Amy Ione

• Director at The Diatrope Institute

In her new book Art and the Brain: Plasticity, Embodiment and the Unclosed Circle, author Amy Ione offers a profound assessment of our ever-evolving view of the biological brain as it pertains to embodied human experience. She deftly takes the reader from Deep History into our current worldview by surveying the range of nascent responses to percept...

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures by Eric Kandel, like his study The Age of Insight [1], builds on earlier efforts to couple science and art, particularly those of Alois Riegl (1858-1905), Ernst Kris (1900-1957), and Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001). These three men, he tells us, endeavored to establish art history as a sci...

The idea that context is an important component in both the presentation and nature of empirical studies became popular at the end of the 20th century and is often considered an outgrowth of Kuhnian paradigms. With the elevation of paradigmatic perspectives, however, came the quandaries of what contextual research "means" in practice. Precisely how...

Click to order: Summary Neuroscience and Art: The Neurocultural Landscape is focused on how understanding ourselves as humans is incomplete without considering both biological and cultural aspects. Using the neurocultural perspective, the book explores how everything in the world is filtered back and forth through the brain and culture. The thrust...

The emphasis on biological and genetic perspectives in this chapter is intended to underscore the complexity of brain development. The next chapter explores complexity in terms of social and environmental modifications. As both chapters point out, these are not separate topics in individual lives. Individuals who are going to thrive despite genetic...

Details on the book and information about pre-ordering is attached.

The name Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) became a household word after he published his book Awakenings in 1973. This chapter introduces him as a doctor, a writer, and a neurologist who reported on his own neurological conditions. Like the previous chapter on Iris Murdoch, this chapter emphasizes the value of case studies, a methodology Sacks used to intr...

Even before written documentation, faces were recorded on material objects, capturing both human behaviors and medical conditions. Some were generic faces and others were historical portraits. Now, photography and digital technologies allow us to capture faces mechanically. Within this, imaging tools have given us access to how a brain may conceptu...

Understanding who we are as humans is incomplete without considering both biological and cultural terms, or neuroculture. This chapter and the next examine the historical foundations of contemporary views, showing how our understanding of anatomy, brain function, sensory input evaluation, and higher-order functions have changed over the course of t...

This chapter examines how neuroscience and art are interwoven with therapeutics. The emphasis is on applications and strategies that enhance human health and well-being. The initial section introduces a range of approaches that intersect with therapeutics: neurology, psychology, neuropsychology, psychiatry, occupational therapy, and art therapy. Fo...

Because the activities of war are interwoven with all aspects of human life, combat has a unique position neuroculturally. Wars stimulate medical advancements, create a need for therapeutics, and foster a range of artistic reactions, such as the trauma evident in Picasso’s Guernica, a cry against war. All of these subjects are discussed in this cha...

This chapter, like the previous chapter, examines historical foundations of contemporary views, showing how our understanding of anatomy, brain function, sensory input evaluation, and higher-order functions have changed over the course of time. Looking at historical material in terms of experiment, theory, and applications further allows us to comp...

In the nineteenth century, photography, moving images, and X-rays impacted popular culture, art, and therapeutics while also advancing studies of physiology and living systems. How these new modalities, particularly film, radically altered the neurocultural landscape is the subject of this chapter. One reason to examine technological developments n...

What should we make of how dramatically neurological differences and neurological disturbances impact the ways in which we act, think, live, learn, and feel? This is a question that many have wrestled with throughout time. This chapter opens with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a book in which he translated his own patholo...

This chapter emphasizes cases with acquired disorders, neuroatypical conditions, and adaptations later in life that change one’s relationship to society and one’s environment. In underscoring the complexity of brain development, it expands on the discussion of genetic and biological perspective presented in the last chapter. As both chapters point...

This chapter demonstrates that synesthesia offers a window into our understanding of the human experience and thus serves as a potent lens through which we can investigate human well-being. It turns to the question of what sensory experiences and documentation related to our senses offer to a neurocultural perspective. Recent analyses have revisite...

A case study of novelist/philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) is introduced in this chapter as an exemplar for bringing art, culture, and the neurosciences together. Her medical profile included the hearing loss that she initially noticed around age 35, as well as the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in her seventies. Studies of her brain degeneration...

Book Review.

Synesthesia gave rise to an important debate in nineteenth-century Europe that was influenced by the Symbolist movement and research into the physiology of perception. Yet, efforts to understand sensory modalities and to pictorially translate musical effects, or vice versa, are very ancient in origin. For example, the ability to coordinate colors a...

