"The Art of Making Choice. David Lynch and His Work in Relation to Neuroscientific Explorations on Human Brain and Consciousness."

“In the complex world of contemporary art - full of labels, elaborations, writings, subdivisions, “references” and movements - a statement made by Semir Zeki drew a clear boundary between ‘beauty’ and ‘art’ since Duchamp’s exhibition in 1917. Zeki compares the samples of literature, music, painting, sculpture and theater. He investigates whether there will be one common characteristic that is reflected in the organization of the human brain when it is experiencing beauty. Neurosciences limit the analysis to several examples from the canon of West and East culture. For years he has been scientifically investigating the neurobiology of visual, musical and moral beauty. He discovered that it is correlated with activity in a specific part of the emotional brain, field A1 of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. Later he expanded this research to the problem of beauty derived from such a highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics. Zeki explored how the beauty of mathematics correlates activity in the same part of the emotional brain which is active during the perception of well - known artworks such as paintings, sculptures and classic music. He compared the language of mathematicians who can communicate regardless of native language, ethnic or gender to visual language that perhaps exists on similar principles. Zeki often refers to the concept of intuitive and 'natural' creative act in his statements. He also emphasizes the possibility of ambiguous interpretations of a single art work. (...) According to Zeki’s definition, based on years of research on the functioning of the brain, the most important goal of art is acquiring knowledge (not “knowing”). Again Zeki underlines that for centuries artists were not guided by scientific knowledge but by an intuition about how the brain works. (...)"
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