Welcome to Healthy Minds, I'm Dr. Jeff Borenstein.

Everyone is touched by psychiatric conditions, either themselves or a loved one.

Do not suffer in silence.

With help, there is hope.

Today on Health Minds: I have spent most of my life studying learning and memory.

Nothing could be more fundamentally humanistic than how we acquire new information about the world and how we store it as memories.

To paraphrase you in the book in terms of one of the key findings about how the brain changes, anybody watching us right now who remembers what we're saying, their brain has changed.

Absolutely.

Your brain has changed anatomically as a result of this conversation.

I tell my friends, I try to urge you to forget it because you don't want to have those anatomical changes remain.

But if you remember it, your brain is different than when we started out.

For the few minutes together.

And one of the wonderful things about art is it changes your brain.

I can't speak of future directions of art because it moves in so many directions.

I can tell you future directions in biological analysis of art.

Now what I've done are primitive little steps.

Really a sort of cognitive psychological insights and how this occurs based on really ideas of Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich elaborate a little bit further.

But we're now reaching the point where we really can begin to get a more empirical understanding of what happens when somebody looks at a work of art, particularly when they look at figurative versus abstract art.

(Dr. Borenstein) That's today on Healthy Minds.

Healthy Minds is brought to you in part by: The American Psychiatric Association Foundation.

The Graham Boeckh Foundation.

And the New York State Office of Mental Health.

♪♪ Welcome to healthy minds.

I'm Dr. Jeff Borenstein.

Every time I speak with Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel I learn something new.

Today I speak with Dr. Kandel about the brain and art as well as the science of memory.

How does art as well as other experiences change your brain?

Most of us are not artists but each of us can have a creative experience when we view art.

And how we view it can help us better understand our brains.

Dr. Kandel's research has had a tremendous impact on brain science.

Eric thank you for joining us today.

Jeff I'm pleased to be here.

I want to talk to you about your latest book, which puts together two of your passions, brain science and art.

What was it like for you to write that book?

I had a great deal of fun writing that book because here was a major artistic movement, the New York abstract expressionists, that went from people like de Kooning and Pollock to Rothko, and each of them moved from being figurative to being abstract.

And I'm very fascinated by the transition from figuration to abstraction.

And these artists gave me a great opportunity to explore that.

And you put it in a context of how art can change based on an approach and how science can change and progress based on an approach.

And I want you talk about the - define reductionism and talk about how that, how you really look at that in both the art and the science.

My initial idea for this came from an argument that C.P.

Snow made that the arts and the sciences are a world apart.

And they have different methodologies, different goals, they don't communicate with one another.

And the intellectual world would benefit if the bridges between those two parts of life were built.

He said that some time ago but it struck me that he really got things wrong.

First of all he assumes that the sciences are antithetical to the humanities.

I've spent most of my life studying learning and memory.

Nothing could be more fundamentally humanistic than how we acquire new information about the world and how we store it as memory.

We are who we are because what we learn and what we remember.

And that identifies us.

So number one science can be humanistic.

But also and this is not adequately appreciated, many art is experimental.

You see this most dramatically for example with someone like Jackson Pollock - painting in a conventional way with a canvas on the wall and then he decides this is not what I want to do.

Throws the canvas onto the floor, walks around it, and splatters paint on it, a revolution in how art is created.

And many examples.

Rothko starts off as a figurative artist then begins to have bars of color, ultimately has bars of black color.

Fantastic.

To think that you would put bars of color on a canvas and elicit such powerful almost religious experience from the beholder.

I once sat in front of of one of Rothko's paintings and I said to myself "You think you're a reductionist you are nothing compared to this guy".

The spiritual power that he releases in one.

Because each one of those bars of color is really several layers so you see sort of florescence coming out from within each of those bars, and it's very, very moving.

And there is a Rothko Chapel in Houston which I visited again for the second time a few months ago and it's marvelous.

You walk in there all dark Rothko's and you stand in front of them, one of them, and you see nothing.

And after a while you see movement in the canvas.

And you don't know are you hallucinating or something really going on -fantastic.

The ability to elicit in you imaginative and imaginary responses is quite extraordinary with Rothko.

In the book and in your other writings you speak about the mind and the brain.

The mind is a series of functions carried out by the brain.

Everything that we do from hitting a backhand in tennis to the most creative works of art, are all mediated by the brain.

All these mental activities even, you know, works of art.

Everything.

(Dr. Kandel) Everything.

Unlike what looking at art that has a figure that almost looks like a picture or a landscape that almost looks like a snapshot or a picture, the abstract art can elicit all sorts of emotions.

There is a convention that sort of began with Gombrich of distinguishing between bottom up and top down processing and how a viewer responds to art.

We are all built with a visual machinery that has evolved through, now, hundreds of thousands of years, the human visual system.

And that guides much of our vision.

But in addition each of us has individual experiences and that modulates how this basic machinery works.

With abstract art you use much more of this top down processing because there's so much ambiguity in the arts.

