The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art - from Vienna 1900 to the Present

Please mention whether the item has deckled edges or not. No matter how good the condition of the book is, deckled edged books can be very disputable. Some people might love it while some people might loathe it. Unfortunately, I'm the latter, and I despise wrongfully made "should be factory rejects but the publisher was too cheap" kind of products, especially in this age of industrialism. I do like to see some quirky books time to time, especially with the antique ones, but not in a modern copy of a masterpiece. So "Please" note if it's deckled or not.

While I am familiar with the rules of composition, I have often wondered why we like odd numbered compositions more than even, why the rule of thirds is the rule of thirds. I mean, we all know that it looks “right” but why? It’s hard-wired, so what’s the why behind the what. I read The Age of Insight hoping to find some answers. While I didn’t find answers to my specific questions, I did learn a lot more about how we are hard-wired not just to value art, but to be artists. I learned so much more about how our brain functions and how our brain functions on art and it was fabulous.

Eric Kandel is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, a neuroscientist who knows more about how the brain works than most of the brains in the world united. He is also a polymath who might have majored in History rather than medicine if he had not fallen in love. I do have to say the most romantic gesture I have ever seen in a book is found in this book. I read it and could only say, “Awwwww.” Then I had to tell everyone because it was so sweet. Don’t worry, you’ll recognize it when you come to it.

Kandel looks at how art has been influenced by our growing understanding of the mind and of psychology and how our brains experience and appreciate art. We learn about the conscious, the unconscious and why it’s always a smart thing to go putter around or go for a walk when you’re stuck trying to solve a problem. We learn a lot about fin de siècle Vienna and the social scene that mixed scientists, doctors, and artists together to cross-pollinate and they did – leading to the Expressionist movement and a wild burst of creativity in science, medicine, psychology and art.

Do not be intimidated by the idea of a Nobel neuroscientist writing a book for you to read. Kandel writes beautifully and clearly. He never condescends or dumbs it down, but he distills the central ideas without overloading readers with minute details. He explains processes with clarity and makes effective use of metaphors. It also seems as though neuroscience is unique in the sciences in not creating a taxonomy of exclusion. Here’s an example of what I mean, “Segregation of information begins in the primary visual cortex. There, as we have seen, information is relayed along one of two parallel pathways—the what pathway and the where pathway.” Why they didn’t name the what pathway the flibbertyhoosit I have no idea, but hooray for names that are descriptive. This makes it much easier to follow and so even though I am a lay reader who didn’t even take biology in high school, I had no trouble following the science.

Kandel is a beautiful writer and when he writes about art, he is eloquent and authoritative. He talks about emotional reactions to art and you know that he his talking about how art moves him. He has the scientist’s gift of organizing information so the book makes sense in how it presents information. it all hangs together into one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. I enjoyed it so much that I have backtracked and read passages again just for the pleasure of understanding what he is talking about when it’s a topic I should feel intimidated by and for the joy of reading someone who loves art, science, the mind, and wants to bring them all together. He is enthusiastic, excited by the idea of consilience – a unity of knowledge, though doubtful that it can happen in the foreseeable future, but reading this book, you can see the potential even within this one man.

"But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light." -- Ephesians 5:13 (NKJV)

The Age of Insight is a hard book to categorize. Professor Kandel's stated purpose is to demonstrate how a knowledgeable scientist can write clearly about science so that the interconnections between art and science can be exposed to those who know only about the art. As such, this book is more about informing those interested in the humanities than those whose interest is in science. As a necessary part of his method, there's a circumscription around a narrow set of artists and literary figures rather than an attempt to make a universal statement. To have attempted otherwise would have made a hefty book into a multi-volume tome that few would read.

As someone who reads a lot of art history, history of science, and current research on mental processes, I was impressed by the conception of the book and how deftly it was carried out in ways that deepened my appreciation for subjects I have long been familiar with. I was grateful for these new perspectives. I found the book to be enjoyable for the most part. If I got to a part that was too elementary for what I wanted to absorb, I just skipped quickly through until I got to weightier material. I didn't have to do that very often.

