Does everybody remember when neuroscientist Ramachandran was advocating his study of "neuroaesthetics"? It was 20 years ago, but some people took it seriously at the time.
Here is his opening statement about the visual arts:
Shocking to think that people couldn't see the fatal flaws built into this. You'd think his friends would pull him aside and tell him that things have moved on since Zeuxis' grapes.
It's a good example of the dangers of misapplying methods. He has to oversimplify to the point of absurdity in order to study something in his MRI machine, and risks tricking naive people into thinking that art is what he can search for. A lesson about scientism in general.
Here is his opening statement about the visual arts:
Quote:The purpose of art, surely, is not merely to depict or represent reality—
for that can be accomplished very easily with a camera—but to enhance,
transcend, or indeed even to distort reality. . . . What the artist tries to do
(either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of
something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the
same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.
Shocking to think that people couldn't see the fatal flaws built into this. You'd think his friends would pull him aside and tell him that things have moved on since Zeuxis' grapes.
It's a good example of the dangers of misapplying methods. He has to oversimplify to the point of absurdity in order to study something in his MRI machine, and risks tricking naive people into thinking that art is what he can search for. A lesson about scientism in general.