And top down processing which brings out our own creative potential, I find extremely enjoyable.

I may have the most modest, shallow idea but I love it.

It's mine, I created it from de novo and to some degree one feels that with a work of art and I think this is why at its best abstract art is so powerful at eliciting your inner feelings, your inner thoughts, your inner ideas.

You speak about how the beholder is active in terms of -- -- the actively involved.

Yes, yes.

This first came from Ernst Kris who was a big influence in my life.

He was a very famous psychoanalyst but initially started off as an art historian.

At the end of his life when I knew him, he wrote Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art .

He brought the two together.

And he pointed out if you and I look at the same painting we see it somewhat differently.

What does that mean?

That means that the beholder is undergoing a creative experience that in a very, very modest way recapitulates the creative experience of the artist.

Now it's incomparably more modest but nonetheless it points out that looking at a work of art is for the beholder a creative process.

And Gombrich picked up on this and, you know, the whole sort of modern critical thinking about art evolves from Kris and the guy before him, Riegl, who said art history is going to die unless its becomes scientific, the science it ought to relate itself to psychology and the problem it ought to address is the beholder share - how the viewer responds to a work of art is the most obvious thing in the world.

Painting is not complete until the painter paints it and the beholder responds to it.

But no one had really spelled it out very clearly.

Alois Riegl did it, first Kris and then Gombrich really addressed these issues and now everyone is talking about it.

And in many ways it goes to how we as people behold all aspects of the world not just art.

We recreate it all.

But art gives us a chance to see it because we all see it in principle the same way, we all see it differently, but it's there for us to see in the same way.

When did you first develop the interest in art and in art how it relates to brain science?

My interest in art goes back to my sophomore year at Harvard when I took a wonderful fine arts course and I really enjoyed very much what I'd learned there about the history of art and there was a great museum at Harvard the Fogg museum.

I started to visit it regularly and I just enjoyed looking at art.

And then when Denise and I married in 1956, she painted me on our honeymoon.

It's hanging in our bedroom.

It's actually - she's only, she's only done two paintings in her whole life, a landscape which we've lost but the picture of me which is wonderful still hangs there.

And then we began to buy other artists besides Denise Kandel.

And we have a wonderful collection.

If you walk into our apartment it's like being in an art gallery.

We have Beckmann's, we have Klinch, we have Kokoschka's, we have Schiele's, we have Nolde's, we have Munch's really wonderful stuff.

And we have an Israeli artist called Moshe Kupferman probably Israel's most important artist, so we have a very nice collection.

I mean we're academic's so this is, you know, 50 cents off but I'm joking with you.

But, but, but we enjoyed it.

And we've been doing this since the beginning of our marriage.

Have you ever painted.

No.

I have no competence in that at all.

So you are the beholder.

I'm completely the beholder and beholden, yes.

I want you to talk a little bit - because in the book you talk about the science of memory and the work that you've done to help us understand memory and learning.

I'd like you to speak a little bit about that as well.

Well when I entered the field one had learned that certain structures in the brain very important for memory storage and specifically that the hippocampus was important for explicit memory storage but one had no idea how memory actually occurred at the cellular level.

I had wanted to be a psychoanalyst, went to medical school to become a psychoanalyst, influenced by Ernst Kris.

But in my senior year I thought even a psychoanalyst should know something about the brain and I took an elective in brain science.

There is only one place in New York that had a laboratory in brain science that was here at Columbia, Harry Grundfest.

And I had a fantastic experience.

I never had anything like this before.

And because of that, Harry Grundfest nominated me for the NIH, instead of going into the draft I went to the NIH and I became a scientist.

And Wade Marshall, my boss, allowed me to do whatever I wanted.

Brenda Milner had first shown that the hippocampus is critical for complex memory storage.

No one had ever recorded from cells in the hippocampus.

And one thing I learned in Grundfest's lab is how to put electrodes into single cells.

It was a skill most people didn't have.

So I learned how to dissect off the cerebral cortex, expose the hippocampus and together with Alden Spencer another draft dodger whom I recruited to join me, the two of us were the first people ever to record from the hippocampus.

Our seniors went wild.

They said it, typical NIH experience, two young guys, incompetence, but surrounded by this wonderful intellectual environment lifts them up and they do something interesting.

And we were excited.

First people ever to record from neurons in the hippocampus.

We studied it very thoroughly.

After some time we turned to each other said "what did we learn about memory storage?

Not a damn thing."

To study memory you have to see how information comes in, how it's modified by the learning experience, how it goes out.

Nobody knew what was the information coming in at the hippocampus.

We, we realized we needed a simpler system.

Alden was a mammalian chauvinist, he would never leave the mammalian nervous system.

I didn't know enough and I thought I would use the simplest system available, marine snail Aplysia.

Gigantic nerve cells and very few of them.

So worked out a very simple behavior to find the neural circuit.

It was a gill withdrawal reflex like the withdrawal of a hand from a hot object.

