Good morning everyone, I would like to welcome you to Goldsmith’s College and our conference on Neuroaesthetics. This conference is the last of four conferences held here since January, the others being ‘A Phantom Limb Phenomena: Its Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophical Implications’, ‘Creative Evolution’, and ‘Creativity and Cognition’. This conference looks at the new and emerging field of Neuroaesthetics—what it is, what it is doing and where it is going. In my opinion, artists have always been implicitly interested in vision, audition, movement, language, perception, cognition, consciousness and now sampling, plasticity, and synchronicity. …
So, I will take the next fifteen minutes to tell you how the brain works. Good luck. Let me try to say some things about how the brain works that I think are very relevant to the discussion today, and in particular that speak to some misconceptions about how the brain works. If I can untangle them, might make it seem a bit more comprehensible about why we can produce art. William James probably got more of this right than any other single individual in history. He understood several very critical facts: 1) that consciousness is not a thing, but a process, and 2) that …