The fantastic organ

The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel is a brutal and beautiful book. Its pages burgeon with beautiful images and beautiful ideas. The ideas are pursued with relentless honesty and diligence for more than 600 pages. There are parts of this book that should only be read in private. I know this after a slightly fraught flight to London, trying to read the book while covering its pictures of masturbating women with my boarding card—I did not want to offend the sensibilities of an Indian gentleman, who showed a polite interest in my reading material. I am not quite sure why I did this, perhaps because I am English; or perhaps because I found the pictures curiously arousing—despite their innocent titles {e.g. 'Seated Woman in Armchair' by Gustav Klimt [(1862–1918): c.1913], pencil and white chalk}. Happily, the book explained why I found them so alluring. Kandel's treatment is a book of two parts. The first deals with innovative thinking and insights in science and art in turn of the century Vienna. The second overviews the neurobiology of perception and emotion, bringing the reader back to deep questions about perspective taking and neuroaesthetics. The premise that underpins both parts is that the brain is an inference machine, generating hypotheses and fantasies that are tested against sensory data. Put simply, the brain is—literally—a fantastic organ (fantastic: from Greek phantastikos, able to create mental images, from phantazesthai). For me, the story starts with Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) and the notion of unconscious inference (Helmholtz, 1866/1962). Kandel places this story in the context of history and art, in an illuminating and compelling way. In summarizing the context that art provides for understanding functional brain architectures (and vice versa) Kandel concludes 'we now know that one of the main reasons expressionist art appeals to us so strongly is that we have evolved a remarkably large, social brain. Moreover, the brain's mirror neuron systems, theory of mind system and biological modulators of emotions and empathy endow us with a great capacity for understanding other people's minds and emotions.' The early part of the book is concerned with the creative achievements of people like Oskar Kokoschka [(1886–1980): see Fig. 1] and Egon Schiele (1890–1918), whose expressionism engages unconscious inference, while Gustav Klimt's 'intuitive grasp of the power of implied line, contour and top-down processing enabled him to create some of the most subtle and sensual works in …