Eric Kandel at TEDxMet

I'm delighted to be here today and to tell you about portraiture and the beholder share from a brain science perspective so that the central challenge of science in the 28 first century is to understand the human mind in biological terms this possibility emerged in the last thirty years of the 20th century when an interesting merger occurred between neuro psychology cognitive psychology the signs of the mind and brain signs the sides of the brain to bring together a new science of the mind this new science of the mind is in a position to inform us not only about ourselves about how we feel think learn and remember but also about consciousness the base of emotion the nature free will but in the larger sense one would hope that as a result of this neuroscience would be provide a font of knowledge by interacting with other disciplines and they might give some insights for example in our response to works of art the idea is that someday neuro sides in fact brain science in general science in general will become part of the common cultural enterprise which is one of the purposes of these lectures I find that hopeful that someday people will find science and particularly brain signs as exciting as defined baseball and football my son thinks is the most ridiculous idea in the world but anyway I put it forward to you in my work as a scientist I've often taken a reductionist approach to the problems that I work on so my interest is in memory and I've taking a very simple approach in which I take a elementary example and try to study it as thoroughly as possible now when one thinks of painting I thought from the very beginning that perhaps the best reductionist example is portraiture because we're really beginning to have an intellectually satisfying understanding which I hope to convey to you of how portraits are represented in the brain what I'm going to show to you is that one of the reasons we do this is the face has many special features that are unique to faces of the objects and they have an extensive representation in the brain let me begin by asking why a face is so important and why do we find them so fascinating which is one of the reasons why portraits appeal to us so much amazingly after the person who addressed this issue was Charles Darwin it was Darwin who first pointed out as you obviously know that we are biological creatures that evolution is driven by sexual selection that sex this is 50 years before Freud is central to human behavior and the key to sexual attraction and to all social interactions is facial expressions this was not at all obvious he pointed out that all of our social encounters how we seek a partner how we make friends how we avoid people I determined really by their facial expressions because facial expressions mediate emotions now he had another fantastic insight he said look every person in this audience has the same features to their face two eyes a nose a mouth and oval surrounding and as a result this is universal every human being on a planet has those features and therefore emotional expressions facial expressions are likely to be conserved they are likely to be a limited number of things you can do with those structures of your face a limited number of ways you can express them and in fact he predicted there were six to seven different emotional expressions and that's now been shown by Eggman and others repeatedly and through those emotional expressions we can either invite approach by being welcoming attractive happy or we can invite avoidance by being fearful or threatening so the valence of facial expression is extremely important in our interactions with the people and all social encounters that means economic intellectual as well as personal and social a mediated through our faces there are many remarkable features about the face that I hope they make clear to you to begin with face is extremely easy for us to recognize a young child two years old can recognize one to two thousand different faces without any difficulty I remind you that computers with enormous computational capability have great difficulty recognizing faces it's one of the most difficult tasks confronting them children that age can learn to recognize if they're put into a monkey colony a thousand different monkey faces is remarkable because we think all monkeys look alike right because we don't have the familiarity with it not only do we recognize faces easily but we recognize them in highly reduced form so this is a Rembrandt self-portrait this is headline drawing of the Rembrandt's important we recognize Rembrandt is easily from a simple line drawing in fact if we exaggerate this appointment a return to later on you'll recognize him even more we recognise a cartoon of Nixon better than we recognize a photograph of the President and perhaps justifiably so but what I really want to sort of do is bring the history of art and the history of science together and the first person to do this was Viennese this is a Lewis regal a rather unappreciated odd historian who said to himself said it's others also around 1890 art history is going to die unless it becomes more scientific and the signs that it should align itself with is psychology and the problem that it should focus on this is a reductionist guy right the problem is shift focus on is the beholder share how you the viewer respond to a work of art the painting he argued is not complete without the viewers response this fascinated to his disciples that were not contemporaries they came later Ernst Chris whom I knew personally was a big influence in my life a early a major art historian who then became a psychoanalyst who said look you and I madam look at the same work of art we see it somewhat differently what does that mean that every work of art is ambiguous and you and I bring somewhat different perceptions to it when you think of that you realize if you and I see it differently we are undergoing a slightly different creative experience in putting together the work of what that means the beholder undergoes in a modest way a creative experience that parallels that of the artist in creating it it's a very modest version of it but that's exactly what's going on garbage picked up on this and thought this was absolutely fantastic it began to study the philosophy and the cognitive psychology of art and he read Bishop Berkeley's famous paper in which he pointed out a remarkable thing that is when I look at a person in the audience I do not see the person I only see the light reflected from the person the photons emitted that person as a result my retina reconstructs you with vastly incomplete information there's no way I can distinguish that lady and the gentleman sitting next to her in the first row from photons coming from their body in their face I need additional piece of information Helmholtz struggling with this problem suggested what the two piece of information on they'd been verified since then they are bottom-up and they're top-down the bottom-up information is that we did not involve the novo yesterday we're evolved through a long line of evolution which Darwin described and our brain evolved to work in an environment we call the world and they expect certain things of the world for example if you see a source of light the most likely source of that is above because the Sun the major source of light is above if we see a person is very large and a person is very small we're likely to think from perspective that the large person is closer to us to the focus etc etc our brain is built into that children at Birth can recognize faces and they do it quite well because they have the built-in mechanism for see if it's got a circle to eyes or nose of the mouth it's a face you don't have to tell me much more okay so they were built in process and development process that tell you what you can expect from the outside world in addition each of us has different experiences we go to the Metropolitan Museum at different times we see different works of art we like