Tue 15 Jun, 2021
Science and art have long realized that experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history this is Gombrich’s “beholder’s share”, and in science this traces to Helmholtz’s concept of perception as inference. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, one in which biological and sociocultural influences conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of its sensory signals. In the third of three seminars for 2014-15 led by the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, Professor Anil Seth will trace the links between these ideas, calling informally on distinct artistic styles (such as Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism) and (in a more informed way) on recent developments in the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, emotion, and embodied selfhood. This is not neuroaesthetics – the attempt to reveal the brain basis of aesthetic responses. Instead, Anil Seth will hope to show how art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press) and was Conference Chair of the 16th Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC16, 2012). He has published more than 100 academic papers in a variety of fields, and he holds degrees in Natural Sciences (MA, Cambridge, 1994), Knowledge-Based Systems (M.Sc., Sussex, 1996) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (D.Phil., Sussex, 2000). He was a Postdoctoral and Associate Fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California (2001-2006). Anil is Editor and Co-Author of30 Second Brain (Ivy Press, 2014), was Consultant for Eye Benders (Ivy Press, 2013; winner of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2014) and contributes regularly to a variety of media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC.