Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 1

00:00:00 i'm edna session director of the helix center i want to welcome you all to these two days of round tables focusing around the ideas of abby warburg i would like to say primarily that i want to thank uh all of you who are here i realize it's an early morning time we are usually not here at this hour and i thank all the participants who've come from various places in the world

00:00:30 to be part of this meeting from our side i think rob panzer has done a tremendous amount of work to organize this and i'd like to thank him and i would like also to thank francois bijer who is here from london and who is director of the abbey warburg institute in london the beautiful poster that you see out there and the brochure that you have

00:01:01 here were all designed by him and sent to us from london so i'd like to thank him uh we are very honored today here to have the uh ambassador francois barra from switzerland and i'm going to ask him to say a couple of words

00:01:34 ladies and gentlemen it's a pleasure for me to be here and to have a switzerland associated to your symposium you may ask why why switzerland is associated well you know the relationship between warburg and and switzerland kreuzlingen binswanger clinique bellevue but more important association is through the agalma foundation which supports this this symposium the agarma foundation is based in geneva and is supported

00:02:07 by another foundation called the wilsdorf foundation which owns the rolex watch company so it's really rooted in geneva and as an important i would say an important support as the mission of the agalma foundation is to explore the relationship between neuroscience psychoanalysis and art and the two persons in charge of the foundation are here today pierre magistrati and francois and

00:02:38 francois and the idea of this symposium if i understand well is born or was born from a conversation between professor galese from parma pierre and francois in a train between geneva and lausanne so so they were talking about warburg and about his concept of science without name which basically

00:03:08 uh tries to bring together various disciplines anthropology history of art and biology and the objective of the agalma foundation is also to build bridges between the sciences and and art and humanities so they said that's interesting warburg as a resonance for us means something for us so let's try to do something and then they spoke to

00:03:39 ed narcissian and today we are here so that's the link to switzerland i wish you a very successful conference and have a good day thank you hello a very brief introduction now actually ambassador baras you can see you know

00:04:09 how professional our our ambassadors because he told everything i asked to tell he really made his homework and and said everything i wanted to say about the agalma foundation so thank you also i thank you ambassador baras anyway as president of the agarma foundation it gives me great pleasure to um to welcome you all here it's true that we uh we actually had the idea of this uh symposium uh victoria francois myself one evening

00:04:41 after i should say there was some facilitator uh facilitating substances like wine we actually had quite some wine and then suddenly we had this idea of organizing something here and more seriously the again as mentioned very clearly by ambassador baras the agalma foundation as as its mission to try to bridge um build bridges between neuroscience

00:05:13 psychoanalysis culture and society and uh in these days i think of super specialization and where um academic life uh has uh lost a little bit of its freedom i think i i can say this after having been in academic life for 30 years it's really very refreshing and very important that there are places like the agalma foundation and i think the helix foundation where there is a freedom of thinking a

00:05:46 freedom of making connection thinking outside the box and and trying to to move uh fields forward not necessarily uh in a very disciplinary way and and this is really the the goal of the foundation um in terms of activities the foundation organizes discussions i should say between a guest that francois and i invite and then we speak for about 45 minutes i

00:06:17 have to say we were very much influenced by what ed had launched many years ago with the philosophers foundation a very again very free discussion on not necessarily even on a specific topic topic but just in our case what we we try to do is what we say an experiment with someone outside neuroscience and psychoanalysis and see how he or she particularly from the in the case of the

00:06:48 art and culture how we we can you know have some ideas emerge from this kind of strange mix between neuroscience psychoanalysis and and and someone from the cultural world and these uh discussions are filmed again very much inspired by what ed has launched and then they are on youtube so if you look on the agalma website you can see we have now about i think over 20 of such uh in discussions and you know you may find them interesting

00:07:19 some of them are in english i have to say most of them are in french but then other activities of the foundations are to organize occasionally small workshops like this one we just had one last week in geneva for the 100th anniversary of the death of ferdinand de saussure the linguistic from geneva it turns out just out of curiosity you may be interested that a member of the agalmath of the board of the agalma foundation is a christian de saussure a descendant of ferdinand de society so

00:07:51 that was even more appropriate for us to discuss this and we had again every little bit in a smaller scale but the same idea neuroscientists psychoanalysts linguists philosophers was i think quite productive and we will have actually a small publication come out of this workshop and then we we try to sponsor certain uh research efforts which for those of you who have tried to engage in

00:08:21 experimental approaches bringing together psychoanalysis and neuroscience uh it's it's quite difficult if without kind of denaturing both of them so it's a really very difficult exercise but we think it's a worthwhile exercise and so we have some some fellows who work on this topic actually we have uh with christine alberini who is quite unique because she's a prominent neuroscientist and also a psychoanalyst here at nyu and uh so we have a project with her and we have a

00:08:52 couple of other projects at the federal institute of technology where where i work so this is to give you the the context and the and the interests of the agalma foundation and it looks like i mean looking at the program and i'd like to thank ed of course and all the people who contributed to organizing uh and bringing together uh the people we have now an experiment that will go on in the style we we like at the agalma foundation and i think also at the helix foundation so thank you very much and i hope we have a

00:09:24 very productive two days thank you pierre i didn't say anything about helix i assume everybody knows about helix but if you don't i'll be happy to talk to you after the meeting um so what i'm going to do is introduce the uh participants in this round table in the briefest way possible and then we'll get going

00:09:59 i will start with ludovica loomer who is sitting there and she's a philosopher and a neuro neurobiologist and has worked with samir zeki who is one of the founders i guess of the neuro aesthetics movement in london next to her is vittorio galese who is professor of physiology in the department of neuroscience of the university of parma and well

00:10:29 known for his discovery of the mirror neurons sitting there is anjon chatterjee who is a neurologist and member of the center for cognitive neuroscience and the center for neuroscience and society at the university of pennsylvania and i believe he has a book coming out on euro aesthetics or it's already here i don't know but it's certainly coming out this week david friedberg who has participated in

00:11:00 a number of our roundtables in the past is professor of art history at university of columbia and director of the italian academy for advanced studies in america and uh finally andrea pinotti is uh teaches aesthetics at the university de la studi di milano and is director the director of the program at the college international the philosophy in paris on the project monuments

00:11:33 correct okay so we'll get going to get this round table started i asked vittorio to just say very very brief words a few words to get us oriented on the subject and then everybody else would jump in thank you thank you ed um it's a great pleasure to

00:12:03 be here uh particularly because uh that dream that was conceived in in switzerland between geneva and lausanne is now real i mean we are here we will spend two days discussing this amazing uh figure of uh uh abi warburg i think we begin to appreciate how innovative

00:12:34 his approach was perhaps particularly today when we are experiencing a new way of a new form of dialogue between disciplines that at first sight may look as remote as possible like the study of the brain and the study of art of culture and warburg embodies uh i think in a marvelous way

00:13:05 this curiosity and this attempt to bridge a different field of expertise particularly because cognitive neuroscience is very popular every every day we read the back the big headlines in the newspaper or we discover what romantic love is all about we discovered a tiny little area where beauty sits and the like this um i would say uh uh outrageously

00:13:38 excessive form of reductionism needs to be tempered by an open dialogue with people that because of their background tend to look at the individual in in a more holistic way so we must bring back the brain to where it belongs to the body in the first place but this brain body complex it makes sense to study it