This book offers some insight into silhouette his­tory and serves as a thoughtful addi­tion to the silhouette story as well. A beautifully produced original study, this book is primarily focused on the United States. Curator Asma Naeem sets the stage in her introductory essay…

Multiple discovery is technically defined as when two or more scientists or inventors independently and often simultaneously give expression to a similar theory, form, model, or invention. The concept is intended to convey that scientists operate within a community and that their discoveries are fostered through an ongoing exchange and communicatio...

Matter and Consciousness, Third Edition by Paul M. Churchland (reviewed by Amy Ione).

In the opening sentence of The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner states, “This is a book about the origins of modern communication as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Labs” (p. 1). Gertner goes on to explain that the Bell Labs environment was an incubator of innovation and offers a narrative documenting man...

Ironically, as I was wondering where to begin this review today, I noticed a car with two bumper stickers matching the sentiments I was tossing around in my mind. One read: "Hate is easy. Love takes courage." The other said: "Got Constitution?" Both relate to the details of the Loving case, in which the United States Supreme Court legalized interra...

Book Review of Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Editors The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011 440 pp., illus. 60 b/w. Trade, $21.95 ISBN: 978-0-262-51664-8. Review by Amy Ione Published in Leonardo Journal, 2012, Vol 45, No. 3, pp309-310.

In the last few years, the term neuroaesthetics has come to denote research that looks at the relationship between art and the brain. The premise within the field is that we can understand art by combining neurological research with aesthetics. Although some of the work associated with this field is compelling, I am among those unconvinced that we...

After reviewing the 7th Creativity and Cognition Conference [1], held in Berkeley in 2009, two thoughts kept reverberating in my mind. First, I thought about the many reviews I have written about art and events in the San Francisco Bay Area and wondered why I have never looked at the vibrant art produced here. I also thought quite a bit about Cathy...

Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings brings together key documents related to institutional critique, a conceptual art movement that has raised questions about the workings of art institutions (museums, galleries) since the 1960s. Alexander Alberro (one of the editors of this volume) calls it a "gesture of negation" (p. 3) that...

Anyone who followed Barack Obama's popularity leading up to the 2008 presidential election in the United States no doubt recalls the iconic "Hope" image that seemed to become the unofficial poster of the campaign, because many felt it defined Obama's message so well. The poster itself was so powerful in a symbolic sense that the Smithsonian Museum...

A recurring topic among those interested in art, science and technology is the value of transdisciplinary approaches. In my view, those who gravitate to this area (or related areas such as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and integrative studies) see broad-based thinking both as a creative tool and as a means to innovatively address some of the...

A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery introduces the Linder Gallery painting to a broad audience through an in situ conversation of six specialists and generalists who discuss the work in the living room of the owner (Ron Cordover). Thus, it is an unusual book about an unusual painting that was virtually unknown until now. The d...

Perpetual Inventory by Rosalind E. Krauss is a collection of essays that spans three decades. The title comes from Krauss's view that her job as an art critic requires that she take a perpetual inventory of what artists make and do, constantly revising her ideas about the direction and significance of the work she critiques. I am not sure the book...

Gerhard Richter, the eighth publication of MIT’s October Files series offers a collection of interviews and essays that examine this virtuoso painter’s oeuvre, his historical position, and how he “fits” within the contemporary climate. Comprised of two interviews with the editor Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (from 1986 and 2004) and eight critical essays...

I was drawn to Christine Hine’s Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science because the synopsis of the book suggested it was a study of the ways that biologists working in this field have engaged with new technologies as the field sustained its heritage and changed to accommodate new possibilities. While some informat...

Creativity is a word that people use as if we all share a similar sense of what it means. Yet, and I am certain I am not unique in this, talking to others at length often shows that how we define creativity is more multifaceted than our assumptions suggest. Given that I am a "creative" person and have come to see the term as both complex and ambigu...

The fifth edition of Michael Sullivan's The Arts of China is an engaging tour de force. Indeed, reviewing this updated, revised and expanded volume is an intimidating task, given its scope. The first edition was published more than 50 years ago, in 1951, as An Introduction to Chinese Art; in this latest version, Sullivan offers a readable summary t...

Gerhard Richter, the eighth publication of MIT's October Files series, offers a collection of interviews and essays that examine this virtuoso painter's oeuvre, his historical position and how he "fits" within the contemporary climate. Composed of two interviews with the editor Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (from 1986 and 2004) and eight critical essays (b...

This chapter examines the importance of visual materials for studying the brain in health and in disease. Surveying historical representations, this research confirms that images of the brain's form and function have long served as teaching tools and as historical reference points for neurological events. The research is divided into five sections:...