This book would be a wonderful gift to a budding artist or writer . . . or to an art historian in training. I'm sure that many wonderful shows could be mounted that would take advantage of the information here in ways that would delight museum and gallery goers.

Although the book will seem flawed to some, I think it succeeds in its purpose of proposing a new way to write about art and science. I'm sure that future books that attempt to do the same will benefit from having observed how this one turned out.

I particularly found the repeated examination of certain art works from different perspectives to be revealing. I think you will, too.

A few times in my younger days I had the opportunity to speak to people who were alive in Vienna during the heady days of the salons that Professor Kandel describes here. Their descriptions carried to me a similar fascination with how the leading thinkers influenced one another there and then. I was pleased to be able to expand my understanding of that unique society in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

I am not much of a fan of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele. I was pleased to learn more reasons to appreciate their work. I must admit that if the subjects had been tied to artists I like better I would have enjoyed the book more . . . but don't let that stop you. This is an important book for you to read!

Bravo, Professor Kandel!

As readers of his autobiographical *In Search of Memory* may realize, Nobel laureate Eric Kandel was 82 when this book was published in 2012. No matter: *The Age of Insight* is a razor-sharp exploration of the modernist aesthetic movements of Kandel's native Vienna and their significance for our contemporary scientific understanding of the brain's perceptual system. Unlike other neuroscience popularizers such as Antonio Damasio and V.S. Ramachandran, Kandel never cuts corners on making sure neural science is relevant to our most advanced cultural understanding of "Being-in-the-World": *The Age of Insight* is a rich and fulfilling book with countless examples of a superior intelligence bringing itself to bear on especially notable cultural talismans in a scientifically informed way. Beginning with Freud's Viennese contemporaries Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, who began to transmute aesthetic representation from a 'realistic' perspective on human and world to one revelatory of the emotional significance of perception, Kandel ends up with a dynamite explanation of just how the human brain can perceive 'symbolic' beauty just as well as the 'selected-for' representations of plenty Ramachandran's theory of art stops with.

An important and up-to-date book anyone with a university education will learn a lot from, quite willingly and gladly.

Luckily I already studied many of the things told by this huge marvelous book, otherwise I would have been probably overwhelmed by the quantity and the quality of the things told by Kandel, who wrote another of my favorite book ever (Principles of Neuroscience). So I wouldn't recommend this book to many, but if you are a psychologist with a love for art and the brain, this is the perfect book for you.

Fortunatamente avevo giá studiato la maggior parte degli argomenti trattati da questo meraviglioso ed immenso libro, altrimenti non so se sarei riuscita ad arrivare in fondo, nonostante Kandel sia uno dei miei autori preferiti ed abbia scritto un altro super libro (Principi di Neuroscienze). Quindi non consiglierei a tanti questo volume, ma se siete degli psicologi con una passione per l'arte e per il cervello, questo é il libro perfetto.

This is a remarkable book by a Nobel laureate who steps outside his specialty of neurophysiology to provide the general public with a comprehensive view of the biology of mind as it relates to art. Readers journey to Vienna, Austria, the place of Kandel's birth, and the fin de siècle art of Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele. We learn about the emerging theories of mind by Sigmund Freud and Wolfgang Kohler. We explore the links between the unconscious mind, art, visual perception, empathy and autism. Kandel restricts this intellectual journey to figurative art (as compared to non figurative art and music). He bypasses socially charged issues of pornography in favor of a description of an emergent understanding and depiction of female sexuality.

New brain imaging technology has provided an explosion of scientific information which probably required significant editing to reduce the book to 515 pages plus 57 pages of notes and bibliography. I found the best parts of the book were the discussions focused on the excellent art reproductions and the update of the physiology of visual perception. In the latter half of the book Kandel seems to struggle between his dual tasks of summarizing the results of scientific inquiry and discussing the psycho dynamics intrinsic in creating and viewing art.

