Eric Kandel: The Age of Insight
Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory, Kandel demonstrated that reductionist techniques could be applied to the brain, so that even something as mysterious as memory might be studied in sea slugs, as a function of kinase enzymes and synaptic proteins. (The memories in question involved the “habituation” of the slugs to a poke; they basically got bored of being prodded.) Because natural selection is a deeply conservative process – evolution doesn’t mess with success – it turns out that humans rely on almost all of the same neural ingredients as those inveterbrates. Memory has a nearly universal chemistry.
But Kandel is not just one of the most important scientists of our time – he’s also an omnivorous public intellectual, deeply knowledgeable about everything from German art to the history of psychoanalysis. In his marvelous new book, The Age of Insight, Kandel puts this learning on display. He dives into the cultural ferment of 19th century Vienna, seeking to understand why the city was such a fount of new ideas, but he also explores the neuroscience of aesthetics, attempting to explain why some works of art, such as Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” continue to haunt us. In many respects, the book imitates those famous Viennese salons, in which artists, scientists and doctors exchanged ideas and gave birth to a new way of thinking about the mind. (The city was a case-study in consilience.) If you’re interested in the intersection of art and science, the book is a must-read.
LEHRER: The Age of Insight is, in part, a remarkable history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, which strikes me as an astonishingly rich creative period. What do you think led to such a flourishing of science and culture in Vienna at the turn of the century?
KANDEL: Beginning in about 1850, Vienna was changed dramatically. Responding to the liberal pressure, Emperor Franz Josef began to evolve the Empire along more democratic lines. One of the consequences of this democratization was a freeing up of travel, which allowed people to move readily throughout the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Many came to Vienna. In addition, Franz Josef transformed Vienna into one of the most beautiful cities in the world. As a Christmas present to the citizens of Vienna, in 1857, Franz Josef ordered the demolition of the old walls surrounding the city, and replaced these walls with the Ringstrasse – a grand boulevard that would encircle the city. The Ringstrasse now became lined with a wonderful set of public buildings such as the Opera House, the Theater, and the Museum of Fine Arts and Natural History. As a result, the city attracted many people of different ethnic and religious origins from all over the Empire, who were drawn to Vienna, for its beauty, its music, and its emphasis on intellectual and cultural achievement. A number of these people went on to pioneer a distinctive form of Modernism that characterized Vienna and distinguished it from Modernism in France, Italy and Germany.
Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before. Whereas the Enlightenment thinking of the 18th Century emphasized that human beings were distinct from all the other animals because they were created by God as rational creatures, the Viennese Modernists, influenced by Darwin, realized that humans evolved from simpler ancestors. Moreover, they were — as the physicians, Freud and Schnitzler, and the artists, Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele would point out – not rational creatures, but people that were importantly driven by unconscious mental drives.
In addition to these five, there were other pioneers in the Modernist movement. There was the Vienna Circle of philosophers, who tried to codify all knowledge into a single standard language of science. There was an important Vienna School of Economics. And – of course – there was the great tradition of Viennese music that began with Hayden and was now continued by Schoenberg.
Particularly important, in Vienna 1900, was a chain of medical scientists stretching from Carl von Rokitansky to Freud, which established a new dynamic view of the human psyche that revolutionized thinking about the human mind. Freud’s theorizing, Schnitzler’s insightful writings, and the paintings of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka, shared a common focus into the nature of human instinctual life. During the period of 1890 to 1980, the insights of these five men into the irrationality of everyday life helped Vienna establish a culture we still live in today. In a sense, there are very few cultures that have matched Vienna, 1900. Perhaps the most comparable example is Florence during the Renaissance.
LEHRER: One of the heroes in The Age of Insight is Carl von Rokitansky, the founder of the Second Vienna School of Medicine. You argue that he inspired, at least in part, the work of modernist artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. How did he exert this influence?
KANDEL: Rokitansky is the founder of what is now considered the second Vienna School of Medicine, which began around 1846. He was the head pathologist of the Vienna General Hospital, called the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, and then became Dean of the Medical School at the University of Vienna. Rokitansky contributed importantly – I would say, seminally – to the development of modern scientific medicine. He realized that when one examines the patient, one essentially relies on two pieces of information: the patient’s history, and an examination of the patient – listening to the heart and the chest with a stethoscope. But in the 1840s, one did not have any deep insight into what the sounds of the heart meant, for example. No one knew what we now know to be the difference between the sound of a normal valve opening and closing, and the sound of a diseased valve opening and closing. So what Rokitansky realized was that one needed to correlate what one sees of the patient at the bedside, with the examination of the patient’s body at autopsy. Fortunately, Vienna was an absolutely ideal place to do this.
