Hi,everyone, I have been listening in and behaving myself till now, taking great interest in the discussion of big issues. Now I want to step in because with Ramachandran's 'laws' the big issues are coming down to specifics in my area. For the last fifteen years I have been trying to use neuroscience to help understand the history of art and have been delighted to discover that neuroscientists are similarly engaged, following a two and a half thousand year tradition. Indeed, last year I published a book with Yale reviewing that history 'Neuroarthistory. From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki'. It is fascinating that big thinkers have been trying to formulate laws-or at least principles-in this area. But of course nobobody until today had enough knowledge of the brain to explore the neurological foundations of those principles. Now I believe we do, and my next two books will endeavour to do that. One puzzle for me is that people in neuroaesthetics tend to disregard neural plasticity which to me is an essential tool as I try to explain why different individuals have made art in different ways at different times and in different places. That is why I differentiate my activity, which has much in common with neuroaesthetics, as neuroarthistory. What I am trying to do is to formulate principles which explain those differences, using the record of all art worldwide from prehistory to the present as experimental material. If you want to find out a bit about this project you can read the introductory material to my Atlas of World Art 2004(just reissued in a cheaper edition as the Atlas of Art 2008). I like to think that the wealth of data provided by that rich record allows us both to formulate and test such principles. The testing is the essential part. Whether the principles I -and others working in this area-come up with are eventually recognised as laws remains to be seen, John
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