Lecture: How Neuroscience Can Make the Humanities More Human: The Example of Neuroarthistory

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Speaker: John Onians from University of East Anglia

This lecture is part of the HRC's Emerging Disciplines Lecture Series. Within the 'humanities' there has been surprisingly little reflection on what it is that make us human. Thus, although there is general agreement that the miraculous mental products we study depend on such attributes as socialisation, language and culture, little thought is given to the attributes of our unique biology on which they, in turn, ultimately depend. Today, however, thanks to discoveries about the brain made possible by new technologies this is changing, and new revelations are transforming the understanding of our humanity. These revelations empower -indeed require - each humanities discipline to look again at its materials to explore what light the new neuroscience can shed on old problems. Neuroarthistory does so for the visual arts, but given the revolutionary significance of its upgrading of the role of passive visual exposure in human mental formation and its downgrading of the role of the conscious and the verbal, Its findings have, it will be argued, profound implications for all the others.