The Vienna General Hospital had two rules that were unique in Europe. One is – every patient who died was autopsied, and two – all the autopsies were done by one person: Rokitansky, the head of Pathology. In other hospitals in Europe, the autopsy was done by whichever physician was is in charge of the patient. So Rokitansky had a huge amount of clinical material to work with. He collaborated with an outstanding clinician, Josef Skoda, who took very careful notes both of what the patient told him, and of what he found on physical examination, and he correlated that with Rokitansky’s autopsy. This allowed Skoda and Rokistansky to define what various heart sounds meant in normal physiology and in diseases of the valve. It also led Rokitansky to enunciate a major principle that had a huge influence – not only on medicine – but also on the cultural community at large, because Rokitansky was not simply a pathologist and Dean of the School of Medicine; he was elected to Parliament, became a spokesman of science, and had an enormous influence on popular culture. He said, “The truth is often hidden below the surface. One has to go deep below the skin to find it.” This Rokitanskian principle had an enormous impact on Freud and on Schnitzler, who were students at the Vienna School of Medicine. In fact, Freud was a student in the last several years of Rokitansky’s Deanship. Rokitansky attended the first two scientific talks that Freud gave, and Freud attended Rokitansky’s funeral. He clearly had a significant impact on Freud’s thinking.
How did Rokitansky influence the artists – Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka? Klimt had a strong supporter in the art writer Berta Zuckerkandl. She ran the most important salon in Vienna: the Zuckerkandl salon, and all the intellectuals in the city attended this. As Berta Zuckerkandl, herself, described it: “Vienna comes alive on my diva.”
Berta’s husband, Emil Zuckerkandl, was a right-hand associate of Rokitansky. Klimt befriended Emil at Berta’s salon and Klimt became interested in biology as an end in itself. He began to read Darwin, and he began to study the slides that Zuckerkandl was working on. He went to Zuckerkandl’s lectures; he attended some of his dissections, and he asked Zuckerkandl to give lectures to other artists so that they would become familiar with the biology of the body. As a result, one can begin to see the incorporation of biological ideas in Klimt’s work. So, if you look at Adele Bloch-Bauer – the picture on the cover of The Age of Insight – you will see that Adele’s dress is covered with oval-shaped symbols that symbolize ova. These oval shapes surround her body; in the background, are rectangular shapes which, in Klimt’s work, symbolize sperm showing that not only is she an attractive and seductive woman, but also reproductively capable. In the famous painting, The Kiss, the man’s garment is covered with these rectangular stripes, the woman’s with ovals. Moreover, not only in the decorative element of his work, but also in the way Klimt represented his women – as evident in his drawings – you see that he wanted to go below the surface. He did not follow the rituals of Western art, or Freud’s naïve and incorrect teachings about female sexuality. Rather, he wanted to use his own insights, which were extensive, to give a modern view of women’s sexuality: that they are capable of pleasuring themselves – they do not need the attention of a man, and their sex lives are just as rich as that of men. Moreover, although Freud was always aware of aggression, he didn’t think it was equally important to eros until toward the end of the first world war, when he saw killing all around him. By contrast, Klimt had already incorporated, in the painting Judith and Holofernes, his insight that aggression is as important as eroticism, and that women are also capable of aggression as well as erotic impulses, and the two can be fused. In this remarkable painting, where Judith, having slain Holofernes, fondles his head in a clearly erotic fashion.
Kokoschka picked up a theme that Freud enunciated: that the examination of the unconscious mental processes of others begins with an examination of oneself. Kokoschka, who was a bit of a self-promoter, argued that he had discovered unconscious mental processes independent of Freud, and in his paintings, he reveals a major interest in going deep below the surface to explore his own emotional life and that of his subjects. And, as with Freud, he had a fascination with childhood and adolescent sexuality that he claimed was independent of Freud. Klimt never did any self-portraits. Kokoschka did a number of very honest and soul-searching self-portraits. For example, during his relationship with Alma Mahler, he depicted himself as a helpless creature, completely in her hands. He also was the first painter to depict female adolescent sexuality – nude adolescence – and the sexual striving of children in the famous painting of the Stein children.
Schiele – the third of the trio of Modernist painters – was the master of modern existential anxiety. He was the Kafka of painting. Much of the paintings that he did were of himself, and many self-portraits were in the nude. Using himself as a model, he depicts all aspects of psychological strivings, not just in facial expression, but even more in hand, arm, and body postures. So, one can trace the influence of Rokitansky throughout all of Viennese Modernism.
LEHRER: Your book is filled with fascinating explorations into the nascent science of neuroaesthetics. If I were a working artist, I’d want to know all about this new field. But I’m curious: do you think scientists can learn from artists? If so, what sort of collaborations would you like to see?