00:14:10 to the extent that even if we move from a methodological reductionist approach so we are dealing with the nuts and bolts so to speak of what it means to be human the ultimate goal must be to go back to the holistic view of human nature and if we want to do that we cannot live out uh from our investigation uh artistic expression creativity and how this relates to something which

00:14:42 is hidden in our psychology so i think that psychoanalysis neuroscience uh the humanities broadly speaking now finally are in um in a position to to collaborate to this very exciting uh enterprise of shedding light on who we are uh exploiting also uh this new level of description that cognitive

00:15:12 neuroscience and i think a prominent figure to bless so to speak this enterprise i couldn't imagine a better figure than abigail book so as i was thinking about today's meeting i thought i didn't think of myself as a neuro-aesthetician i think of myself as an art historian who makes use of tools that seem to me that will illuminate

00:15:44 the objects of our studies and as many of you know i have long insisted on the importance of opening one's mind to science and not getting too anxious about the alleged reductivism of science but as i was thinking about today's symposium i realized that probably once one was a child and suddenly one is old and probably i may have been in this audience the first person to have gone to the warburg institute um so i wondered when i could just begin

00:16:14 with a little background um so i arrived in oxford to do my graduate work in art history at the end of 1969 and francis haskell who had just taken over from another great and extraordinary hermeneut and art historian edgar vint who was a warburgian of course was a high british positivist and he looked at me and he said you can't study here go to the warburg institute in london so i went to the warburg institute so that was at the end of 1969

00:16:45 and as i was reflecting on the direction of warburg and studies and the ways in which many of us here including myself and vittorio have sort of seen the links between a b var book and neuroscience i realized that it wasn't always so because when i got to the warburg institute the emphasis was completely on both michael backs and all and anne sconbrick were completely on the nagleben there antiqua gombrick had done his own stuff on perception as we all know in art and

00:17:15 delusion but the real bergen work at that time and throughout the 1970s and even into the 1980s was really about iconography and the night lavender antica so when i wrote the power of images sort of thinking about the other s aspect of a b var book which has now come to the fore in other words this kind of psychological roots of human responses to images embodied above all in the whole notion

00:17:45 of the pathos formula that patos formal in other words those aspects of art which move us because of the collocation of emotion and movement in the body and its effects on the bodies of others which of course tied up eventually with the work of the mirror neuron group in parma this was really a very late comer on the nagleben of warburg himself in london no one would have thought that new the cognitive neuroscience

00:18:16 offered any access to the works of a b valve to the work of av barber so actually this is all a late development the whole it was always there in varburg the notion of the emotional consequences of moving drapery and dancing bodies and so on but nobody until fairly recently i mean we have lots of people here chris wood has written eloquently about it chris johnson also um but for a long time the original conception the really original aspect of

00:18:48 warbucks contribution was relegated to this um more more positivist decoding of the great iconographies of the renaissance so now we have reclaimed what seems to be the most moving aspect as it were of abe varberg and it's finding its fruition in the kinds of work which we have seen done amongst the cognitive neurosciences with the development of the neuroscience of emotion emotion movement and so on so we can

00:19:19 move ahead in this direction but i just thought that that historical background would be useful adding perhaps another issue to this question of the historical background more generally as regards german culture in the 19th century victoria you talked about us about this figure special figure of barborg as a possible bridge between natural sciences and humanities

00:19:54 we know that the german philosophical and epistemological discourse was responsible for the division the terminus technicals between geistes wiesenschaften on one side and natorvis and schaften on the other side nevertheless it was not infrequent that students and scholars training in one field two courses in the other verbal

00:20:27 himself is an example an emblematic example because he was trained as an art historian but in the 90s he went to berlin to attend courses in medicine at the faculty of medicine there he studied neurology and and you find in the fragments on the psychology of expression very interesting sketches and drawings on the structure of the nerves on the problem of the reflex

00:20:58 and and there are drawings about the relationship between stimulus and response and then he read neurologists like eval herring and the very important lecture in 1870 on memory as organized matter and then among his sources there was richard zamon a zoologist and neurologist as well who gave him the terminus techniques

00:21:30 name engram so he was really imbued with this literature and i think that just taking one of the most famous concepts in varbrook's discourse sofrozoone the ancient greek word that it translates with bazon and height i i'm not sure what an english possible translation would be caution

00:22:01 prudence being wise not being impulsive there you you find this idea of distance as interval paused as crucial it was not only a question of symbolic distance the one that he discusses for example in the serpent ritual lecture that modern technology destroys the distance that magic and

00:22:32 art had instituted between men and and world he speaks also of distance in a neurological way meaning the distance between the stimulus the response and the human being has the creature that can procrastinate that can introduce mediation postponement a creature that is not obliged to immediately

00:23:04 respond to the stimulus but that can respond and zenon was very important to him in this context in a procrastinated way in a delayed way image plays in this frame i think uh very fundamental role because image has a biological meaning in this biological utility in helping men in negotiating

00:23:36 between stimulus and response postponing the response even for centuries even for thousands of years and so this idea of stretching round bankroll the space in between the space for thought the space for memory unducks realm all terms that verbal evokes as a constellation around the surface unit term i think they can also be

00:24:07 usefully investigated from a neurological perspective rooted in those young years of studies in berlin i wonder if i could uh pose a question that as i've been listening to this that i'm still trying to get my head around which is on the one hand there are cultural theories and of which i

00:24:40 am relatively ignorant of and on the other hand there is psychoanalysis of which i am relatively ignorant and esconds together is bad is that like a double negative and then there's neuroscience of which i have some knowledge and and in part i'm trying to figure out what the

00:25:10 relationships of these things are and on the one hand you can think of cultural theories as something that is an emergent property of a whole lot of things but can't be reduced to what one individual person or what in one individual brain is doing and at the other end at least my medical school knowledge of psychoanalysis is a deep dive into the individual at the level of the

00:25:41 content of what they're talking about what they're thinking about what they're dreaming about what they associate so on and so forth but neuroscience in some ways seems to be somewhere in between at least the way it's typically practiced which is on the one hand our methods are driven to try to generalize it's the inherent nature of much of empirical research is you want to get generalizable principles but not typically so generalizable that they are

00:26:11 applicable to cultural theories and the very inherent nature of generalizing is that we typically tend to be less interested in the individual right the individual becomes one exemplar of a general principle that we're trying to derive right and psychoanalysis on the one hand seems to be seems to drill down at the individual and the content of the experience of the individual that we typically try to do away with in in most neuroscience studies

00:26:43 and but our generalization doesn't generalize to the point of having at least in a transparent way making contact with with cultural notions and and i'm just curious what people think about is this are these tensions that are inherent in the disciplines or are these just historical tensions that have to be traversed and and settings like this might help in that regard

00:27:14 and it's my turn to answer thank you very much it's a small issue actually one of the things that was fascinating me more the most about warburg is that is expressing i'm not sure for the first time in the history of thought because we can always go back to the greeks for almost everything but

00:27:44 exactly the tension between subjective and objective individuality and socially and i think i don't know is one is one of the most striking thing that make us what we are this tension of being a self but this self is developed and and we reach our concept of being who we are in the

00:28:16 interaction with the others so this tension is exactly what make us what we are but i think at the beginning of the century at the end of the 1800s beginning of the 1900s there was this crack somehow that opened a discussion that we are treated we are still trying to to solve today even with the songs of yesterday of joseph lee do this mind body

