Neuroscience and the visual arts with John O'Keefe

Science & Cocktails http://www.scienceandcocktails.org Is there a relationship between neuroscience and the visual arts? How does the brain represent the external world? Why did art history tend to more abstract representations? John O’Keefe, Nobel prize winner in physiology and medicine, will contend that there is a rough relationship between the way that different schools of visual art perceive and depict the world and the processing that takes place in different brain modules. He will further suggest that the history of visual arts shows that the development of artistic perceptions and representations of the world proceeds in a quasi-logical fashion which roughly follows a path from representations in deep brain structures far from the periphery and moves historically more and more towards the periphery.