KANDEL: Why would we want to encourage a dialogue between art and science, and, in a larger sense, between science and culture, at large? Brain science and art represent two distinct perspectives of mind. Through science, we know that all of our mental life arises from the activity of our brain. Thus, by observing that activity, we can begin to understand the processes that underlie our responses to works of art: how is information, collected by the eye, turned into vision? How are thoughts turned into memories? What is the biological basis of behavior? Art, on the other hand, provides insight into the more fleeting, experiential qualities of mind – what a certain experience feels like. A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
What would the benefits of such an exchange be today, and who would gain from it? The gain for brain science is clear. One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists, themselves. Insights into the processes of visual perception and emotional response may well stimulate new expressions of artistic creativity. Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, and the Impressionist artists learned about color mixing from the study of color by physicists, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to the revelations about how the brain works. Understanding the biology behind artistic insights, inspiration and the beholder’s response to art could be invaluable to artists seeking to heighten their creative power. In the long run, brain science may also provide clues to the nature of creativity, itself.
You, Jonah, yourself, have pointed out in your first book that artists are psychologists. They have insight into the human mind that often precedes the insight that scientists have, because scientists need to design experiments, and then carry them out in order to do it. They cannot do it by intuition, alone, as can writers and painters. So, I would not necessarily say that scientists and artists need to collaborate with one another, but it would be helpful for them to talk to one another to, perhaps, give rise to specific ideas that may or may not be carried out together. For example, we, at Columbia, under the strong support of President Bollinger, are thinking of starting a Ph.D. program in Science and Art, in which psychology and neuroscience students will learn more about the biological response to art, and encourage some students of art to get involved in this, as well. In fact, David Freedberg, who is an art historian interested in these problems, is going to participate in this.
LEHRER: One of the tensions that emerges from early 20th century Vienna is the attempt (by Freud and others) to undermine the assumptions of the Enlightenment – we are rational creatures – using the tools of the Enlightenment. In many respects, this basic theme has continued in recent years, as neuroscientists and psychologists continue to reveal the powers of the unconscious in shaping our beliefs and behavior. (We are not nearly as rational as Descartes believed.) What do you think Freud would make of modern neuroscience?
KANDEL: I think Freud would love modern neuroscience. Freud developed his tripartite structure of the mind, clinical observation, theory of psychoanalysis, in the hope that, someday, this would be translated into brain sciences, he was aware that what he was developing a cognitive psychology – psychoanalysis – and that this was bound to be modified, and, in part, falsified, by biology. He knew that psychoanalysis was not an empirical, experimental science. So, there is no question, he would very much have liked to develop a biological science of psychoanalysis if he could do so. He tried, in his 1895 essay on Psychology for Neurologists, but he saw this was a complete failure. Biology was just too far away from providing the kind of a background he needed. But the situation is clearly different now.
In fact, if you look around, it is amazing how much of our view of the mind follows outlines of Freud’s thinking. We now know that conscious mentation is the tip of the iceberg, very much as Freud argued. We are now clearly aware of the importance of instinctual strivings. We have localized them to the hypothalamus, and to the amygdala. We know that sexual strivings are present in childhood. We realize that when we convert unconscious to conscious mental processes, a sort of broadcasting function goes on. We are aware of superego functions at a biological level, moral values that are built into our brains.
I think while Freud would be quite satisfied with neuroscience he would not be satisfied with the current structure of psychoanalysis. This is because the generations of psychoanalysts that came after did not try to make psychoanalysis more empirical; they continued the tradition that he had begun. It wasn’t until recently that follow-up studies have been carried out to determine under what circumstances psychoanalysis is effective, how it compares to other forms of short-term psychotherapy, and ultimately, they are now beginning to do imaging experiments to see whether or not biological markers – for example, in Area 25 in depression – are relieved by psychoanalysis. So I think the failure of psychoanalysis to progress is due in part to the decline in the scientific ambition of psychoanalysts.
LEHRER: How has this new science of art changed the way you think about art? Do you now think differently about the beauty of Schiele, Klimt and the Viennese modernists?
KANDEL: Yes. I now have a much better idea of why the Modernists’ portraiture affects us so profoundly, because I realize that they have tapped into the enormous face processing capability of the brain. I now understand why their exaggerations are so effective. They regulate the cells in face patches in the inferior-temporal lobe of the brain. We see how arbitrary use of color can have a powerful affect on our emotions.
We now have an outline of the Beholder’s Share. We see how some people – for example, autistic people – have a difficult time responding empathically to paintings of faces. I understand better, the nature of ambiguity in art – how each of us sees a slightly different version of a great work of art, and that this interpretation is subject to the creative capability of the brain. I was not aware, before, what a creativity machine the brain is, and how each of us sees a different view of art because we have different brain responses to it, and how, even for simple perception, there is not only bottom-up processing, determined by Gestaltian rules of grouping things together, but there is a lot of top-down processing, which is based on comparing what we see now to what has been stored in memory.
So, I think understanding the biology of the Beholder’s Share has significantly enriched my understanding of art. It has done so without in any way diminishing my aesthetic response. In fact in general, knowledge only enhances enjoyment, and I think it has enhanced my enjoyment of art. It is a little bit like saying, “To what degree does reading good literary criticism of Shakespeare, say by Harold Bloom and A.C. Bradley, enhance your enjoyment of Hamlet or King Lear?” I feel very much the same way.