00:28:49 matter over mind and mind over matter and this crack open up a sort of vulcan from which came out the destroying of all our stability and certainty about our conscious life about space and time about the possibility of measurement so and everything came out at the same time and even barbour was there at the same

00:29:20 time and was striking uh you know with the notion of magical and unreal and art science religion because we don't talk about it but it's still there it's a big part of our life anyway we're there to try to find a solution about this gap to to to give some some anchored which all done because otherwise we would

00:29:50 collapse into this crack and opening this this whole cane of things we had to find sort of solution we had to find our way through not to to build a bridge and and i think barbara was amazing in trying to do that probably was not absolutely probably i'm not an expert on i read quite a lot about what he wrote but i'm not an expert on him but but

00:30:23 it was it was one of the first to try maybe unconsciously to find a bridge to overlap this gap and this was you know most of our life is in individual experience we live with deep-seated in culture and culture is a big part of what we are but we live in in our individual life and experiences and so he describes the experiences for example in front of a work or not

00:30:54 of art as the most private thing is empathic is there is talking to you and you have to give life to the image you have in front but then you have to insert in in the history in the culture there is no no history of culture without the history of an idea so to make sense of this individual experience you have to insert it in the development of of something broader which is more or

00:31:24 less the history of we cannot even say the western thought because it was linked to everything and everywhere it destroyed completely space and time this this symbol could travel and live without barriers in every time and every space and this tension between the private experience of something and the objective is exactly what art is about and what art came about when you know when there was this huge

00:31:56 break in the post-modernism you know art became became an idea more than an image duchamp was the master of that i was putting as in front of urinal saying now you have to perceive it as a piece of art and until you don't perceive it as a piece of art this is not going to be art so you have to make this become something which can travel in history so i don't know it's it's funny what you said because it's something that

00:32:28 that i'm struggling with trying to to make sense of it of this tension between the aesthetic private experience and the history i think uh anyone raised a very important point about the relevance and the specific status of cognitive neuroscience when addressing uh these specific topics that traditionally

00:33:01 as andrea was reminding us of uh belong to these separate domains nato vision shaft and geistness mr shaft i think it's time to seriously question this distinction and division however we should also uh bear in mind that when we speak of cognitive neuroscience we basically describe a methodological approach so we all recognize ourselves as cognitive

00:33:32 neuroscientists to the extent that we all have a daily practice with these very expensive toys we call fmri high density eg pet and the like but you can use employ these toys to ask completely different kind of questions and it's true that to lay the grounding the the foundational basis of

00:34:03 an approach to human nature based on this specific methodological approach it is unavoidable to start uh with an approach that so to speak a privilege generalizing results where we take the average undergraduate most of the time white first world college student

00:34:34 to be a sort of typical exemplar of of the human species so to speak and i i mean i don't need to point out that this is a very uh not only reductive but uh heavily biased view of human nature

00:35:05 indeed in the field of the study of emotions people there is a growing number of people also of colleagues that begin to question the supposed universality of some of the the findings upon which the empirical study of emotion was based uh starting from the second half of last century and interestingly more and more of our colleagues are exactly thinking about how to study

00:35:37 this distinctive aspect of human nature which is the individual quality of being a human being and it is remarkable that as soon as you decide to leave behind this approach to the supposed generality of the finding you're up to trying to dig more

00:36:08 about the distinctive relationship between how your brain works and what your personal life history was your attachment style uh the early experiences uh you you had uh with your parents with with the with other individuals all of a sudden you realize that you spot incredible differences uh i'm thinking about a study where people were required to watch videos

00:36:39 portraying the facial expression of their partner in pain and it turns out that according to your personality profile different brain networks activate in spite of the exactly the same cognitive response when you are asked to evaluate the unpleasantness and the intensity of the pain that supposedly your partner is uh feeling uh

00:37:10 by merely watching to this video showing the the facial expression of your partner this cognitive evaluation is the same in all participants however when you look at which part of their brain is active uh you you discover that people with a different affective style activate the the standard called the circuit for uh the empathy for pain the anterior part of the insula and the artery

00:37:40 cigarette cortex while other individuals uh don't they tend to activate more the visual part of the brain the mesial aspect of the of the brain part of the what we call the default mode network uh the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex so they most likely experience that particular image of their partner in pain in a completely different way which can be partly also identified

00:38:13 with our peculiar methodological reductionist approach so i think there's a lot to do and this is why i think this time is really exciting for all of us because now that we learn how to use this machine we have perfectly familiar with the instruction manual so to speak we know what to expect from a technical point of view we know the limitation of the technique but at the same time we should perhaps

00:38:43 think a lot more and someone said a long time ago that science doesn't think i think it's a way to extreme view but when reading some neuroscientific paper sometimes i think heidegger was right so there's a lot of room to improve uh theoristic value of this particular approach that i repeat offers you a further perspective on human nature

00:39:15 which will never be able to uh give the final answer to the question that keep us busy all the time who we are but i think it it can bring in new data new perspective that if interestingly discussed with the contribution of scholars from other discipline can

00:39:46 can lead us to very interesting uh results i think so i'm rather optimistic you want to say something i'll wait so um i just wanted to say uh you know although victoria and i have known each other for a long time worked together i noticed a slight backsliding here and i'm not sure that he's making unnecessary concessions but never mind i think the point is that and i'll explain in a moment i think anjan's question is a really

00:40:16 important one it's one which the people in the humanities who whom i work with mostly ask all the time i mean the question is how can the generalizing aspects of science be reconciled with the status of the individual the effects of cultures and contexts so you know whenever i hear this question i always inclined to say it's not a view which is well received but i'm inclined to say what's so difficult to understand about

00:40:48 the situation i'll tell you why i think this what i think has happened now as the sciences have come closer to the humanities it's offered us what offered us an extraordinary opportunity and that is the best neuroscientists we just heard are attentive to context there's no question about that but how do we arrive at the understanding of the individual with all this generalization around us and this is what i'm trying to what i try to say is not so difficult to

00:41:20 understand in order to grasp the effects of individual contexts of past histories both personal and historical we still need to know what happens in the brain of all individuals possibly even primates but neuroscience also gives us the tools this has been the great privilege for me it also gives the one the tools to see and to understand better what happens

00:41:51 when the human brain is modulated by the effects of individual cognitive experiences individual inputs individual circumstances there is no in my view no distinction really between the task of the neuroscientists in establish basic structures in the brain and figuring out how individuality is constituted on the basis of those you know we all have an amygdala if the amygdala is lesioned you just walk straight into the traffic across

00:42:23 the way amygdala is activated when you have a fair response now obviously some of us know snakes better than others you know herpetologists are probably less likely to be afraid of seeing a cobra at least seeing a i when i see a snake i jump away i don't make any distinctions any taxonomic distinctions between those that are poisonous but when you see as joe ledoux as shown you know when you see something that moves a bit like a snake everyone is going to have a startled reaction and thereupon succeed i mean you know

00:42:55 the great beauty of the neurosciences now it also gives us a sense of temporal operations and temporal distinctions within the brain so i think the prospect here for understanding the individual is not curiously diminished by the kinds of techniques which we have available but in fact enhanced and that's why the back sliding i just want to briefly i don't think you need backslide away so we need to slide away too far from basic emotions and so on and so forth to be more outspoken i'm really annoyed keeping reading

00:43:28 articles where the it seems that people are even unaware of the absurdity of translating the personal level description at the level of uh typically amenable to to our approach so i'm um i'm not reducing the impact of neuroscience actually the opposite i mean i'm a neuroscientist that's my job i mean i'm not an art historian i'm

