from the Virgin of the Rocks or Mahler's Ninth.
Why then is art of peculiar interest to neurology? First, because, like science, it expresses our most distinctively human capacity—the ability to detach ourselves from the here and now and to contemplate possible worlds, including, importantly enough, the here and now. This ability must have a neural basis, although doubtless not a simple one. Second, because in focusing on our human response to the world and in seeking to reawaken it through art, artists become explorers of the human senses and the human mind; they become experts, in their own intuitive way, on the workings of sight and of hearing, and on the ‘inner terrain’ of experience. If we can come to understand the neurological basis of artistic creation and the aesthetic response we will have made plentiful progress in understanding the distinctive features of the human mind.
How much do the books under review help us in this grand project?
(ii) Treasures and trinkets
The most various, and most readily enjoyable, of these four books is Clifford Rose's edited volume Neurology and the Arts. It reminds us that the connections between neurology and the arts are numerous indeed. Besides the giddying questions just discussed about the basis of creativity and the aesthetic response, these connections include the neurological disorders of artists, representations of these disorders in art, the inspiration of medical work by artistic example and vice versa. All these and more are touched upon in this entertaining collection of essays, harvested from a recent symposium of the Medical Society of London.
Some of the essays are close to the everyday practice of neurology. In Peter Wolf's ‘Epilepsy in literature’ I was struck by a quotation from Margiad Evans' autobiography, A Ray of Darkness, which gives an eloquent description of what she later came to recognize as the aura of her temporal lobe attacks: ‘... to catch that murmur of sight, that vision of sound whose first thrilling even when I was so young seemed to come over immeasurable time and distance. I still have those startling moments, memories from the first instant, which bring through my physical body a spiritual awareness indescribable. Sometimes with a touch they are over: sometimes a day cannot contain them’. Wolf highlights the ‘linguistic peculiarities’ of Evans' articulate account, which he has also identified in his patients' oral seizure descriptions.
Wisely, this collection leaves the boundary between neurology and psychiatry as hazy as it is in real life. In ‘Neurology in the Nordic sagas’, Ragnar Stien tells the story of the murderous Egill Skallgrimson, whose famous elegy for his two lost sons, Sonatorrek, provides a ‘most accurate description of a reactive depression and its effective psychological treatment’ (a talking therapy provided by his daughter):
The sorrow keeps me sleeplessI can't keep my head erect
From my mouth their memories float
Wrapped in precious poetry.
There are moments of arresting pathos. Christopher Gardner-Thorpe quotes Henry Head's Destroyers. Head is enjoying ‘dreams of peace’ on a ‘primeval strip of western land’—Cornwall, perhaps, or the Hebrides. He glimpses a ‘silent, gray’ destroyer in the bay:
An angel of destruction guards the doorAnd keeps the peace of our ancestral home;
Freedom to dream, to work and to adore,
These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath,
Are bought with death.
There is plenty of humour. In the essay ‘James Joyce in a clinical context’ J. B. Lyons tells us that, while still a medical student, Oliver St John Gogarty, future author and ENT surgeon, came to the aid of a friend who also showed literary promise and was at the time in need of treatment following a youthful indiscretion. ‘To Dr Michael Walsh, a local GP, he wrote: "Mr Joyce is the name of the tissues surrounding the infected part; if you will cure him you will delight me".’
I am particularly grateful to the editor for his final essay, ‘Silas Marner, George Eliot and catalepsy’, which gives a scholarly explanation of the reasons why I need no longer be embarrassed by my recurring inability—possibly you share it?—to explain the nature of catalepsy.
(iii) Memory and Literature
Suzanne Nalbantian's Memory in Literature is a brave and interesting attempt to take up the challenges I outlined in the first section of this essay. Literature can be considered as a ‘laboratory for the working of the mind’, furnishing the scientist with an opportunity for ‘field studies’ in, for example, the operations of memory. Nalbantian argues that science can also benefit the understanding of literature, by providing ‘more precise and objective criteria for evaluating mental phenomena in literary works than the vagaries and imprecision of standard psychological criticism’. These interrelationships are of course complex, as contemporary science sometimes influences the work of artists, whose evocations of memory may not, therefore, be theory-neutral.
