Art and Neuroscience-An Interdisciplinary Approach

Chiyo YOSHII (Graduate School of Letters)

Course Objective
   This course is intended for the students who are interested in the interdisciplinary approach or the study of the brain or both. We will learn about the brain from an interdisciplinary perspective, that is, from two different viewpoints of the humanities and science. We will see how art-a poem, a novel, a painting, a piece of music-reveals the brain's fundamental characteristics, while we will also see how they are investigated in neuroscience.

Course Content
   Walt Whitman and the Brain-Body Relation / George Eliot and the Brain's Plasticity/ Marcel Proust and the Unreliability of Memory/ Paul Cezanne and the Subjectivity of Vision/ Igor Stravinsky and the Brain's Feedback System/ Gertrude Stein and the Deep Structure of Language/ Virginia Woolf and the Emergence of Consciousness

Textbooks
   Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Mariner, 2008. Other materials will also be used in class.

Grading Policy
   Class participation: 40% / Term paper: 60%