00:43:59 happy to spend time with with with people like you but my approach is completely different what i'm i meant to say is that there is not enough people are not enough aware that our approach could be a lot more fruitful if we would abandon this kind of neurohubris leading us to establish a one-to-one

00:44:30 map between the words we employ to describe our inner life our emotion our experiences and brain networks because such a one-to-one map between words and neurons probably doesn't exist so the the methodological reductionism that became available by the possibility of investigating human nature with the tools of cognitive

00:45:01 neuroscience is a an invaluable tool enabling us to deconstruct such words and for example showing that many people got it right when they were saying that vision in a way is a sort of haptic experience uh i'm thinking about merlot pontiff for example now with our expensive toys we can show that merlot ponte was right

00:45:34 because indeed all of our perception in a way is synesthetic so it is really becoming hard to find uh parts of the brain that are unimodal even primary sensory areas it has been shown the visual cortex can be driven by auditory stimuli primary auditory cortex activity can be modulated

00:46:04 by visual stimuli we were the first to show that your somatosensory cortex is activated visually when you see the tactile experience on someone else's body and the like so it is really our our theoristic value of this approach is greatly amplified is if before addressing this empirical

00:46:34 question you are the broader picture of the cultural context and you discover that many people were smarter than you are and gave serious thought to this issue and came up with very interesting solutions so i'm not denying the heuristic value of cognitive neuroscience actually the opposite what i i would like to see it employed in in a better way than it still is by many of our colleagues that's my point make a few comments

00:47:05 from the psychoanalytic end of things i was very struck about uh with what you said about warburg's interest in the neuron and the uh transmission of the impulse because that's what freud was interested also and when he worked on the project for scientific psychology that's essentially what he was doing and what he was trying to do was take his observations which came primarily

00:47:36 from observing patients who at the time were diagnosed as hysterics and had all sorts of crazy symptoms and tried to see how he could explain those symptoms by understanding the function and the energies that moved within neurons via the axon and so on and he also talked about therefore the blocking of the impulse which is eventually what led to the theory of repression which then

00:48:07 became the central theory in psychoanalysis because repression is what then defined and led to the notion of a dynamic unconscious which is as freud himself distinguished it from other unconscious the dynamic unconscious is what then influenced you in life by uh running your life a certain way as opposed to the other way he also of course did do a lot of generalizing

00:48:37 and he at times generalized too much and part of those generalizations were the uh and i should also just say i think because it's not often recognized that three or four of freud's major works took uh occurred within a period of two and a half to three years neuropsychology of defense studies in hysteria

00:49:07 interpretation of dreams and the project now he was using some cocaine at the time but it's a tremendous amount of work that came out from the one brain but one of the things he did and because of the time you know he was working on this and things were not as complex and complexity wasn't recognized the way it is today is that he did create some simplifying formula so that you had

00:49:38 psychosexual phases of development you had things like edible complex which then served to generalize so people had castration anxieties people so it wasn't just on the individual level but was generalized and then applied to larger issues psychoanalysis i think has increasingly uh without saying so moved away from that and it has become a lot more about uh the careful

00:50:12 long-term intense investigation of how one person's brain mind work and in every possible detail that can be made available by the patient in the mental frame of investigating himself or herself on the couch four or five times a week and that does give us significant amount of information and what it does give us also is what you

00:50:42 were saying is that everybody smiles everybody dances everybody says they love but it's tremendously different and that investigation i think is very important when neuroscience became so popular i mean there wasn't even neuroscience when i was in medical school we talked about neurophysiology neurochemistry neuroscience but neuroscience suddenly

00:51:13 took off there was also an over excitement from the psychoanalytic end and similar things that are being done in neuroscience putting somebody in an fmri and saying there is there is the point of love happened in psychoanalysis by saying go where this behavior is because of this part of the brain it's inevitable those kinds of things but i had a very interesting experience yesterday i was honored by christina to be invited to her lab and i

00:51:44 went to her lab and one of the graduate students presented his research to my mind i'm not a scientist it was very carefully done and well presented about an idea which he thought also confirmed freud's idea namely what we take for granted that his childhood experiences influence you later in life but he did that with rats and showed how

00:52:17 the effect of an electric shock and then showed it at what periods it becomes uh if you will a memory that has an impact on future behavior and at which point it doesn't but but then i i was thinking about this and looking from the point of view of a psychoanalyst i was asking myself when a baby has experiences he doesn't or she doesn't just have one thing happen like an electric shock

00:52:47 but has a number of things and that these things interact so the electric shock in the baby hypothetical electric shock may have an influence on the way he's going to uh feel about the milk and the way he's going to feel about the milk is going to influence something else so that very early on and the the the graduate student showed this beautiful slide of synaptic and neuronal development

00:53:20 between the ages of six months two years and four years and it's incredible the change it's like you have a handful of neurons and synapses and then you have like a jungle and so in this process a lot of things are happening but they are all interacting with each other and so i think this is where the fields can come together because you can have you can just do that study or you can begin to think of

00:53:52 it in a different context in a larger way and see and begin to study how those experiences affect each other and what the consequence of it is which may then have a connection to how and this is the subject of this round table you do or do not react or appreciate art and so since you wrote a paper on this just recently maybe you should say a few words about yeah we we we decided to start

00:54:22 uh investigating aesthetic experience not just dealing with notions that are so heavily culturally determined like the sense of beauty for example but we we were interested in investigating to which extent when you behold some artwork particularly we decided with david to start from the most difficult part of

00:54:54 of this enterprise namely to see what what's going on in the brain body system of a beholder when there's no body to resonate along with so we decided to start not with the figurative art but with the modern abstract art and the first experiment was done on lucho fontana's cuts and the second one that just came out uh on the brush strokes of franz klein and although we employed two different

00:55:26 approaches we we employed high density eeg and in the first study we just were happy to measure the level of the synchronization of the motor system of the beholder so they are watching a static image a cut by lucho fontana and a control stimulus where the cat is substituted by a black line with the same length and width of the cut but what is missing is the dynamic aspect of the static image namely the shade produced by

00:55:59 the cut in in the depth of the canvas and we never mentioned the word art beauty aesthetic experience we only said to our volunteers you're going to see images on the computer screen please watch them carefully and try not to move as much as you can because even blinking can introduce artifacts when you record brain activity with this net on the head and the results were quite interesting and were fully

00:56:30 compatible with the hypothesis david and i put forward in 2007 namely that when you see uh an object a visual object which is the consequence of someone's hand gesture the brain of the beholder so to speak produces an embodied simulation of the gesture and what you see is the reenactment of that gesture which is purely uh

00:57:01 simulated because we recorded also the muscle activity of beholders and their muscles were completely silent but a part of their motor system was so to speak reenacting the gesture of performed by lucho fontana and of course we we decided to employ uh lucha fontana's artworks probably a cat uh done by by myself or by uh alessandro milta the main author of this

00:57:31 paper uh would have worked the same although i was talking with the curator of the contemporary art museum in prato the pechi museum and he was telling me you can cut a canvas a thousand times but you will never accomplish the end result uh lucha fontana uh and probably is right but uh nevertheless and the second study was on the brush strokes

00:58:01 of franz klein here uh we had a more sophisticated approach that enable us also to locate uh the sources of the signal in the brain and so we we found three components so our analysis became a little more sophisticated and you david would be happy to hear this because uh you left behind the infullum part of of aesthetic experience you want to know more about the relationship between the

