Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me

I'd come to think our brains needed help transforming from trash compactors into microscopes, and that's where art comes in: a way to fight our instincts to truncate and elide, and, in so doing, to notice more, appreciate more, empathize more. Which is all to say, to experience more. If our lives are the set of experiences that we collect, then art

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one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe oth... See more

The Nobel laureate particle physicist Frank Wilczek once said that beauty exists as a dance between opposite forces. First, he said, beauty benefits from symmetry, which he defined as “change without change.” If you rotate a circle, it remains a circle, just as reversing the sides of an equation still reveals a truth (2+2=4, and 4=2+2). But beauty ... See more