This book should appeal to a wide audience of readers including those interested in visual perception, neuroaesthetics, the unconscious mind, art history and the Vienna Secessionists.

Kandel uses the exceptional conjunction of brain science, art and psychology in a particularly rich period in Vienna to illustrate and tell a larger story about how our biological brain shapes and responds to art (particularly visual art), and what each teaches us about the other. This is a splendid read, which manages to narrate a fascinating story while both instructing and provoking further thinking in the reader. It is supported, not incidentally, by excellent art and graphics that specifically illustrate the text but are often interesting in themselves.

Kandel is a proponent of integrating humanistic learning with serious but non-expert science. This volume does justice to his cause, as it should be equally stimulating to the art lover and the the science enthusiast. Whether you fall into either or both categories, you are likely to learn a good deal new about each, and be not only instructed, but possibly inspired along the way. The latest in brain and mind science is well-presented and discussion of the art that Kandel uses to illustrate his thesis is informed and insightful. One need not be fully convinced by Kandel's premises on the integration of art and science to appreciate and enjoy this effort.

As some readers of Kandel's previous work (e.g., In Search of Memory) may know, the author has a strong sense of personal connection and fascination with Vienna of this period. I initially feared that his focus on the unique culture of Vienna circa 1900 might prove a distraction: Might the "looking beneath surfaces" theme that Kandel claims as driving and connecting the psychology and medicine to the visual and literary art of this unusual time and place be over-blown? My misgivings were unnecessary. Kandel not only makes a good case for what was unique, but more importantly, uses it to great effect to make his broader case about how science and art can and do inform each other. So, even if you are not wholly taken by the art and portraiture of the Viennese artists of the day, they serve wonderfully to demonstrate Kandel's broader case.

As a minor minor criticism, I would say that on some occasions the leaps between detailed treatment of brain biology and art criticism can confuse, and the connecting tissue becomes a bit stretched. And perhaps the author reiterates the importance of the particular artists and Viennese influence a bit too often. Still, Kandel is always quick to return to the key threads of his argument, and that argument seldom is seldom less than interesting --- more often, it is fascinating.

In short, I learned a lot from this book and was not only entertained by Kandel's nice telling, but stimulated to further reading about both the art and science to which he opens the door. Highly recommended.

The book traces the pathway between the brain of a creative artist to the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain of the "beholder". In doing so, it is a fantastic update and guide to our current understanding of brain function and that mystery of mysteries, consciousness. (the author in his previous book, In Search of Memory clarified that other mystery, memory).
I truly feel that this is one of the best written, best organized and most informative books I have read. I would expect the author's expertise regarding neuroscience, but his discussions of art are amazingly.
The only reservation is that I had exposure to neurology in medical school; it prepared me to work through the current understandings of neurophysiology. The lay public may not be able to get through the concepts.

*****
"In conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Eric Kandel will discuss the book already praised by Oliver Sacks as 'a tour-de-force that sets the stage for a twenty-first century understanding of the human mind' in all its richness and diversity."
*

My relation with the Viennese milieu started with my father telling me about the dream city, the reincarnation of late antiquity Alexandria, where I was born after WWII. He took his postgraduate studies in Vienna University before it was annexed by Hitler. Sam, my younger brother was fascinated with Klimt, few of his frescos still hanging on my house walls. But I was a fan of Mozart and Freud, and later I encountered the magical worlds of Dr. Kandell; thanks to the intellectual tours of Charlie Rose.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Vienna, the pride of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire - was considered the cultural capital of Europe, by my dad and many, with its unique atmosphere and sophisticated charm. Vienna embraced a versatile mix of musicians, scientists and artists, who met in cafes and spent the evenings in sparkling salons, or gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held to amuse one another and enjoy fine taste and broaden their knowledge through conversation.