00:58:31 brain and the evaluative aspect of aesthetic judgment so basically we found three networks a sensory motor network which most likely responsible of the enactment of the gesture employed by the artist so dynamic so charged with emotion then we found activation in the orbit of frontal cortex which is probably i am very cautious to establish this relationship

00:59:03 because otherwise i would be guilty of the same oversimplified vision of the brain i was blaming before but nevertheless there is some evidence that links the activation of this ventral part of the frontal cortex with the reward so probably has to do with the joy or the positive feeling induced by the

00:59:34 aesthetic experience and then we had the third cluster of activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which most likely has something to do with the more detached and evaluative observation of the artwork then we recently also investigated this relationship between the gesture employed to produce a static graphic sign and what's going

01:00:04 on in the bottle system of the beholder this time we employ the handwritten roman alphabet letters chinese idiograms and scribbles all three kind of stimuli activate the motor system of the beholder but they do it with a different intensity and with a different uh temporal dynamic it is as if and i'm very cautious this is an hypothesis that has to be verified it looks

01:00:36 as if the motor system of the beholder were unconsciously capable of distinguished symbolic graphic sign which lead to a stronger resonance from the scribbles which have no symbolic value which brings in a further question is there any bio mechanic primitive shared by all forms of symbolic written language this is an

01:01:08 open question no one uh so far addressed empirically but these preliminary results seem to raise this as a possibility that can be empirically investigated so so far we we focused on this relationship the immediate relationship between something which is static but at the same time is very intensively dynamic

01:01:38 and we believe that we discover one component that gives this dynamicity to something which is a stat there is a wonderful the cunic at the moment the blue one i don't remember the the title of the painting and every time i i see it i stand in front of it i i feel moved not only metaphorically but physically and i think

01:02:10 we we can describe this component of the aesthetic experience we can explain why we are so moved that something that is still but uh induces a lot of of movement and this is a possible way editorial you said that you didn't mention the world art aesthetic to the students or whatever so and were they aware that these

01:02:42 were works of art well indeed at the end of the experiment we asked them a lot of questions as you can imagine we asked them um to rate the quantity of dynamicity of movement they could spot in the static images we asked them if they saw them before we asked them if they considered uh either the original artworks or the control stimuli as artwork and one of the most

01:03:12 interesting result of this study is that the same effect could be detected in all participants no matter how acquainted they were and so why don't you speak about aesthetic experience so how can you speak about aesthetic experience if they are not aware that this something link i mean how do you define aesthetics well because for them is something no i don't have chemo

01:03:51 you say that i feel moved so you have you're aware of something happening in these uh experiments you did were the activations similar whether the person said at the end they were moved they were or not there is all all people rated as more moving the original artworks than the control stimuli irrespectively from their knowledge

01:04:22 those images to belong to art or not so there is a a tight relationship between the dynamicity of the image recognized by the beholder and the degree of activation of their motor system then coming back to your question of course there's nothing intrinsically aesthetic in a sense in this experiment although the easiest way to answer your

01:04:53 question would be to go back to the etymology of the word eye stasis okay so to to put it shortly but i'm happy to leave it to to david we never claimed that aesthetic experience is the activation of the motor system of mirroring mechanism period what we said that our point is that aesthetic experience is a multi-layered

01:05:23 enterprise and one key dimension of aesthetic experience besides the socio-cultural context in which it occurs the framing effect blah blah blah one key ingredient is this embody ingredient and this embodied ingredient is present in our relationship with all kinds of images not necessarily because of their artistic status which by the way is

01:05:55 historically determined i was reading a paper in the new york times about a recent research showing that reading novels uh leads you to a more empathic and they were making a distinction between highbrow literature and i don't know what they employed 50 shades of grey this kind of uh uh we call it uh uh one of them must have been more yeah

01:06:25 so and a journalist was asking me what do you make of this distinction i said well uh one should be very careful because balzac who is now revered as a classic was publishing uh some of his comedo men in newspapers so all of these notion judgments evaluation are very much historically determined even the very same notion of bert is historically determined

01:06:59 that's why the tension between the objective way of looking at it and the subjective is something which you cannot get rid i mean you when you talk about art you cannot avoid feeling this distension between art art is made by by the evolution of culture art is art is not only a subjective thing if you if you if you are subjective in front of something and you do not recognize this

01:07:30 as art probably is not i mean it has to make sense yeah but what we now call art for example think about people putting their hands in uh covered with pigments on on caves we call that art now for them probably had a completely different meaning it was religion it was the possibility to

01:08:00 get into a different dimension nobody really knows what was the meaning of this practice but still i mean uh even if you uh bracket uh this sociocultural historical aspect that changed a long time there is something i think intimately related to our own human nature which is a a notion that for many decades uh was considered politically incorrect

01:08:32 okay the human being is a construction like foucault put it but this construction is made of bricks that are always the same that's the point and cognitive neuroscience can reveal the nature of those people has been waiting to yes i think that a word evoked by by ed should be introduced in this constellation that is inhibition i think that also david is working on on this notion because when victorious

01:09:03 says that our response to images is a sort of motion and emotion response so there is this idea of a motor reaction the question is in the aesthetic attitude where is the threshold between emotion that remains at a possible virtual or quasi-virtual response reenactment virtual and body

01:09:34 simulation and when for example in front of some images very often religious images we have we are elicited to a real response in vandalism for example or in iconoclasm david here is a specialist of these reactions there you have violent responses and there the motor system response to images in a very effective

01:10:04 way somehow opposing the idea that the image as i evoked in my first intervention is a mediation between the stimulus and the response there in vandalism in iconoclasm image seems rather to be a sort of a bomb eliciting a very violent reaction i think that this is important also because i have started a work

01:10:34 research comparing some images in which verbal was very interested into images that represent inhibition rembrandt an etching showing medea at the wedding of jason and krause and she is deciding to kill her kids but she has not already killed them she's there in the shadow thinking of the strategy of the decision

01:11:08 but she hasn't taken the decision definitely yet or again rembrandt the claudius chevilles a painting uh barbara was very fond of he had a copy made for the institute and the cop is still hanging there today kivilis is there with the batavians gathered around the sacred table they are deciding to go against the romans the invaders but

01:11:40 they haven't decided it yet so what they will do freud moses in that essay freud collects opinions from the kunstwistenschaft from burkat from wolflin and they all stress the fact that moses is in them is represented by michelangelo in the very

01:12:10 moment preceding the action freud describes and of course he is very interested in in the foot and the position of the angle of the foot of the statue and we know that barbara was obsessed with feet and the nympha's feet and if you compare the gradiva food you find that this gradiva food is very similar to the moses one almost a recta in a 90 degrees

01:12:40 so this is a lestings lancome this is the pregnant moment before the decision and this elicits i think a very interesting kind of empathy in the beholder that i would call the energetic or narrative empathy because your imagination starts working there and you start asking yourself what is he going to do is he going to do to slash his brother

01:13:12 and all the rave party around the golden calf or deciding something else we know the story of course from the from the holy text but we can also imagine possible different options and this is a saturation of narrative into a single image it is an image of inhibition it is an image of self control it is an image of the sofrozone again of bisonite of

01:13:44 caution of pre-decision which is i think could be quite interesting to to investigate even in the perspective of visual and motor systems yeah i'm hesitant to talk because it's not in direct response to what you said but i do want to pick up some of the themes that have come up uh one this idea is you said very early influences well the

