ART & ORGANISM
MAJOR THEME:
The Art & Science of Art & Science
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Science is objective … but not scientists
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ART and SCIENCE are catchphrases for configurations of cognitive functions. (localized and distributed coordinated processes in the brain and body that have more-or-less privileged connections with each other that make specific aspects of INPUT « INTEGRATION « OUTPUT more-or-less likely)
ARTISTS and SCIENTISTS (and we are all more-or-less both) are highly motivated to make the contents of mind understandable (both to themselves and to others). Our evolutionary biology has prioritized functions that support MEETING BIOLOGICAL NEEDS (both immediate and long-term) As a working hypothesis we treat all specific COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS are highly ADAPTIVE (in the evolutionary past or developmental present) and contribute to direct and inclusive FITNESS.
Are these configurations alternatives? Essential co-constituents of reality?
The epigraphic shows the ceiling of the great Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona: the architect, Antoni Gaudi, was informed by a life-long love and study of the structural dynamics of plants
The ART and SCIENCE of ART and SCIENCE
Cognitive dispositions and competencies are not distributed equally. We all enjoy differences attributable to our genetic and cultural developmental make-up. And to the extent that we can communicate with ourselves and each other, our knowledge and understanding of the world in which we must survive and hopefully thrive can be enormously enlarged. [See KNOWLEDGE IS POWER].
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Maria Popova wrote, “longing is … the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names — Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet” and Portuguese has the lovely word saudade: the vague, constant longing for something or someone beyond the horizon of reality — but we recognize it in our marrow, in the strata of the soul beyond the reach of words.”
OR we could speak of yearning… and Yearning is not to be taken lightly: Mary oncesaid.
“We have needs, wants, desires, and then there is this other thing … and this is important, so pay attention: before the big bang, before time itself, before matter, energy, velocity, there existed a single immeasurable state called yearning….This is the special force that on the day before days obliterated nothing into everything. It is the unseen strings tying planets to stars. It is the maddening want we feel from first breath to last light.”
(voiceover by (character) Mary Shannon at the end of an episode of “In Plain Sight.”)
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The differences and similarities of ART and SCIENCE as they might be useful to college instructors were explored in a recent conference presentation (Greenberg et al. 2017)[i] and the salient points for us are summarized below:
TEACHING as a profession and as a calling is emerging from the shadow of the “two cultures” view of art and science as mutually exclusive domains of human consciousness and action[ii]. [a case can be made for specialization and focus that engenders research and scholarship “silos,” but as with most human undertakings, nothing in excess. Infusions from sibling fields become necessary to refresh stimulate creative progress]
The importance of creativity and intuition to science, and empirically-driven perception and expression to art is no longer in doubt. BUT the modes of theory and practice have yet to enjoy the rapprochement that will go beyond their co-expression as anything more than a mutually wary alliance.
In recent years, two trends provide reason for optimism: (1) looking beneath the surfaces of art and science as cultural constructs as well as adaptive human behavioral patterns[iii] has established that the best expressions involve the necessary interactivity of intention and motivation in most human activity, not least teaching. And in concert with multidisciplinarity (2) the emerging appreciation of phenomenology in the classroom is giving instructors powerful new ways of communicating course content as well as identifying teachable moments—moments at which students are uniquely susceptible to transformative learning experiences (Greenberg et al. 2015)[iv]; moments that frequently had been hidden in plain sight.
Literature Review
Two of the great callings of our culture are that of the artist and that of the scientist. We recognize the dispositions that seem to predispose us and others to one or another of these callings by their relative reliance on the two principle modes of reality-testing, correspondence (how well an internal mental percept represents or is represented in the external world) and coherence (how well an internal mental percept fits in with past, current, and anticipated percepts). This balance refers also to one’s confidence in the validity of an internal representation of reality.[v]
ART[vi] emphasizes an individual’s unique sensitivity[vii], creativity, and powers of representation.[viii] As a field, art emphasizes intuition and the sensual, and is subject to all those weaknesses of one’s senses: (a) being notoriously vulnerable to illusion, confusion, and bias and (b) being of uncertain origin: that is, corresponding to systematic flaws of perception or something of purely internal origin such as imagery imposed on scotoma, visual migraine, or vivid memories evoked by ambiguous stimuli.[ix] Non-conscious knowledge (latent learning, intuition) is highly valued and is often recognized by spontaneity and impulsiveness. Reality-testing of artists emphasizes CORRESPONDENCE between an idea or contents of one’s mind and an external representation. COHERENCE is the complementary form of reality-testing in which the validity of one’s ideas or actions is corroborated by how well they “fit in” with other ideas of that individual or the ideas of others. The validity of an artist’s actions or production may be provided by other people’s applause or silence as representative of their shared but ineffable feelings.