Nalbantian approaches the subject by examining in turn a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers whose work exemplifies, she argues, contrasting aspects and types of memory. Writing of ‘Rousseau and the Romantics’, she reports that their memories are typically retrieved in a state of spontaneous, meditative nostalgia:
When these wild ecstasies shall be maturedInto a sober pleasure...
Although their memories are often tied to a familiar haunt, like Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, they do not generally require a current sensory trigger. For the symbolists like Baudelaire, in contrast, recollection is a ‘kind of stupor’, elicited by sensory impressions, like ‘the sound of a bell, a musical note, a forgotten perfume’, grounded in physical presence and suggestive of its physicochemical substrate in the brain. In one of Baudelaire's poems of ‘Spleen’, or depression, he wonderfully evokes burdensome memories:
J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans.Un gros meuble a tiroirs encombre de bilans,
De vers, de billets doux, de proces, de romances ...
[I have more memories than a man a thousand years old.
A heavy chest of drawers containing scraps of verse,
Check stubs, love letters, writs, a summons, a ballad ...]
As one might anticipate, Proust earns a chapter to himself, focusing on the vast mental effects of apparently trivial reminders, often olfactory or gustatory, occasionally tactile, like the ‘feel of a starched napkin wiped against the mouth’, which somehow ‘bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of memory’ (Proust, 1987). Nalbantian contrasts these overwhelming Proustian episodes of recollection in which ‘the distant scene ... had for a moment grappled, like a wrestler, with the present’ to the constant sense of the past fringing the current consciousness of characters in the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner.
The emphasis here is literary, not scientific. Arguably, Nalbantian fails to grasp wholeheartedly the opportunity to integrate the literature and science of memory. Nevertheless, there is much of interest here and much to learn from this sophisticated book.
(iv) Sketching invisible objects
Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt
[He painted many things, this Bruegel, that cannot be painted]
Abraham Ortelius, Album Amicorum (quoted by Michael Frayn in Headlong)
... the arts, which embrace not only all physically possible worlds but also all conceivable worlds innately interesting and congenial to the nervous system and thus, in the uniquely human sense, true.E. O. Wilson, Consilience
Art which speaks to us clearly or touches us deeply turns a key in the lock of the senses. But much successful art does more than open a door into the interior of our ‘adapted minds’ (Robert Solso, in The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain): it communicates a lived experience. This feat is greatly aided by the artistic use of metaphor, which exploits a key feature of our mental lives: that perception itself is metaphorical, "all seeing is ‘seeing as’" (Searle, 1992). The two remaining books under review address these central ideas.
Solso's The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain, written in amiably chatty if sometimes wordy prose, is pitched at an introductory level until past its mid-way mark. But in the closing chapters there is an interesting discussion of just these issues. Following Ernst Gombrich, the great historian and theorist of visual art, Solso emphasizes the grounding of art in the evolved features, some of them quirky, of our perceptual and cognitive systems: ‘our sense of harmony, beauty, aesthetics and even dissonance—indeed our entire understanding of art, is rooted in our neurophysiology, which formed cognitive structures for less elegant processing demands over many millions of years’.
Cartoons are perhaps the most familiar artistic examples of the economical use of ‘keys’ to visual recognition, exploiting the beholder's constant ‘effort after meaning’. Solso finds further illustrations of artists' intuitive explorations of the workings of the visual brain in the use of illusions and of two-dimensional cues to the third dimension in pictorial art. The selection of significant detail, the use of a carefully chosen set of keys, allows the artist to convey something of his ‘take’ on the visual scene before him. As Solso remarks in successive chapters, ‘all art is representational’, yet ‘all art is abstract’: I take this to mean that the artistic representation is always an abstraction, reflecting the choices and responses of the artist, rather than a photographic record of every visual detail, yet the abstraction is always a representation, hinting at plausible interpretations in terms of the familiar visual world. Solso describes art aptly as ‘visualised thought’—and the same could be said of perception itself. The suggestiveness of apparently unfinished work, which can be especially ‘lively’—for example, in the sketches of Leonardo and Michelangelo or the sculpture of Rodin—is relevant here: in making both the artist's and the beholder's share explicit, such work helps to emphasize and celebrate the creativity involved both in artistic endeavour and in the act of perception.