01:14:14 influences actually go quite early there's evidence for example that what a mother ingests in the third trimester has an influence on the taste that the child will later have right and taste is a it's an evaluative judgment it's a preference um so these influences go go very very early even before even before people are born the question of this relationship between the individual experience and what can

01:14:46 be generalized or how do we deal with that there have been two strategies uh in in cognitive neuroscience and one i think in part you alluded to which was freud's roots which came out of charcoal's clinic and that there is a long history of careful observations of individual patients and trying to make inferences of how systems work on the basis of the systematic way in which brain damage

01:15:18 produces consequences and i would take one minor exception to what vittorio said which is i do not think cognitive neuroscience is a method i think imaging has largely overwhelmed the public imagination of cognitive neuroscience but it it is fundamentally asking questions about what the brain base is for behavior is and this goes back to the same intellectual climate that freud was working on that that

01:15:49 warburg stepped into you can take it back to to broca wernicke lichtheim lissa our lipman these are the people that set up set out the agenda and the framework that we're still dealing with and so um part of what got me interested in neuroesthetics was from the observation that when patients have brain damage some patients that are artists that they continue to produce art and their art is actually this is the exception not the rule but

01:16:20 their art is actually better or received as better than what it was before this is the only major cognitive system where that observation has been made right there are sensory phenomenon in which that observation has been made but if you talk about language if you talk about any complex phenomenon this kind of paradoxical facilitation in the setting of brain damage is something that has only really been reported in art and that's telling us something important it's telling us something important

01:16:50 about the the biologic uh infrastructure that is that in the context of producing art is sufficiently flexible and one thing that these sort of detailed examinations of single cases i think can really be illuminating in a way that you as you were suggesting that freud did you take individual patients and then you try to generalize from that in a way the analysis can only be done on individuals because as soon as you take a group

01:17:20 you're washing away what is most interesting about that behavior the second strategy that i think vittoria alluded to which is that in cognitive neuroscience there has been an interest in in individual differences and i'll give you an example of art study we did which has been presented in abstract form but not written up which is there's a there's a fundamental question of if you say um do you like a rothko painting or do you like copper that there is nothing inherently correct

01:17:52 about which answer you give right this is an individual difference thing some people like abstract art some people like representational art some people like historic art some people like contemporary art so on and so forth so when you're dealing with that kind of massive variability how do you approach this as a scientist and what we did was and this was with a group of schizophrenics and people with schizophrenia as well as people uh you know with the normal controls

01:18:22 and basically did the kind of experiment where people are shown pairs of paintings and they say which is better which you like more right and you go through a whole series of these and we also had these rather than evaluative components descriptive components where you say which painting is has warmer hues versus cooler hues and things like that so the trick here is that the assumption is that if you're looking at preference which is variable it still

01:18:55 should be the case that if someone prefers a over b and b over c they should prefer a over c right whatever your internal metric is which may be different it needs to be consistent and so the question for us was then using people's individual differences allows us to give an access of what people's consistency are so then the question becomes consistency and what we are able to show is that in this group of schizophrenic individuals that as a group

01:19:26 two things they're less consistent than people without schizophrenia they are less consistent in the evaluative judgment which is this preference as compared to the descriptive judgments so it's not that they're just inconsistent they'll say whatever they want it's specifically about their preference and then the other interesting thing is if you look across the people with schizophrenia of course they're not it's not that they're all bad that there's some variability and then you leverage that variability and what we

01:19:56 find is that the greater the greater the variability in people's preferences judgment correlates with how they also describe their hedonic experiences right so you give them other kinds of questionnaires and so it turns out that people who have a kind of what has been referred in the literature as anticipatory pleasure right the pleasure of anticipating what might happen that people who had decreased

01:20:27 anticipatory pleasure were also the ones that were the most variable okay so now you take that back to the biology it turns out that that models of anticipatory pleasure seem to really rely on dopamine dopamine is at least an important system that seems to be abnormal in people with schizophrenia and what we don't know from this is whether this has to do with the medications they're on or something inherent about the biology of their disease so that remains unknown but i offered this as a suggestion how

01:20:58 you can use you can actually leverage the variability of the individual responses to to to honor the individual response and at the same time try to get a generalizing principle out of it yeah um i didn't i think most of us would probably agree that dopamine plays a role in aesthetic pleasure um but i want to go back i mean these are really interesting stories i want to go back to the discussion we were having earlier um

01:21:28 partly raised by vittorio and then affirmed by andrea and this is a discussion which brings together freudian views of inhibition freudian views of culture the work of the neurosciences but it's all omitting i think in all our discussions we're admitting one very significant issue which i'm going to come to in a moment i think the issue is slightly virtu vitiated by these statements slightly apodictic statements that people make you made

01:22:00 this quite a lot art is i think we should probably just relinquish any kind of declaration about what art is um because we kind of know now that we don't know what art is i mean you go to any art gallery and you we art may just be what people pay the most money for we don't know so this whole issue was brought home to me with some force i remember chris woods said he may have we may have been drinking a bit much that evening but he said exasperatedly

01:22:30 to me after i gave a lecture about the sort of motor dimension of aesthetic response which victoria described very quickly he said oh he said why don't you realize that all art is irony i mean he was being kind of epigrammatic that evening and i was very exasperated by this but he raised a very important issue which is i don't think all art is irony but consistently with this view that i don't think we should say what art is or not but you know we talk about aesthetic appreciation i just uh aesthetic evaluation if aesthetic

01:23:01 enjoyment i just did that but what really lies at the bottom of all of this as you know can't wrote is aesthetic judgment i mean we can talk a bit about aesthetic pleasure and i said you know how our feelings are affected but what is moot is not what art is but what is that moment in which you know what happens at that moment when we make an aesthetic judgment and that moment must surely be a moment

01:23:32 of a certain kind of removal of reclaiming of the self against involvement with the work of art and this seems to me our sense of absorption in the work of our to use you know here's michael fried carrying on for years about absorption's role in our aesthetic responses what really we need now to do and i think i'm trying to convince victoria to do an experiment with me on precisely what removes the self

01:24:03 from its empathetic engagement with the work and what happens then as it were you know what exactly do we mean when we talk about inhibition what's happening in the brain you know they're various candidates for the inhibitory factor i somehow think it's somehow down in basal ganglia he says no it's much forward in prefrontal cortex so here is a real issue which can be discussed which will get us back to what seems to me you know at least

01:24:34 the clear framing of the question which is the framing in terms of the moment in which we realize we are not in the object but we are sufficiently detached to make a judgment this is andrea and and varburg's notion of dengham in which you have the space for contemplation and this you have a sense of the realization of who you are as a judging self so that's a project that you know we've

01:25:05 got to get on with as it were yeah comment on that so again going back to individual classes and this notion of inhibition of movements in a way that might seem agentic so there's a a classic relatively rare but classic neurologic syndrome called alien hand syndrome and this is one in which which we've done one of the few experimental studies of such a patient right so let me just

01:25:36 describe it for for people who are not aware of this this is a situation where someone's hand it's typically on one side seems to perform behaviors that seem complex but over which they have no control and so the particular man that we studied about seven or eight years ago i mean he would come in and he'd sit down and he'd sit down on his hand because he didn't want his hand doing things that he had no control over these kinds of or he'd grab a magazine