They used liberal discussions, of novel ideas that may have led to inventive conclusions, with influential results in psychology, brain science, and innovation of literature, and art. Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, among many others began exploring a charming new territory: the then mystical unconscious. The School of Medicine in Vienna University paved the way to break through of modernity, once its realization was revealed, that truth lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, which inspired and enhanced a wide spectrum of pioneers allover Europe.

That principle was the motivation behind Sigmund Freud who shocked the world with his revelations of our everyday unconscious erotic desires and aggressive reactions, disguised in symbols, and repressed into dreams. Schnitzler even discussed the taboo of women's desires within their repressed sexuality in his novels. Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele responded by creating, what was startlingly mindful, and honestly portraying that unconscious desire, high anxiety, and animal lust.

In his book The Age of Insight, Nobel Prize laureate, the gifted neuro-psychiatrist Eric Kandel recovers back to memory these crucial times, at the eruption of the Modern age, and a brand new simulation for the human brain, creativity initiated and dramatically realized. The story is dramatized and told by the inspiring Troubadour around the inventive genius of 1900 Vienna. Freud, Klimt, and the whole bunch spear headed by their School of Medicine, and how they, in turn, galvanized the pioneers of Art History into modern historiography?

In "The Age of Insight, wonderfully written by professor Kandel, one of the pioneers of creative scientific thinking, at least in his overlapping domains, exposing these Viennese innovators under today's scientific tools of examination, from Cat scan to ultra sound in an effort to expose and frame the modern era art of Klimt, et al, reflecting on its roots in the thought of Freud and school. He utilizes an enhancement in the leadership of an intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900. Very well researched, and artfully illustrated. This is an extraordinarily amazing work from a celebrated leader in neuroscience whose miracle is creating the time of this encyclical essay.

This book gives a great account of the current state of knowledge of our understanding of the visual system, and for that I would have rated it very highly.

The author is an expert in neuroscience and that makes the neural material well worth reading. Unfortunately the book goes into many areas where the author is less of an expert.. For example, in Chapter 14 he says 'By the 1940s, emerging knowledge about the biology of the brain and about information processing gave rise to the first computers, the first “electronic brains.” ' This is total nonsense. The idea of computing was thought of long before neuroscience had advance to that point. Many would say that it goes back to Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871) and his work in the second decade of the 19th century. Glaring errors like this always make me distrust a writer in any areas in which I am not convinced he is knowledgeable. One also wonders why the author even wasted pages on material like this since it adds nothing to the narrative, in addition to being wrong. In the end I would place much of the material on Art in this category also for several reasons: it seems to be a distraction to good material that is present, many experts in the Art history area disagree with it, and I (as a non-expert in the Art area) find his statements about what everybody "sees" in some of the (limited number of) paintings he discusses to be at odds with what I see.

The author states at the end that "I have illustrated the potential importance of the new biology of mind as an intellectual force, a font of new knowledge that is likely to facilitate a new dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences." I failed to find an organization of the material that led to that conclusion.

This book kluges together the art of Klimt and science of Freud into a fluid mosaic of intellectual life in Vienna where the intellectual elite knew they were living out the last days of an ancient and tolerant society poised on the precipice of the Great War that would soon change everything for them

Books like this make one thankful that, in our age of internet snippets, there are still people willing to devote enormous effort to create an insightful and thorough study of the unusual mix of art and brain science. One wonders what will happen to wisdom if books ever become obsolete, since it is hard to imagine how one could beat the pleasure of reading scholarship of such depth. Kandel's choice of Egon Shiele and Gustav Klimt as shining examples of portrait art are perfect, and I stumbled across the work of these artists in Vienna, a city unparalleled when it comes to valuing art. One can see much of the art that is in this book by visiting the Belvedere and other public galleries in Vienna. I would quibble with Oskar Kokoschka's work as being of the calibre of Shiele and Klimt, but that is personal taste. This book is intelligent, entertaining, enlightening, and a marvellous read. It is so well researched. One difference between a Nobel prize winner and the rest of us is that he can commandeer top experts to review his work without apology because he knows that the result will be even better than his own independent thinking. Bravo to Eric Kandel. This book should be read by everyone interested in the art of portraiture.