Art “makes a stimulus special” (Dissanayake 1992[x]) and functions best by identifying and representing the “essence” of a constellation of ideas—a selective attention to a key fragment that evokes a larger phenomenon, a focal idea that can be the attractor for many related ideas—the “seed” around which a constellation of related ideas forms.[xi]
SCIENCE tells the best story it can with the best facts it has. Confidence in any story (theory) about the external world is highly influenced by the integration of personally held beliefs and the beliefs of others (peers and mentors). Thus coherence—the fitting together of beliefs—is a privileged aspect of reality-testing in science. The contribution of consensus to coherence also results in a relative invulnerability of shared beliefs to individual differences and encourages an emphasis on objectivity and quantifiable content.[xii] Good stories are aesthetically satisfying, but their ultimate test is that of making reliable predictions. But even very good stories that lead to important adaptive advantages for those that apply them are often controversial (classical and quantum physics) and the stories are understood to be approximations in their representation of the “real world.”[xiii]
Both ART and SCIENCE, then, utilize cognitive processes of AFFECT[xiv] and REASON with varying authority and influence, each backed by differing proportions of the two major modes of reality-testing: CORRESPONDENCE and COHERENCE, working in lock-step to provide us with more-or-less confidence in the validity of a belief. The [BKS1] importance of individuality in how these processes develop and are applied is celebrated by the resurgence of interest in the phenomenology of teaching and learning. PHENOMENOLOGY emphasizes the idea that one’s acquisition and creative deployment of new knowledge such as course content emerges from that individual’s uniqueness. There is also a growing literature on the reliance of scientists on creative intuition, and of artists on orderly organization. In haunting resonance, William James (1911) observed, “…percepts [emphasizing correspondence] and concepts [emphasizing coherence] interpenetrate and melt together, impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, knows reality in its completeness…. The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible (except by theoretic retrospection) to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense.” [bracketed phrases added by authors]
ART and SCIENCE. Art and Science represent distinctive constellations of cognitive abilities with privileged relationships (connectedness) as distinguishable parts of a whole. Of course, there is significant overlap in the many processes of perception, integration, and expression that are more-or-less prioritized in their participation in their respective functions. In the broad sense we intend, the processes are far more than relatively integrated centers of neural activity: they involve sensory input and action systems as well as extensive feedback and error-detection systems, much of which involves the body as the means of expression as well as experience (embodied and situated cognition)[xv]. Increasing the integration of cognitive abilities of students in the classroom also increases the prospect of an enduring transformative learning experience in which “students move from knowing course content to realizing such knowledge in a manner that transforms worldviews far beyond the college and university classroom. (Greenberg et al. 2016).[xvi]
We can capitalize on an insight of evolutionary biology which helps us conceptualize art and science as cognitive traits that participate in the adaptive function of whole individuals. To paraphrase Levins and Lewontin (1985)[xvii], “Parts and wholes … evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves. These are the properties of things that we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration.”[xviii]
RECIPROCITY OF ART AND SCIENCE: Their Co-constitution of our sensations, perceptions, and conceptions:
- DOES PHYSICS NEED SCULPTURE? READ “Nataraja at CERN”
- DOES PHYSICS NEED POETRY? e.g., https://www.counterpointknowledge.org/why-physics-needs-poetry/ then https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/07/09/200064088/physics-and-poetry-can-you-handle-the-truth [We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”—Niels Bohr in conversation with Heisenberg[i]]
- WHY PHYSICS NEEDS POETRY: By Alissa Jones Nelson. https://www.counterpointknowledge.org/why-physics-needs-poetry/
“Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‘information’ that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.” (Ursula Le Guin. 2014 speech at the conference “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.” Quoted by Alissa Jones Nelson)
[i] In his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg in early summer 1920, in response to questions on the nature of language, as reported in Discussions about Language (1933); quoted in Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy (1972) by Robert J. Pranger, p. 11, and Theorizing Modernism : Essays in Critical Theory (1993) by Steve Giles, p. 28
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ARTISTS as SCIENTISTS as ARTISTS?
