What Art Tells Us About the Brain: The Surreal Paintings of René Magritte

This journey through the paintings of René Magritte will reveal your own visual brain in action: figures suddenly are seen as background, only to reverse places in the next glance; transparency battles with opacity; objects are distorted, not by the hand of the artist, but by your brain’s drive to “make sense out of a scene.” Russell D. Hamer, PhD., is a visual neuroscientist whose current work focuses on the brain mechanisms enlisted when viewing visual art, including higher level interpretative, aesthetic, and emotional processes in the brain.