Kandel defends a stimulating hypothesis: neurosciences and art can be used to sandwich psychological dynamics. One way of defining the mind is to assume that it is what connects the brain and art. This is close to my own hypothesis. The idea is well defend as long as Kandel speaks of his neurological ideas on the brain for which he got a Nobel Prize.
However the reader should be warned that from a historical perspective this presentation of the intellectual life of Vienna in 1900 is simplistic and some times incomplete. His account correctly catches the spirit, but is full of important historical mistakes. His critic of Freud's cases is interesting, but he is for example wrong when he says that Freud went to study with Charcot after he and Breuer worked with hysterical patients. They had met since 1880, but were not yet working together. In his discussion on biology he not only forgets that Lamarck invented evolution theory 50 years before Darwin, but forgets that Mendel created his theory of the genes in collaboration with the University of Vienna. He forgets the tradition of geologists that began with Lyell and continued in Vienna through the important work of Suess and Neumayr, with whom Darwin was in personal contact. It is they who created a time frame within which evolution theory could develop. Closer to his own field, he naturally mentions Helmholtz and Brücke. However he underscores their importance in the creation of a psychophysiology of affects as well as the influence of Wundt in setting the stage in which Freud was trained and developed his notion of the unconscious. Finally he suggests that the Viennese neurologist Meynert is one of the pioneers of the notion that "the human brain consists of regions that have been conserved through evolution" (p.40). Although he may have done interesting and creative research on the subject, the research on the subject was already well advanced at the beginning of the XIXth century.
The book is therefore mostly interesting for its discussion on how to coordinate artistic and neurological dynamics to understand the dynamics of the mind.

I'm writing this without re-writing this, so fire away at my flaws, please!

I will figure out how many stars to give it at the end, when I do a weighted average on various points.

But to summarize before I even start, the problem with this book is it intellectualizes a subjective non-linear process, that of
making art. Admittedly you can write and come up with a readable, consistent intellectual description of how certain artists did
what they did, and how certain parts of the brain become active in certain functions, but it doesn't mean you can generalize that
all artists create in the same way or that all viewers will see in the same way even if they activate the same brain parts. Kandel
writes about 3 highly skilled and evolved Vienna visual artists that as he claims helped invent modernism using insights
developed in the field of psychiatry.

The basic problem is: What is art? Kandel writes about one kind of art: expressionism, painting on canvas with oil paints. He
asserts that this is reductionism, and that in science you have to start somewhere to find a general theory of how things work.
He does a comprehensive job of it on this segment as accademic papers are required to do and stand up to peer review (by other
scientists and/or art critics) . The scientific method requires a theory to give reproducible results and scientists have their own
shorthand, mathematics and descriptive language for describing a theory. Artists generally don't know the scientist's math or
language and as one reviewer here alluded to, practicing artists don't write papers on scientist's specialties.

He also considers this problem and states the reason for Modernism to happen is that Freud wrote some papers in layman's
language. I may be digressing, but fwiw, there are 1000's of book written by artists on how to make a successful drawing,
painting, sculpture or encaustic. How useful are they? Mostly, the materials source list where to buy and what is used is about
the most useful. As one artist-teacher said, You really can't teach art, you can only teach some technique or the craft part. I have
taken a lot of classes and workshops on various aspects of art, and almost always, it's implied that you have to find your own
way to making a good image that resonates (or activates certain parts of the brain).

But getting back to art, I subscribe to Sam Goldwin's aphorism: " If you want to send a message, use Western Union."
Secondly; "Anyone who wants to learn about psychiatry from the movies should have their head examined."

After-the-fact analysis of a movie or other art works, can definitely be used to proffer a psychological postulate a person would
like to share. Go for it. Kandel, in an effort to do so uses 636 pages. Some of the pages are pretty repetitious, e.g., describing
hand gestures, and other siginfiers in Kokoschka's paintings. That chapter goes on way too long. A corallary to Goldwin's
aphorism above as it relates to Kokoschka, if you want to be psychoanalyzed, go to a psychiatrist. And attributing psychic
abilities to Kokoschka is part of his hype, theatre, and marketing, which most lionized artists are good at.

You might be thinking I'm a Luddite, but until Brian Greene or somebody can explain how quantum physics works and an
electron can be two places at the same time, I doubt if brain function analysis is going to make any art. By then, quantum
computers will be making art for other quantum computers, as Kandel alludes to, so ?

On the positive side of the review, I really enjoyed the good research on the visual artists, particularly Schiele. Although I have
several books on Schiele, Kandel gives new information about this artist. That's one star! (Schiele, that is.)

So, what am I to conclude about this book and Kandel? I think Kandel likes to consider fine art as a non-artist and
uncounsciously used his position and authority to write a book on art, but since he isn't a recognized art critic, he incorporated
what he does know in his professional field as a base to write about art. Being an expert at grant writing, he might have even
been paid in advance to write it.

He could have hypothesized how brain anaysis could work to make art. But I have to do it. Suppose for instance someone
could write a computer algorithm to tell you if you have a good art idea. 1. You put on some electodes on your head, go into an
MRI machine and think about a reclining nude masterbating. Ding! Scores 75 out of 100. 2. Think about a reclining nude
reading Vanity Fair magazine while drinking a soda: Ding! Scores 50 out of 100. Er, uh, perhaps you have a scenario to suggest.
It's still up to the individual to come up with the idea out of thin air or nothingness; similar to the Big Bang (not the TV show, the
real one).

So I give the book 2 stars, since at the time of this writing, no one has given it two stars, and I'm providing something new and
original. But is it art? (my review) It's not art, it's typing, as Truman Capote says.

Dr. Kandel, a global treasure who has illuminated fresh insights into the human mind, presents a brilliant account of the zeitgeist of Vienna 1900, the "Golden age of nervous splendor", when great artists and scientists such as Freud, Klimpt, Kokoscha, Schnitzler shared ideas and germinated masterworks. These pioneers share more in common with each other, than lesser artists and scientists in their respective fields. I had the pleasure of directing La Ronde in Paris, by Schnitzler, in 1987, and I took liberties to change the mise-en-scene such that it was like a bordello-asylum, as run by Herr F. And the audience comprised scientists from the Pasteur Institute. Outstanding book and a great read.

This book is an example of "scientism" run amok, the pattern of which unfolds as follows.

First, Kandel introduces some specific manifestation of art or psychological behavior characteristic of the historical period in Vienna before World War One. No problem with that . . .

Second, he formulates some general problem of aesthetics/psychology that could be understood to arise from it. That's okay, too . . .

Third (and this makes up two-thirds of the book), he introduces some established scientific facts (typically of a physiological nature). Still no problem . . .

Fourth, he talks about the aesthetic/psychological problem as if the scientific facts were somehow related to it. BUT THERE'S SIMPLY NO CONVINCING REASON TO THINK THAT THEY ARE (!)

It's a sleight of hand that only fools people who ASSUME (as Kandel does himself) that there MUST BE a physiological explanation (and only such an explanation . . .) for EVERYTHING.

In actual fact, he demonstrates NO convincing connection whatsoever between the aesthetic issues . . . and the science. He only juxtaposes them selectively and self-servingly.

This book is useless as anything other than a demonstration of a "scientistic" (not scientific) state of mind . . .