01:26:08 or a cup and hold this because as long as his hand was occupied it wouldn't do things but what are the kinds of things it does is that it will he'll walk by he'll walk by a light switch and his hand will reach up and start doing this turning on on and off on and off on and off the lights um and there are a variety of these kinds of behaviors and what we and his lesion just so you know the part of his uh the part of his brain that is damaged is the medial part of the frontal lobe right it's the classic location for

01:26:40 this kind of phenomenon what we were able to show is the conditions in which this happens are two one is that the control over affordances that most of us normally have he didn't have and what do i mean by that which is if you see a cup with the handle there is a kind of affordance that makes you want to grasp it

01:27:12 right and it's likely that the mirror neuron system is in in fact involved in that kind of experience most of us can choose to do this or not and it should be clear that most of us our motor systems operate below consciousness most of the time right where usually you think about every time you drive to work or you walk to work you're not really aware of all the little decisions you're making we largely respond to things in the environment with our motor systems and that's what this person was doing but unlike the rest of

01:27:43 us is not able to control it the second piece of this is he was exquisitely aware of this so if you have damage bilaterally you get something called utilization behavior where people do this but they're completely apathetic about it so he had this monitoring system over his own motor behavior at the same time he didn't have control over one side and then this creates this sense that this limb is doing something of which he has no

01:28:13 control over right it's completely responsive to the environment uh and so it's a kind of it's a kind of a problem with inhibition at the same time there's awareness you have to have both of those things simultaneously to have this kind of phenomenon i think even though i know we can talk a lot more about this it's time to right it's time to go for questions and answers so anybody who has a question has to walk up to the microphone there and ask that question

01:28:44 peter there are two papers with closure siri you want to ask okay most of the okay most of the uh discussion this morning's been on the tension between generalization and she began with that and the particular case and your characterization of psychoanalysis it's a

01:29:15 single case and what do you have so uh i'd like to say i practice analysis in los angeles and i've analyzed chinese and japanese and latino i have a latino young lady iranians and so on and you get a picture of the culture and with that i want to say with abby barber today when we're getting to a man embedded in the german jewish

01:29:49 elite of hamburg major banking firm that you all know branches in new york and so on and he suffered consciously from anti-semitism he was a uh soldier in the german army prior to world war one and was unable to get promoted to reserve officer as a

01:30:20 very symbolic but full of prestige max weber wrote a brilliant critical piece on the position of the german reserve office here and he writes to his mother also as he's a student in strasbourg how he hears other students and people in pubs issuing anti-semitic remarks and he's he's very aware he's unhappy about it

01:30:52 he calls it mao shong which is a imitation of yiddish and now that's not all there is a huge a very significant kartai it's kartai 61 in the archive the varberg archive and it is his collection his method of working was to collect

01:31:23 clippings from the day's newspapers of things that interested him and there are a large collection of clippings about the ritual murder myth in eastern europe in kiev the bayless case in konev in east prussia you know he collected these and this was the raw savage underside of european culture that he was very aware of and it's significant that the breakdown

01:31:56 the psychotic breakdown came in november 1918. now that's not a random date that's the date of the collapse of the wilhelmine empire and it's a date where his peer and friend albert baleen whose name you might know the hamburg america line the hamburg africa line the hamburg asian line these were all creatures of he was the ceo of this empire of sea power in germany he suicided in november 1918

01:32:31 and var borg that's where he had his psychic collapse and we look for in psychoanalysis the specificity why on that date and what's the specificity of the delusions and the delusions were murder and blood poisoning he tells bins bonger you're feeding me human blood i'm not going to eat this meal

01:33:03 i suggest to you that what you really want to know out of psychoanalysis is the culture that he comes from and he and his brother you know there was an event in the middle of world war one in 1916 it's called the juden ceylon where the prussian general staff ordered a census of all the jews in the german military now nothing like that took place on the italian army the french army

01:33:35 british army but they were with a a purpose of derogating and deprecating the jews trying to show they weren't doing their part and fact is that after this census the results were suppressed they were never published until france josef strauss in the bundes republique was the foreign strike that defense minister and he published the results because the contribution of jews had

01:34:06 been magnificent to world war one so this is the world he comes from and when he sees murderers and so on he saw them and he collected data on them extensive data on german anti-semitism on european primitive hatred of the jews and i suggest that it comes back in the psychosis that's a that's an intro to your panel

01:34:36 tomorrow i think this is quicker and it's about lesions and it relates to something david said and and to what you said which is um individual differences and lesions so even in alien hand syndrome you can get someone unbuttoning a shirt but also the famous case that i've forgotten the neurologist's name of the self-strangling and also amygdala lesions do not produce

01:35:07 identical uh results by the way they're a huge variation so i'm i wanted to just pick that up about individual differences is there a question of content individual psychic content in something like say self-strangling in uh in alien hand syndrome me make two comments about that and thanks for the question so one thing it turns out that an alien hand syndrome is that the repertoire of behaviors are fairly restricted

01:35:38 there are certain grasping behaviors they're repetitive behaviors they're actually the kinds of things not unlike what you see when people have motor seizures and what healing jackson called you know talked about as this sort of grammar of movements where you have these elements that are built built on what we argued in this paper is that that what you see in alien hand syndrome uh are concatenations of these motor primitives

01:36:08 and that you would never ever have the situation where someone's alien hand would for example write a poem right that could never happen on this model right uh whereas if you really think of this as there's an alien being on the divided self that the divide itself would actually perform some intentional goal directed behavior it turns out that that's probably not the case the individual differences in terms of the consequences of brain damage uh is is extraordinarily interesting and the

01:36:38 biology of that we don't really know very much so it is the case that often what you will read in the literature are these sentinel cases but if you see a lot of the patients what you are struck by is that the same kind of damage that produces wernicke's aphasia that was so instrumental and important in thinking of how language is organized in the brain is not what happens in everybody and not only that what happens six months down the road is highly variable in terms of how people recover now it

01:37:10 what's the biology of that why is it that some people do better initially why is it that some people do better down the road there are some ideas around it there are certain genetic predispositions for example people that are homozygous for apoe alleles that is a predisposing factor for alzheimer's disease uh it looks like that might have been more generalizable to how the brain responds to injury right so uh and but what the

01:37:41 mechanisms around that are not known uh it may have it may be a wiring issue which is that there is if we took everybody in this room that is over the age of 50 and got high resolution mri scans the amount of white matter abnormalities assuming everybody in here is normal is going to be highly variable right and so the consequences of that of this kind of subclinical low level and i hesitate to use the word damage

01:38:13 because it's not expressed in any way might have consequences for recovery so the individual differences in organization at that level which is increases as you get older so as victoria said if you're doing 20 year old college students you've already filtered this to a very narrow segment right so so i but i think those are those are the exactly the kinds of questions a biologist just needs to ask and try to address

01:38:43 just walk through the microphone okay sure yes uh professor galese's correlation of the motor system and lucio fontana and franz klein i'm an art historian and a psychoanalyst and i've worked with a lot of artists and i thought a lot about ernst chris's image magic the idea that an artist

01:39:15 is trying to create life in the work and the the i worked on giacometti and louise nevilson and both of them and i think many other artists and many of the artists i've worked with are aiming in some way conscious or preconsciously to create a sense of life and that is the the dynamic quality and looking at artwork that succeeds in doing that even if it's the the pregnant moment before the action