An art critic (Jed Perl) wrote of a new exhibit of Cezanne at MoMA (link): “A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.” Is THIS the artistry we would hope of the scientist? Anchored in her own senses but free to interpret correspondences in coherent terms of past and collateral stimuli?
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ART and SCIENCE, PERCEPTION and PRACTICE
Cultural memes that have contributed to traditional views of ART and SCIENCE:
Points to Ponder as groups compose their views about art and science
and their interaction with each other and with teaching[xix]
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ART: “A distinctive human universal … art can be viewed as ordinary behavior made special.”—Ellen Dissanayake (1992)[xx]
ABSTRACTION “All good art is abstract,” Susanne Langer (1957:69) ” . . . every art purporting to represent involves a process of reduction… This reduction is the beginning of art…” –Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence 1953:275[xxi]. [agreeable because abstraction in art is the example par excellence of the transformation of phenomena in one’s world into the language of senses, perceptions, and the conceptions in one’s brain] |
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Science. “The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.”—T.H. Huxley[xxii] … recalls Einstein: “Science is a refinement of everyday thinking.”
“Science is neither a philosophy or a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon be a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. –E.O. Wilson (1998)[xxiii] |
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Views of Relationship. “Art is I, Science is we” –Claude Bernard[xxiv]
“… the technical and rational aspects of the disciplines [must not] take the place of the artistry (e.g. dealing with uncertainty, uniqueness or conflict) … [I am] concerned about … a ‘squeeze play’ in which technical rationality and dwindling professional autonomy in effect squeeze out the opportunity to focus on artistry in practice.” —Schön’s (1987) view described by Vagle (2010)[xxv]
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”—Albert Einstein Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”—David Hume[xxvi]
“…parts and wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves. These are the properties of things that we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration”—Levins and Lewontin11 |
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Motivation. All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves…”–Aristotle[xxvii] “All of us have felt the pleasure of acquiring information … the enjoyment of such experiences is deeply connected to an innate hunger for information: Human beings are designed to be “infovores.” It’s a craving that begins with a simple preference for certain types of stimuli, then proceeds to more sophisticated levels of perception and cognition that draw on associations the brain makes with previous experiences.”—Biederman & Vessel[xxviii]
“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”—Jules Henri Poincaré “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. —Albert Einstein |
Adapted from The Art and Science of Teaching, published in Proc 9th Annual Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, Virginia Tech., Blacksburg VA (details: https://neilgreenberg.com/art-science-of-art-science-05-11-2017/)
Look in now on the convergence of W.I.B. Beveridge and William Wordsworth
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Contrasting and comparing the constellations of ART, SCIENCE, and PHILOSOPHY generally make assumptions about their purposes, their goals, a sense of the biological needs they serve, success in which has perpetuated their practice. Like orgaisms in nature, they survived and thrived in proportion to their success, a kind of natural selection. The “natural science” that Art & Organism puts in the foregound was once called natural philosophy. And like contenporaryphilosophy is most often (but not always) thought of as a progress toward some ultimate clarity (see “Is Philosophy an Art”). Like science, philosophy is always open to revision and thereby successive approximations of truth. But…
“The belief that philosophy is closer to literature and the arts than to logic or science has long had its supporters. Rée cites the poet John Donne, who studied in the 1580s at Oxford and Cambridge, where he soon wearied of Aristotle. For Donne, philosophy was like music, and should be conducted spontaneously rather than in well-rehearsed performances. A not dissimilar stance was taken by Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted by Rée as believing that “instead of mimicking the natural sciences philosophy ought to be ‘written like poetry.’” (from Gray’s (2021) review of Rée)
Perhaps even SCIENCE, like ART, ultimately explores inward not outward… whatever science purports as its knowledge goal, what is really learned about who we are and what our possibities are–each and individually. As though every great explorer–no matter what unexpected vistas were revealed in the outer world–were really looking for themselves. This is not an unfamiliar trope.
