Here is an excerpt from an article written by Priscilla Long in which she explains what it takes to take in, say, a Picasso. It was published by The American Scholar, the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.

“Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, The American Scholar, delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1837, the magazine aspires to Emerson’s ideals of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books, history, and science.”

To check out all the other resources and obtain subscription information, please click here.

* * *

What is it about our species that we make art and view art and love art? I’m thinking of the ancient cave paintings in France and Spain, begun 40,800 years ago—the age of the oldest red-painted dot to be accurately dated. (It’s found in a cave called El Castillo in the Spanish province of Cantabria.) The high cave-art era occurred between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago. How modern they seem, those lyrical representations of bison, horse, mammoth, ibex, deer, and auroch (pronounced OUR-rock, an ancestor of the dairy cow). They were made by drawing curved lines in charcoal and adding shadows and highlights in mineral-derived colors such as red ochre to convey movement and three-dimensionality.

How we see—how the brain perceives what the eyes take in—is entangled with how we see art, how we make art. This is one thread in the book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain by neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel. If I were going to be washed up on a desert island with my choice of 10 books, along with, I would hope, a good supply of espresso, this thick and handsome volume—a tapestry of art history, psychology, creativity studies, and brain science—would be one of them.

How do we see? Light waves hit the sheet of neurons, the retina, that lines the inside rear wall of the eye. These neurons, called retinal ganglion cells, fire and send their electrical pulses along the optical nerve, “a biological cable,” in Kandel’s words, “composed of more than a million axons.” The electrical pulses reach the lateral geniculate nucleus—a part of the thalamus, our brain’s receiver and central relay station of sensory information.

The lateral geniculate nucleus sends sends the electrical pulse to the primary visual cortex, located at the back of the brain. These millions of neurons are stimulated by whatever they are sensitive to, such as motion or color or edges. Neurons sensitive to edges respond to a line at one, and only one, angle or orientation. Kandel writes, “If a black line or edge is rotated on an axis before our eyes, slowly changing the angle of each edge, different neurons will fire in response to different angles.” Next the primary visual cortex projects its electrical pulses forward. Farther forward, other parts of the brain take these separate ever-arriving bits of data and construct the image.

So the brain is an artist, creating images out of separate visual components. Maybe our ability to read a curve drawn on a flat surface as a three-dimensional figure is related to our reception of visual data from the world as edges—lines and curves. Maybe when artists draw they are doing with their hand what the brain is doing with its electrical pulses.

* * *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Priscilla Long is the author of The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life , and Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. Her essay “Genome Tome,” which appeared in the Summer 2005 issue, won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.