Beauty and the Neuroscientist: A Conversation on Neuroaesthetics with Semir Zeki

I remember that, when I was a child, I had this big book about the human body. It was a fascinating read: I read how fresh air goes to the lungs and then there, in the alveoli with the surface of a football field—I don't know why they thought an early teenager would understand pulmonary and systemic circulation but not square meters—exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the blood, I read how the heart pumps blood, how white blood cells attack viruses and bacteria and sometimes they misfire producing allergies, where the salty or sweet receptors in my tongue were, and so on. By the end of each chapter, I could see that the things I feel—my breathing and heartbeat, the taste and cold of ice cream—come from tiny processes in cells and molecules.

It was obviously an illusion—but that's not the point. The point is that there was a notable exception, in this understanding. The chapter devoted to the brain explained how neurons transmit chemical and electrical signals and wow, it's amazing, but what does this have to do with my mind? I mean: I have to pee because my bladder is full of filtered blood because my body has to get rid of the waste of cells' operations, the passage from nephrons to the urge to find a restroom is crystal clear. But what is the link between some neurons that receive and send signals and the thought "I must find a restroom"?

I read that chapter several times and at first I thought it was my fault: like all other chapters, the answer was there but it was too difficult for me to understand. After maybe six or seven times I started to realize that I wasn't missing anything: there was no answer, in that book, on how the brain, a bunch of neurons, can think. It was a mystery, at least for me but I started to think that it was a mystery also for scientists.

Years later this suspicion was confirmed many times. Yes, I studied philosophy, so my approach to these topics is maybe biased, but I'm quite sure—I have no certainty here, as anyone else—that we can link certain mental phenomena to certain brain parts, but the properties of the two levels will remain different. You can try to grasp the idea with an analogy introduced by Spinoza: a curved surface is convex on one side and concave on the other; just as the same surface is both convex and concave depending on perspective, mental phenomena and brain activity might be two aspects of the same underlying reality.

That's why, the first time I heard of "neuroaesthetics" I was curious but also a little suspicious: wow, a science that puts together neuroscience and the experience in front of an art piece—but in order to do what? To try to reduce our aesthetic experience to brain circuits, to find a neurological explanation of why Michelangelo was a greater artist than Pietro Torrigiani, following my childish dream of understanding the mind starting from neurons? Or to gain some insight of both the brain and the aesthetic experience? The answer to this question is nearer to the latter than to the first, as we can read in scientific articles and books written by Semir Zeki, the neurobiologist who started this field of research; I cite here the most famous: Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness, published in 2009.

When, in 2024, Zeki was invited to Lugano for a public lecture about how art changes our brain—part of a course at the Università della Svizzera italiana in collaboration with IBSA foundation for scientific research—, I met him for a long interview.