[i]Neil B. Greenberg, Katherine H. Greenberg, Brian Sohn, Sandra Thomas, Brenda Murphy, Kristina Plaas. (2017) The Art and Science of Teaching: A DEEP Dialectic. Proc 9th Annual Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, Virginia Tech., Blacksburg VA http://www.cideronline.org/conference/presentation1.cfm?pid=3137. https://neilgreenberg.com/greenberg-et-al-2017-the-art-and-science-of-teaching-chep-conference/
[ii] “The Two Culturesis the first part of an influential 1959 Rede Lectureby Britishscientist and novelist C. P. Snow.[1][2]Its thesis was that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society” was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciencesand the humanities— and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
[iii] “Looking beneath” is the “DEEP” approach: https://neilgreenberg.utk.edu/Pages/DEEP/overview.aspx
[iv] Greenberg, N., Deepa Deshpande, Kathy Greenberg, Karen Franklin, Brenda Murphy, Kristina Plaas, Howard Pollio, Brian Sohn, & Sandra Thomas. (2015) Patterns in Transformative Pedagogy: Ethological Perspective. Proc. 7th Annual Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia. Pp 67-68. http://www.cider.vt.edu/conference/proceedings/2015ConferenceProceedings.pdf
[v] Absolute “truth” may not be possible, nevertheless it is biologically adaptive to pursue it and gain more confidence by successive approximations—telling the best story we can with the best facts we have.
[vi]ART DEFINED at least in part as GOING BEYOND the immediate practical meeting of a survival need, makes the extra effort — time or energy (or some other currency) — seem expendable or available in surplus. BUT in fact, it may by its uniqueness recruit a larger meaning for the act or tool or other “artistic” expression –it communicates to deeper levels, penetrates to deeper layers of consciousness –thereby facilitating a larger meaning. It may be better remembered, or remembered with more precision or accuracy by communicating an affective quality such as the feelings of the artist reflected in his enlarged commitment. It’s one thing for a Paleolithic man to share a view of a woman or women with his cave-mates, another to invest precious time in shaping a Venus of Willendorf.
[vii] “artists are the antennae of the race”—Ezra Pound. Their sensations and perceptions selectively attend to important stimuli that many other people miss.
[viii] “All good art is abstract,” Susanne Langer (1957:69); “. . . every art purporting to represent involves a process of reduction. . .. This reduction is the beginning of art. . . . [it is] no less necessary when the painter is aiming at unlikeness than when he aims at life-likeness.” — Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence 1953:275.
[ix] e.g. scintillating scotoma (visual migraine); Charles Bonnet Syndrome: imagery affected by scotoma https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22022546; (visual release” e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations , http://www.rnib.org.uk/eye-health/your-guide-charles-bonnet-syndrome-cbs/charles-bonnet-syndrome)
[x] Dissanayake, Ellen. (1992) Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: Free Press. Chap. 4.
[xi] This is “redintegration” –the gathering (release from non-conscious resources) of ideas that participate in the concept—the drawing together of related ideas of which we were not previously (consciously) aware.
[xii] “physics envy” term used by Joel E. Cohen (19721) Science Vol 172:674-675 in his review of Mathematics as Metaphor: Dynamical System Theory in Biology. Vol.1, Stability Theory and Its Applications. By Robert Rosen. Wiley-Interscience, New York, 1970. (“Physics-envy is the curse of biology. When somebody else has done the dirty, tedious work of showing that a mathematically formulated physical principle leads to predictions correct to a specified number of decimal places in the boring world of Euclidean 3-space with Cartesian coordinates, theoreticians and textbook writers can axiomatize, generalize, and dazzle your eyes with the most coordinate-free, cosmically invariant representations you please. The areas of learning Rosen has united by these formal analogies are provinces of Atlantis, and the deed and lot numbers of the foundations on which his analogies rest are recorded nowhere.”)