different works of art we have different personal lives that interacts with our value judgment without aesthetic appreciation of all that's the top-down process that you and I even though we have the same built in brain see it differently is because we've had different personal experiences that we bring to bear on a work of art but he also argued if that's true if these bottom-up processes are based on the average expectable world in which we live you should be able to trick the brain by creating something which is you know looks like it's average expectable but ain't the Kazon iike square you see these four beautiful white circles and you see lying on top of that a black square with beautiful outlines you all see that every one of you can see that would you raise your hand if you see it so we just want to make sure that everybody is seeing it you are making it up this is in your head this is not out there let me show you when these semicircles are organized you fill in a square that simply is not there this is a fooling of the bottom-up process it expects to see this thing filled in completion against all principle if you unorganized these semicircles you lose it completely you how we respond to faces psychologically biologically how we represent faces in the brain how we resent body how isn't the body in motion how we spend emotion how is we represent empathy how we represent theory of mine that you have different aspirations that I have I'm just going to focus on one on faces I'm going to show you what we know about facial recognition from a psychological point of view and then from a biological point of view faces are very special and I love this face this is an artist from Venice Archambault oh you probably many of you know him who worked in Vienna a lot of his career and he loved to make paintings of faces using fruits and vegetables and he allows me to demonstrate one of the absolutely spectacular features of portraits that and faces that distinguish them from all of the objects in the universe if I take this glass of water and I turn it upside down I'll of course spill the water which I don't intend to do but you will still recognize it as a glass but if you turn a face upside down you can't recognize it now this is an extreme example okay I'm going to give you a more subtle example if you look at these two images some of you may recognize this Mona Lisa right you see that this is one of Lisa okay but what you can't see when she's upside down is differences in facial expression so even if you recognize your friend your mother-in-law upside down with different facial expressions you can recognize them it's only when you turn them right side up you can see this is the Mona Lisa in the Louvre this is Leonardo's enigmatic smile magnificent painting and here you see a distortion of the eyes and the mouth upside down you simply can't do it this is your brain okay more complicated than this but I'm going to give you the beginners introduction to the brain you have four lobes you have the accepted lobe you have the temporal OB of the parietal lobe and you have the frontal lobe information for vision comes in the back of the brain and the face area it's a very large area is in the inferior part of the temporal lobe it has two parts to it upholstery inferior and anterior infill in 1947 a neurologist by the name of bottomer discovered soldiers that were wounded in warfare that had difficulty with face recognition and he called that pros up agnosia probes up means face agnosia means inability to recognize people with traumatic injuries sometimes have injuries to the back of that region in which case you can't see a face cloth face if the lesion is more anterior it often is a developmental thing nine to ten percent in this audience probably have some degree of frozen nausea but we now have some cellular insight in what happens into those areas we have it both in humans where we have particularly good information in in monkeys that has come from research that has been done originally by Charlie gross and thereby Marge Livingston are colleagues tourists au and Winifred wine Russian it's really quite wonderful let me tell you the monkey stuff because it's in greater detail they've discovered six areas between they call face patches if you put electrode into those areas any one of those areas ninety percent of the cells or more respond to faces if you stimulate the central face patches the others light up means that this is an interconnected set of cells okay if you record from different ones they have different processing functions some give you the face head on some gives you from the side some gives you three-dimensional view of the face they deal with different aspects of the face let me just give you one example this is a recording from one face patch and this red firing is brought up the fiying of the cells okay so if you show a monkey a picture of a monkey why not they like it they fire but if you show them a cartoon of a monkey they like it even more remember Nexus cartoon but even more but it follows give stoutest principles it has to be holistic for some reason we don't understand it doesn't leave the nose but it's got to have two eyes in the mouth in a circle around it you take at the mouth no firing you take out the eyes no firing you have the eyes the mouth it will circle no firing give the circle no nothing inside no fine you've got to have all of the components if you just empty out the eyes and the mouth no fine turn it upside down what happens no firing you exaggerate the features the cells go wild let me finish by addressing why you come to the museum and that is do we have any insights into why we develop affection and love for works of art Ronald Lauder a neighbor the NOI gallery right down the block paid a hundred and thirty five million dollars the most that had ever been paid this was about ten years ago ever been paid for work of art for a Dell bloch-bauer he fell in love with his painting he thought this was modern Beauty personified he appreciated as many people did not the sexual the erotic symbols on her the rectangular symbols in Klimt paintings indicate sperm and the oval symbols indicate over soshe's reproductively capable she is very seductive and he absolutely fell in love with him he thought this is the modern Mona Lisa what systems in the brain get recruited for love of art it turns out that there's an area in the prefrontal cortex that's recruited but importantly a system in the brain a modulatory system and brain that affects every component of the beholder share and that's the dopamine system now the dopamine system doesn't simply get recruited for love of art it gets recruited for many primary rewards like food drinking sex very powerful an addiction it's gets included for romantic love and for love of art lourdes ceases painting when he's 14 years old his while about the payton he comes from a very affluent family could probably afford to bide no one is going to sell it to him so he comes back to vienna almost every summer pining for this painting okay he later became ambassador to Austria with a residence in Vienna seeing this painting all the time people described how much he wanted the painting you could see what's happening to the dopaminergic system in his brain it's just revving up he's going wild I am confident I'm absolutely confident that he would have paid a hundred and forty million dollars for this painting had he been necessary to do it but he was able to get it four hundred and thirty-five so let me simply end with a statement of faith I think we all believe that the greatest enterprise for the human mind has been always will be this is here Wilson's language and attempt to create linkages between the sciences and humanities I think in this generation this is becoming possible thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 34,426

Keywords: ted, ted x, TEDx, tedx talks, tedx, tedx talk, ted talk, ted talks

Id: Jyc7FIglkHI

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2013