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    The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
    The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
    The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
    Audiobook16 hours

    The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

    Written by Eric R. Kandel

    Narrated by James Anderson Foster

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind-our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions-and how mind and brain relate to art.

    At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9781977373786
    The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
    Author

    Eric R. Kandel

    Eric R. Kandel is the University Professor and Fred Kavli Professor at Columbia University and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of learning and memory, he is the author of In Search of Memory, a memoir that won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which won the Bruno Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria’s highest literary award; and Reductionism in Art and Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, a book about the New York School of abstract art. He is also the coauthor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field.

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    Reviews for The Age of Insight

    4/5

    66 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliantly communicated content and fascinating. May need to buy the book too :-)
      Also applause to the narrator- excellently read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Insightful, articulate, well considered. Excellent bibliography. And truly accessible and readable.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is about the biological aspects of our emotional response to art. In particular, to Viennese expressionist art of the early 20th century. Sounds complicated, but Kandel writes about it with such lucidity, it was easy to understand his thesis. I highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      The author clearly enjoyed himself immensely writing this. In this case I won't hold the brazen self-indulgence since I enjoyed it too. And I'm not even an art aficionado like the author. Initially I was disappointed when it went into so much detail about art history but I'm glad I stuck with it as it does so much more and I'm happy to learn some art background which otherwise I would never bring myself to read about.
    • 5/5
      Well Eric Kandel has put together a really interesting book. Initially, I thought it was going to be a rather superficial critique of art. Then I thought it was all a bit too much about Vienna in 1900 being the centre of the cultural universe, and, in particular, the extraordinary contribution of the rather small Jewish population there. And when I did a bit of research on Eric Kandel himself, I found that he was born in Vienna and also Jewish. In some ways, this book is a hymn to the Jewish population of Vienna. In another biographical work Kandel says: "My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values. “The greatest grim irony of all was the fierce attachment of so many Jews to a city that through the years demonstrated its deep-rooted hate for them,” wrote George Berkley, the American historian of Vienna and its Jews". In fact, I found myself wondering whilst reading this book, whether I was getting a full picture or was Kandel "cherry picking" from history and just focussing on the people that were important to his own history. In hindsight, I think he has "cherry picked" but manages to stick with his three chosen artists to illustrate all his points about Art and the brain. A couple of other points about Kandel are: he is a Nobel Prize winner for physiology or Medicine in 2000. No mean feat.....it was for his work on memory storage in the brain and especially for his work using the Axons of sea slugs. And his first degree was actually in 19th and 20th century European history and literature. Finally, he was mentally burned by the Nazi take over in Vienna ...as he says (elsewhere).... I cannot help but think that the experiences of my last year in Vienna helped to determine my later interests in the mind, in how people behave, the unpredictability of motivation, and the persistence of memory."I first became interested in the working of the brain when I was still at high school...and read a book called :Memory: Facts and Fallacies" by Ian Hunter which was published in 1957 and I probably read it in about 1958 when I was 14. It was heavy going but, woke still.....when I had finished it I was left with a profound emptiness. As I recall they wrote a lot about alpha waves of the brain but in terms of understanding what was going on in the brain....there was a big blank. Happily, 60 years later.....as Kandel's book points out ....a lot of progress has been made. And, interestingly the progress has not really been made by the philosophers or psychologists.....as far as I can tell....but it has been due to the new tools such as fMRi. I guess the next big breakthrough will come when we are able to trace the activity of individual axons though the brain...or are able to build working models with living axons.But Kandel does a pretty good job, in my opinion, of explaining the functioning of the brain......the roles played by:PerceptionThe conscious parts of the brainThe unconscious parts of the brainEmotion The interplay between the unconscious and the conscious The role of emotion both conscious and unconsciousLower level processing and higher level processing The insights of psychologists....especially Freud.The contribution of artists to psychology/perception/cognition/understanding emotion/visual processingIntertwined throughout the narrative about the functioning of the brain, Kandel used the work of three artistss to exemplify some of the ways the brain functions...especially at the emotional level. (Klimpt, Schiel and Kokoschka). So Kokoschka's portraits supposedly go beneath the surface appearance of the sitter to reveal their "true" psychological state. (OK maybe......but Kokoschaka probably painted a lot of landscapes and it's hard to look for psychological truths in these). Anyway, Kandel draws attention to the way that when we will at people we spend more time looking at eyes and mouths ...and hands too are really important. And he shows how Kokoschaka and Schiele have emphasised these aspects of their sitters. Kandel assumes that they really has psychological insight. (Maybe ....maybe not).He has a great section on vision and another on emotion and another on creativity. In his last section he concentrates on the links between the arts and science. I get the impression that he wants to be seen as both a fine scientist and someone with a profound appreciation and understanding of the arts. Certainly he has a good understanding of the three artists that he focusses on. And I can understand why he confines himself to portraits of people but I would have appreciated perhaps a slight diversion into other aspects of arts. (For example, what do people look for in landscapes or drawings of animals?).I think I will go back to this book again. It's a bit too much to totally take in in the one go. But, then. in 5 years time knowledge about the brain might have moved on a lot and one would be better off reading later work.....we will see.Happy to give this one five stars.
    • 3/5
      500 pages of science, art history, and art criticism written in a very straight forward manner, science for the general public. Some brain science is numbingly dull. This book helped me to recognize Freud as the first to place unconscious thought so central to psychology. Also it helped me start to realize how much of human thought is unconscious and how much our emotions and feelings are part of our thoughts. The author explains some fascinating results in testing consciousness near the end of the book.

      The most amusing moment in the book for me was finding that the figure noted on page 378 to the sentence "In art, as in life, there are few more pleasurable sights than a beautiful human face", was a photo of the author's wife.

      I wouldn't recommend this book to readers who are not interested the project to help bridge the gap between science and art.
    • 5/5
      This was a great book, I loved each page! The story starts in 1900's Vienna, the first group of thinkers and artist the writer explorers are Freud, Klimt, and the Austrian expressionism artist. That is only the start, Mr. Kandel then explores how we see art and how art interacts with the brain. Then how the brain becomes the mind. Freud was one the first that explored that field. The artist he infuenced explored it in their art. Now science and art is showing how it may work.