[xiii] The hypothetical “real” world is compared to a “real-enough” world story that provides at least temporary satisfaction of the need for order. Bertrand Russell wrote, “There is an important sense in which we are “prepared” to behave a certain way or believe a certain thing: it coheres, a new belief is found to be so consilient or consonant with what we have already learned that it supports or strengthens or fully realizes that constellation of ideas.”What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires—desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”(from “Roads to Freedom”)
[xiv] “Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information (Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, “A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness” PNAS 2017): “We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain,” explains LeDoux, a professor in New York University’s Center for Neural Science. “Specifically, the differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences.” As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, “the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious experiences.”
“Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the brain’s subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions aren’t a response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.
However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both cognition and emotion, LeDoux and Brown see a quite different architecture for emotions — one more centered on process than on composition. They conclude that emotions are “higher-order states” embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present theories, they see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.”
[xv]Embodied cognition: “By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context.” — Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience pages 172–173. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition; situated cognition “…draws a variety of perspectives, from an anthropological study of human behavior within communities of practiceto the ecological psychologyof the perception-action cycleand intentional dynamics…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition.
[xvi] The “Transformative Learning Experience” resonates with Feuerstein’s idea of Structural Cognitive Modifiability: “changing cognitive structures [change also] the total universe of behaviors to which the part belongs…. The individual has been changed, and once modified as a result of the intervention, a process of “self-perpetuation” is generated, whereby the individual continues to modify him or herself, and thus projects into the future the acquired changes.” (Feuerstein 1997)
[xvii] Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin (1985) The Dialectical Biologist. Harvard University Press (p.3): “Scientists act within a social context and from a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and co-determination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.”
[xviii] This interplay of parts in this evolutionary view was foreshadowed by William James: “The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.… Percepts and concepts interpenetrate and melt together, impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, knows reality in its completeness…. The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible (except by theoretic retrospection) to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense. –William James, Some Problems of Philosophy. (1911: 51,52). https://archive.org/stream/someproblemsphil00jameuoft#page/52/mode/2up
[xix] Neil B. Greenberg, Katherine H. Greenberg, Brian Sohn, Sandra Thomas, Brenda Murphy, Kristina Plaas (2017) The Art and Science of Teaching: The DEEP Dialectic[xix] Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, Virginia Tech., 2017, February 16
[xx] The evolutionary process of ritualization enhances natural or sexual selection for signals enhanced by selective emphasis: the feather fluffing of stress becomes the peacock’s tail of courtship.
[xxi] Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence 1953:275. ” one of the most important works of criticism of the twentieth century”—Accent // “… I have finally been brought to the conclusion that Malraux’s history of art is not simply one of his best productions but perhaps one of the really great books of our time.”—Edmund Wilson. Voices on-line
[xxii] T.H. Huxley (1863) “Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature.”
[xxiii] Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson, in which Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities. Wilson uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor. p45.
[xxiv] Claude Bernard (d. 1878) was a French Physiologist, author of the highly influential, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865). Regarded by Harvard historian, Jerome Bernard Cohen. “one of the greatest of all men of science.” “A modern poet has characterized Bernard’s view of the “personality of art” and the “impersonality of science” as follows: Art is I: Science is We.” Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. IV (1928)
[xxv] Vagle, Mark D. (2010) Re‐framing Schön’s (1987) call for a phenomenology of practice: a post‐intentional approach. Reflective Practice, 11:3, 393-407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2010.487375
[xxvi] David Hume, A Treatise upon Human Nature (1739) bk. 2, pt. 3
[xxvii] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, 980a.21. 350 BC http://www.classicallibrary.org/aristotle/metaphysics/index.htm
[xxviii] Biederman, Irving & Vessel, Edward A. (2006) Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain. American Scientist. 94(3), 247-253. [PDF] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/2006/3/perceptual-pleasure-and-the-brain/1 “All of us have felt the pleasure of acquiring information—a view of a dramatic landscape, a conversation with a friend, or even a good magazine article, can all be profoundly gratifying. But why is this so? What makes these experiences so pleasurable? // We believe that the enjoyment of such experiences is deeply connected to an innate hunger for information: Human beings are designed to be “infovores.” It’s a craving that begins with a simple preference for certain types of stimuli, then proceeds to more sophisticated levels of perception and cognition that draw on associations the brain makes with previous experiences. When the hunger becomes even moderately starved, boredom sets in.”
[BKS1]I need a transition here.