The Art & Neuroscience Project
at the Italian Academy

For neuroscience Fellowships supporting researchers doing ongoing studies, please go to the Art & Neuroscience Fellowship Opportunities page; see here below for details about neuroscience events at the Academy.

The Academy's Art & Neuroscience Project is closely related to its concerns with cultural memory, and is informed by groundbreaking work being done by neuroscientists in Italy, the US, and elsewhere. It is intended to expand the historical and sociological investigation of the traces of memory into fields where the operations of memory itself can be subjected to analysis and critique. The aim is to move from traditional historical approaches to memory, such as those most famously described by Paolo Rossi and Frances Yates, to modern scientific approaches, such as those currently being studied in the neurosciences. The Art & Neuroscience Project also encourages investigation of responses to works of art – visual, literary, and musical. New developments in the cognitive neurosciences have greatly illuminated the neural substrate of such responses. Striving to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences with serious cross-disciplinary dialogue, this project shows that intellectual rigor need not be shortchanged in the pursuit of discourse across the two cultures, as C.P. Snow put it fifty years ago.

The Academy develops seminars and public events designed to spread word of the newest scientific advances and to bring together researchers in the sciences and the humanities:

March 24, 2006
Columbia Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind
The Academy's Teatro was packed with an enthusiastic crowd eager to learn about recent advances in the neurosciences from the best-known scientists in the world, including Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, Raymond Dolan, Vittorio Gallese, Joseph LeDoux, Semir Zeki, and Margaret Livingstone, along with responses and reflections from noted artists including Marina Abramovic, Robert Irwin, Richard Meier, Lynn Davis, Laurie Anderson, Terry Winters, Joan Snyder, Philip Taaffe, George Condo, and David Salle. The conference was led by the Academy's Director, David Freedberg, along with Arthur C. Danto and Nobel Laureate Eric R. Kandel. The Forum was sponsored in part by the Louise T. Blouin Foundation.

June 13, 2006
Art and Vision Science
This closed meeting was held to pursue some of the ideas raised during the Forum in March. This gathering, in the Academy's Library, featured rigorous discussion among all the participants, some of them originally speakers or participants at the Forum.

April 24, 2007
Lecture on Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation, and Aesthetic Experience
Vittorio Gallese of the University of Parma, an acclaimed speaker at the 2006 Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind, returned to the Academy to deliver this lecture, which brought another full house. The subject of mirror neurons – of which Gallese was one of the principal discoverers – now arouses intense interest in many fields, as was proved by the lively post-lecture discussion launched and moderated by respondents David Freedberg (Director of the Italian Academy) and Kevin Ochsner (Director of Columbia's Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory).

March 25, 2008
Symposium on Vision, Attention, and Emotion
Experts doing fresh and exciting work in the fields of neurophysiology and neuropsychology addressed the cerebral mechanisms of visual perception and visual attention and how they are linked to emotional systems. This approach is crucial to understanding the neuronal substrate of the emotions we experience when viewing a work of art. The sessions provided a lively day of provocative discussion on the basis of the latest research in these areas. Speakers included Marlene Behrmann (Carnegie Mellon), James Bisley (UCLA), Anna Ipata (Columbia researcher and 2007-8 Fellow at the Academy), Earl Miller (MIT), Kevin Ochsner (Columbia), Elizabeth Phelps (NYU), John Reynolds (Salk Institute), Daniel Salzman (Columbia), Jeremy Wolfe (Harvard), and Steven Yantis (Johns Hopkins) as well as Academy Director David Freedberg.

The Art & Neuroscience Project at the Italian Academy

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The Art & Neuroscience Project
at the Italian Academy