01:39:46 there is a sense for an artist who is aiming to make that work that he or she is trying to do something with what louise nevelson called livingness and i think artists have different ways of describing it but it seems very related to the correlations that you are finding in in the work that you're doing thank you so i would like to make a comment on uh what vitoria said and i fully agree with you with the current

01:40:19 trend of cognitive neuroscience and the reductionistic let's call it uh you know consequences of being subject to considerable pressure and by journals to come up with papers that have a large end a number of subjects that you can make statistics on and you know i'm an

01:40:49 experimental neurobiologist i also like you try to publish in the good journals and we all play that game but uh the the issue is that it looks like we may need and just you know come comes out of this discussion and thinking um you know a forum where uh when this this vicious cycle in a way which you know uh you are forced in a way to have a large and

01:41:19 erase individual differences or try to focus on the data that uh show more consistency across individuals to be able to publish in the best journals and okay you probably provide useful information i don't say that this is not useful so i fully agree with you we are part of the game and we do it but but on the other hand it's very impoverishing we lose a lot of information like this and uh and and so i think um you know let's think

01:41:52 about how to push this uh the the value of individual observations uh and and and and and provide a forum for this in a way that is of course scientifically sound it's not just to um you know decrease the quality of the studies quite the contrary i think that the tools the expensive toys that you you're talking about can be used uh much with a much more um incisiveness

01:42:23 if we were able to provide the right framework for and rigor for studies of individual individuality i think it's an excellent idea and if i know you enough we should expect some development well let's think about it you know i think you're definitely right and um i'm very sympathetic with with the onion because i think we share um a strong background in clinical

01:42:54 neuropsychology because when people nowadays think about cognitive neuroscience i'm speaking specifically of cognitive neuroscience uh most people think about the the fancy toys we were discussing before e.g uh neglecting uh the fact that one of them historically speaking but also nowadays although it's getting more and more difficult to publish single cases almost impossible uh we we we we learned a lot about the relationship

01:43:26 between brain behavior and cognition by studying single patients and uh i think uh uh it's really um assessing that the enormous pressure we all receive uh in a sense living in italy is a privilege you can take a lot more risk because nobody cares what you do so it's interesting but i i'm trying hard to see uh the positive aspect of that but in other

01:43:57 countries where uh there's a lot of attention about what you produce uh so the emphasis is more and more on on quantity sometimes at the expense of i mean i'm not disputing that all of these people have a enormous uh technical quality what gets lost is why are we doing this where are we publishing no that's the point i want to make it's not that i mean i think cognitive neuroscience and all the

01:44:27 what has been published in those circles and with that kind of philosophy i think it's very useful and and brought a lot of knowledge to to how your brain works i think we understand it's a major progress so i'm not disputing this but i think we are losing a lot of information and that's a pity but it's interesting because we had professor andrea califano here and he's at colombia and he's a microbiologist and studies cancer what seems to be happening more and more in cancer study is

01:44:58 studies of n of one okay interesting which would be great if it happened in our field yeah i mean i give you an example i i do a professor's rounds at a rehabilitation hospital in philadelphia and last week the case that was presented to me turned out to be incredibly fascinating and it relates to something that you were saying which is this is a guy who was a-lexic couldn't read but had a very specific kind of alexia that i have not seen in the last 30 years which is he had difficulty identifying individual

01:45:29 letters right but that that's has been observed but what's different about him is that he could identify without any difficulty individual numbers right so the graphemic complexity of numbers and letters are exactly the same he can see numbers he can't identify letters my first thought is we need to bring him in the lab and really study this and and you know sort out what's happening at that level of visual processing in relation to these symbolic forms which are letters and numbers which have no inherent meaning other than our

01:45:59 associations and how is this even possible but no takers none of my you know it's you know my post-docs are all involved in programmatic research and you know in these cases require a lot of work because you have to really think through you can't just set it in motion uh and but this is the kind of thing that i think because of again our funding mechanisms that it is not and publishing uh you know publishing constraints i mean these sorts of uh

01:46:31 little you know unique uh nf1 studies that really have the potential to teach you something important we're just we're just letting them slip through our fingers okay i think we need to stop because we have okay one more question and then we will stop because we have another we have professor diddy uberman who's going to he's arrived no he's not you're not the right yes there i thought i saw him yeah

01:47:02 so christina did you have a question also okay right after this one comment from christina and then we'll move on okay thank you let me introduce myself my name is lisa farber and i'm an art historian um i'm the former student of tom kaufman so that's partly why i'm here um i've heard your discussion please forgive me i have to use my notes um dr glacier was talking about the evaluation of immediate human sort of responses to

01:47:32 visual images and that these responses were in some way consistent and then you were all speaking about the relationship between neuroscience and the evaluation and reception of images and there was one comment about the possible influence of early life experiences like mother's milk you know on the aesthetic taste later in life i would like to said you know to know if the scientists here have really thought about the part of the brain that affects human memory

01:48:04 and how that is a determining factor in people's responses to images i would also like to suggest and i i've studied var book naturally because i worked at princeton and um tom kaufman is a you know student of the warburg institute um i would also like to suggest that human memory shapes responses to images and that in viewing a work of art it may be precisely that movement that david friedberg

01:48:35 mentioned the moment when the immediate physical response stops and then your memory kicks in you relate what you're seeing to what you already know and that determines your human response anyway i think that varberg was interested in the gestures and the motifs that let's say botticelli was using from ancient works of art and how that influenced the reception of his painting in the 15th century

01:49:05 and then also he was thinking about the images of albrecht dura and how the reception in germany in the early 20th century was in part affected by people's familiarity people's memory of those images so i think that human memory is something that i haven't really heard discussed here very much and is there a part of the brain that you could measure because i think that some of the art historians here perhaps

01:49:37 david friedberg or christopher wood or andrea bayer or perhaps myself we have a slightly different visual memory or ability to mem you know memorize images recall things and so that may determine why we become art historians and also how the regular population understands images well the next comment was made from christina who is a memory expert by the way we have a session of memory right yeah no actually my comment was not about that but we're gonna have a

01:50:08 discussion tomorrow and all dedicated discussion to memory and art and emotions and all those connections uh my comment was actually uh about what pierre was saying and all the discussion that was going on and and i think i i hope this is not trivial but i want to make sure that we are not um we are distinguishing two different levels of analysis one is the group analysis to understand the general principles and this is where we started

01:50:39 because when we knew basically nothing when we started in many fields and so that has to be done it cannot be an individual analysis and then another level equally important is the individual analysis but that we need to find the way to do that scientifically in a very solid way so what are the controls and that it has now been developing more and more clearly even in the animal studies

01:51:10 there are the group studies as well the now the individual differences coming out of the group analysis so i i don't think it's a matter of selecting which paper is going to be published i hope that's not what we're doing i think those are two different levels that needs equally both to be understood and scientifically solidly thank you so we'll have about a 10-minute break and then professor hubermann will give his paper and then we'll stop for lunch and we

01:51:42 resume at what time rob two o'clock

01:52:18 thank you for sending that to me by the way

01:52:56 but the fact is how is that going to be translated into any kind of research well i don't know about neural research

01:53:38 it's nice of you to come out for these things is

01:54:48 is she's discovered

01:55:19 i've been following the email debate about uh professional standards american psychology monday night

01:56:09 i know what she says

01:56:54 she's not um unable um

01:57:36 okay you go and fix them

01:58:18 um yes there's not much

02:00:10 is uh

02:00:40 step by step