What of music, which many people find the most pure and powerful of all the arts, yet which has the least readily intelligible connection with our ordinary lives? It looks at first glance as if this medium is so abstract that expression is severed from meaning altogether, yet for many of us music provides the most eloquent representations of feeling on offer anywhere: consider the evocation of grief in Bach's Mass in B Minor or Barber's Adagio, of tender triumph at the climactic moments of Sibelius' symphonies, or of the spellbinding extinction of a joyful day at the close of Copland's Appalachian Spring. Yet it is perfectly true that we have no dictionary of musical meanings to guide our interpretations when a piece bemuses us. How does music manage to key into our feelings so successfully while bypassing conventional semantics?
Perhaps the clue lies in a word we often use of music: it ‘moves’ us. No other form of art speaks more directly to our feelings, but it speaks just as directly to our tapping feet and dancing bodies. Music is movement—the musician's—made audible: it begins with movement, ends in movement, and moves our emotions as it moves our limbs. Emotions—again the etymology points us in this direction—naturally express themselves in movement. We can hope to find deep affinities between music and the neurophysiology both of movement and mood. The idea that music reveals the ‘form of feeling’ may be more than a metaphor. Of all the arts, music holds out the greatest promise of explaining how ‘the qualitative and the quantitative fuse’ (Sacks, 2001), bridging the realms of matter, life and mind.
Anyone seeking a guide to the current state of knowledge about music and the brain need look no further than Peretz and Zatorre's The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. This superb collection of brief essays originated in a meeting sponsored by the New York Academy of Science in 2000. The editors raise all the salient questions in their preface: What does music have to tell us about the organization of the brain? Does the answer help us to understand the universal existence of music in human societies? What effect does the considerable rigour of musical training have on brain structure and function? How do culture and nature interact in the production and appreciation of music? The insights this book provides are too various and subtle to summarize here, and I strongly recommend that anyone interested should buy this book.
In the beginning was the Word—and the flautist's note, and the sketch on the wall of the cave. Perception itself is creative, imagination is always at work: the many forms of human art re-enact and celebrate these. I agree with Semir Zeki's remark in his interesting essay in Roses's Neurology of the Arts: ‘The primordial source of art is the knowledge-acquiring system of the brain, with all its splendours and shortcomings’. He identifies the sometimes painful discrepancy between our ideals and our reality as an important secondary source of art: this must be right, though art can also capture and delight in the passing hours, the momentary particular. Art and the brain both lie close to the heart of our human identity: these books provide valuable progress reports on the current study of their complex relationship, and point the way to a fruitful future.
Division of Clinical Neurosciences, The University of Edinburgh
References
Cadbury D. The dinosaur hunters: a story of scientific rivalry and the discovery of the prehistoric world. London: Fourth Estate; 2001.
Carroll L. Alice through the looking glass. London: Macmillan; 1872.
Lewis CS. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. London: Geoffrey Bles; 1950.
Proust M. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard; 1987.
Pullman P. The subtle knife. London: Scholastic Children's Books; 1997.
Rowling JK. Harry Potter and the philospher's stone. London: Bloomsbury; 1997.
Sacks O. Uncle Tungsten: memories of a chemical boyhood. London: Picador; 2001.
Searle JR. The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge (MA): T Press; 1992.
Tulving E. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology 1985; 1–12.
Wilson EO. Consilience: the unity of knowledge. London: Abacus; 1998.
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