Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, the son of Milada Janosikova and Ludvik Kundera. His father, a noted concert pianist and and musicologist, taught him piano, and he considered a career in music before his interests shifted to literature, particularly French.
“From an early age ,” he told an interviewer for the literary journal Salmagundi in 1987, “I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco, and admired French surrealism.” - Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Mr. Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being. “ - Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, Thursday, July 2023 on MILAN KUNDERA, 1929 - 2023

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 71

As artists started to move toward abstraction, they began to see analogies between their art and music. Although music has no content and uses abstract elements of sound and division of time, it moves us powerfully. Why, then, does pictorial art have to have content? This question was addressed by the French Poet Charles Baudelaire, who pioneered a new style of prose-poetry and wrote the famous volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The flowers of Evil), in which he described the changing nature of beauty in modern life. Baudelaire argued that even though each of our sense responds to a restricted range of stimuli, all of the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. It is therefore particularly interesting that the earlierst truly abstract painting was achieve by the pioneer of abstract music, Arnold Schoenberg. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 71

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 69

On November 12, 1918, the day after the day after the armistice ending World War I was signed, Monet committed to giving the French government a set of large paintings as a monument to peace. Shortly after his death in 1926 at the age of eighty-six the French government constructed two oval galleries at the Musée de l'Orangerie, …as a permanent home for eight water lily murals…most of the murals do not show the sky; only the infinity of the lily pond. These remarkable works are filled with ambiguity and beauty. We see in them the beginnings of a change from a dialogue between the artist and his subject to a dialogue between the artist and the canvas. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 69

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 44

In us, learning has led to the establishment of a completely new kind of evolution - cultural evolution - which has largely supplanted biological evolution as a means of transmitting knowledge and adaptations across generations. Our capacity for learning is so remarkably developed that human societies change almost exclusively by cultural evolution. In fact there is no strong evidence of any biological change in the size or structures of the human brain since Homo Sapiens appeared in the fossil record some 50,000 years go. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times to modern times, are the product of cultural evolution, and therefore memory. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 44

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 25

What is so wonderful - indeed, almost magical - about our brain is that we can perceive an object based on incomplete information, and we can perceive it as being the same under strikingly different conditions of lighting and context - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 25

Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

If you’re not joyful you are wasting your life. The fact that I exist is a perpetual surprise for me. What’s the healthiest emotion? Not love, not compassion, not even joy. It’s All. It’s wonder. Why do we exist? Perpetually surprised, full of wonder and joy. You return to innocence. And what we lost today in this world is the loss of innocence - Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

Best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It’s a discontinuity. Fundamental creativity. Creativity is death and resurrection. It’s a death of context, meaning, relationship, and story. And a new meaning, relationship, and story. That’s fundamental creativity. Einstein coming up with the Theory of Relativity…or a great piece of art. Beethoven’s 5th. These are original creativity as a disruption to the algorithm. - Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel, page 21

...we do not see material objects, but rather the light reflected off them (Berkely, 1709). As a result, no two-dimensional image projected onto our retina can ever directly specify all three dimensions of an object. This fact, and the difficulty it raises for understanding our perception of any image, is referred to as the INVERSE OPTICS PROBLEM. (Purves and Lotto 2010; Kandel 2012; Albright 2013)... any three dimensional object is inherently uncertain. Gombrich fully appreciated this problem and cited Berkley's observation that "the world as we see it is a construct slowly built up by every one of us in years of experimentation." - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel, page 21

Reductionism in Art and Brain Sciense, ERic Kandel, page 44.

In us, learning has led to the establishment of a completely new kind of evolution - cultural evolution - which has largely supplanted biological evolution as a means of transmitting knowledge and adaptations across generations. Our capacity for learning is so remarkably developed that human societies change almost exclusively by cultural evolution. In fact, there is no strong evidence of any biological change in the size or structures of the human brain since Homo Sapiens appeared in the fossil record some 50,000 years ago. All human accomplishments from antiquity to modern times, are the product of cultural evolution, and therefore MEMORY. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Sciense, ERic Kandel, page 44.

Chris Frith 2007, cognitive psychologist.

What I perceive are not the crude and ambiguous cues that impinge from the outside world onto my eyes and my ears and my fingers. I perceive something much richer - a picture that combines all these crude signals with the wealth of past experience ... Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality. - Chris Frith 2007, cognitive psychologist.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

A hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and returns to the ordinary world, changed or transformed, and shares that gift with their community. Before any of this can happen, the hero must answer the call to that adventure. The hero is reluctant at first refusing the call. A mentor appears, and helps them to cross threshold leaving the ordinary world for the new one. In real life it can be hard to recognize the call for adventure, it is almost always something that you are afraid to do, but know inside that you need to do. It appears as an obstacle. To be the hero of your story, you must answer the call, and the obstacle is the way. - Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

REDUCTIONISM IN ART AND BRAIN SCIENCE, Eric R. Kandel

Riegl emphasized an obvious but previously ignored psychological aspect of art: that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only do we collaborate with the artist in tranforming a two-dimensional figurative image on canvas into a three dimensional dipiction of the visual world, we interpret what we see on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon “the beholder’s involvement.” Based on ideas derived from Riegl’s work and on insights that began to emerge from cognitive psychology, the biology of visual perception, and psychoanalysis, Kris and Gombrich went on to develop a new view of this concept, which Gombrich referred to as the beholder’s share. - REDUCTIONISM IN ART AND BRAIN SCIENCE, Eric R. Kandel

The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 239

if we want to understand the way in which northern art developed, we must appreciate this infinite care and patience of Jan van Eyck. The southern artists of his generation; the Florentine masters of Brunelleschi’s circle, had developed a method by which, nature could be represented in a picture with almost scientific accuracy. They began with the framework of perspective lines, and they built up the human body through their knowledge of anatomy and of the laws of foreshortenning. Van Eyck took the opposite way. He achieved the illusion of nature by patiently adding detail till his whole picture became like a mirror of the visible world. The difference between northern and Italian art remained important for many years. It is a fair guess to say that any work which excels in the representation of the beautiful surface of things, of flowers, jewels or fabric, will be by a northern artist, most probably by an artist from the Netherlands; while a painting with bold outlines, clear perspective and a sure mastery of the beautiful human body, will be Italian. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 239