I’ve been reading The Age of Insight by Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. In this fascinating book about art and neurobiology, he relates visual techniques of artists to the brain’s processing of visual information. Today I explore hard and soft edges in a schematic portrait of a human head. Kandel pointed out that the first […]
My readings of vision research ended years ago, with the works of Kuffler, Hubel and Wiesel about low and intermediate visual processing in the primary visual cortex. The current book I am reading, The Age of Insight, by Nobel Prize winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel, relates how artists instinctively use the physiology of this stage of vision (edge-detection, orientation […]
Sometimes I have trouble thinking of what to paint. Most of the time I get ideas from books I read or trying to ‘make visible’ (to borrow a phrase from the great Paul Klee) what is in my head or in my dreams. Today a family member with whom I live had to go back to […]
I just resumed my reading of The Age of Insight, a book by Nobel Prize winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel. It is a unique book that examines the world of art beginning in the early 20th century (with Vienna, Austria as the focal point) in relation to the psychology and physiology of the brain. I remember studying […]
Memory has been on my mind since I finished Patient H.M.. H.M. was a very famous research subject because an operation on his brain that robbed him of his short-term memory. For example, if H.M. met a person and that person left the room and returned, H.M. would not remember the previous meeting. One of the most […]
I finished Patient H.M. today. I have always been interested in memory and have read some of what has been written about this famous patient whose profound memory loss (induced almost certainly) by a bilateral resection of his medial temporal lobes. There was much personal and political intrigue and an appalling sense of the lack […]
I was thinking about the walk that I went on years ago, with my parents and Mike, my older brother. I took many photographs that day. In a couple of them it seems that I recorded a human connection. I cherish those instants in time, but I really wish I could have more of them […]
I like word play. Spoonerisms, for example: The announcer at the piano concert said, “Mr. Playbody will now pee for us,” instead of “Mr. Peabody will now play for us.” I remember the following from high school: “I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.” I had a […]
My friend of longest standing (since kindergarten) gave me Atlas of the Human Brain in Section, because he knew I loved neuroanatomy. For today’s watercolor experiment, I did a ‘blind’ drawing (sketching without looking at the paper) of a cross section of a human brain. I added some details (unrelated to brain anatomy) after finishing […]
I’ve got the brain on my mind lately. Every spare minute I read more of Patient H.M., a new book by Luke Dittrich. It delves behind the scenes in the development of ablative brain surgery during its ‘wild west’ beginnings, where there was not even a thought about informing the patient, most of whom had mental […]
