Bringing science to art

Several important books in recent years have examined the neuroscience of single art forms, including Zeki’s Inner Vision [1], Livingstone’s Vision and Art [2], and Peretz and Zatorre’s anthology The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music [3]. Dahlia Zaidel’s recent book is an attempt to look beyond single art forms and develop a broader and more integrative view of the arts and of human creativity. Through its emphasis on neurological case studies of professional painters, composers and musicians, the book aims to examine neural specialization for the arts. The fact that a book on this topic offers almost no mention of dance or the literary arts stems from an absence of informative lesions in practitioners of these arts rather than from any lesser interest in these branches of the arts. An important strength of the book is its grounding of the arts in human communication processes rather than perception alone. Hence, production and perception of the arts are given equal treatment, in contrast to many cognitive approaches to the arts that focus on perceptual mechanisms or aesthetic responses rather than on the discursive processes that mediate art’s communicative functions in society. Zaidel acknowledges from the outset that art works are not just pretty things that play with our emotions but are socially meaningful devices that convey cultural information between people. In addition, Zaidel makes a point of starting from the beginning – or at least what we know of the beginning – through a discussion of such ancient relics as Paleolithic petroglyphs, pictographs, figurines and musical instruments. She also reviews evolutionary hypotheses about the adaptive functions of creativity and the arts. Although none of this is new, its placement in a neuroscience text is significant. I hope that this synthesis of neural and evolutionary approaches to the arts is an optimistic sign of things to come, especially given the glaring absence of functional brain data in most evolutionary psychology treatises, whether of the arts or otherwise. Much of the book deals with a presentation of neuropsychological case studies of professional painters and musicians. The logic of the lesion-deficit approach to cognition permeates the text. Some of these cases, like the aphasic composer Shebalin or the autistic childartist Nadia, are well known. Others, however, were