Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the complete, but to the imperfect and incomplete. We know just enough to know that we want to know more; there is something here, we just don’t what. That’s why we call it beautiful.
An illustration titled Neuron preparing to fire by Graham Johnson, an American scientific imagery specialist.
This illustration won the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge in 2005, sponsored by both Science magazine and the National Science Foundation.
Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.
http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/video/notes-neurons-full
“The experiment and the poem complete each other,” writes Jonah Lehrer, in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, a book that looks at how artists intuit scientific breakthroughs. Art and science once operated in the same room, so what if it was back in the Renaissance.