And I shocked the animal in the tail and this reflex dramatically enhanced.

And if I came back with a weak shock later, it continued to show this dramatic enhancement.

And after just one painful shock it showed this dramatic enhancement for half an hour, but if you did five or 10 of these painful shocks, showed it for days.

It learned it.

It remembered it, for days.

So I went in, I found that in short term memory there's a functional strengthening of synaptic connections.

But long term memory there's a more powerful strengthening and is an anatomical change.

And that's due to factors of alterations in gene expression.

That was the first demonstration that anyone ever had of what learning and memory involves - and change in how nerve cells communicate with one another.

Uhler predicted it, lots of people said the opposite, you know, lots of ideas floating around.

I was the first one very lucky to demonstrate rigorously how learning occurs in a very simple system.

It turns out to be very general mechanism.

And of course, you know, the era of molecular biology was coming along.

I was able to show how, you know, the nucleus is signaled, how it turns on gene expression et cetera, et cetera, so I was able to use that very effectively.

And then in part with support from the Lieber's I was able to shift and open up a second front in the 1980s and work on the mouse in addition to work on Aplysia - possible to do genetically modified mice and we were able to verify the same thing and then begin to study animal models of mental disorders.

We had a very nice via Eleanor Simpson, very nice model of schizophrenia.

To paraphrase you in the book in terms of one of the key findings about how the brain changes, anybody watching us right now who remembers what we're saying, their brain has changed.

(Dr. Kandel) Absolutely.

Your brain has changed anatomically as a result of this conversation.

I tell my friends I try to urge you to forget it because you don't want to have those anatomical changes remain.

But if you remember it, your brain is different than when we started out.

(Dr. Borenstein) A few minutes together.

And one of the wonderful things about art is it changes your brain.

You remember it, produces anatomical changes and you have the pleasure of looking at this and really makes a big impact on you.

What do you see as future directions in art given what you know?

I can't speak of future directions of art because it moves in so many directions.

I can tell you future directions in biological analysis of art.

Now what I've done are primitive little steps.

Really sort of cognitive psychological insights in how this occurs based on really ideas of Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich elaborate a little bit further.

But we're now reaching the point where we really can begin to get a more empirical understanding of what happens when somebody looks at a work of art particularly when they look at figurative versus abstract art.

There's something called construal theory that has argued and documented in many ways that we distinguish between importantly in many logical processes, but whether something is close to us or far away both in space or in time.

So if I ask you, "you know I'm putting up a hotel "across the street and I want to label the ladies room and a gentleman's room, how do I do it?"

You would say "you put up a cartoon."

If I would tell you "I'm putting up a hotel 20 blocks away."

You would say "I would write gentlemen and ladies."

If I were to ask you "I'm putting up a hotel NOW what would you do?"

"Cartoon."

"I'm putting up a hotel in the same place a year from now."

What would you say?"

"Write it out."

So we make a big distinction in both space and time of how we think about these things.

And this is also true we've now shown together with a collaboration with Celia Durkin and shared graduate student Daphna Shohamy, figurative vs abstract art.

We treat abstract art as if it's further away either in space or in time and the same tests that distinguish between this and logical distinctions also applies to this almost identically.

And you describe how because of the reductionism that occurs in abstract art, it's really broken down, it almost challenges the brain to look at things in a different way.

Much more.

It really evokes your creative processes much more than figurative art.

And it's interesting.

This is true for art it's not true for music.

So when, you know, painting became abstract, you know, many people enjoyed it from the very beginning.

But when Schoenberg began to really move into that realm it's not enjoyable it's just too dissonant, too complicated.

So it shows you it's not a universal principle.

In the book and in your other writings you speak about the mind and the brain.

The mind is a series of functions carried out by the brain.

Everything that we do from hitting a backhand in tennis to the most creative works of art are all mediated by the brain.

All these mental activities.

This set of functions carried out by the brain.

Even, you know, works of art.

(Dr. Borenstein) Everything.

(Dr. Kandel) Everything.

(Dr. Borenstein) Everything.

In the book you write about how we are social animals relates to us recognizing faces, recognizing emotions in faces, and I'd like you to speak a little bit about that.

Well faces are extremely important in our lives.

We recognize others, we recognize ourselves by our faces.

And, you know, in forming a collaboration, forming a partnership, and falling in love, facial expression of the person that you're interacting with is extremely important.

And that's because the faces are treated differently by the brain than any other object.

For example, if I take a pen and I turn it upside down you have no difficulty recognizing it as a pen.

But if I take a face and turn it upside down you'd have a difficult time recognizing the person.

And even if it's a well known face one that you know very well if you change the expression of the face on one image and not in the other, you turn it upside down, you can't tell the difference between the two images even though one is distorting the other one not.

So there's a special process and when people began to explore the brain representation of faces - Doris Tsao and Winfred Freiwald did this - it was amazing.

There are in the brain face patches.

Six of them, if they combine brain imaging with single cell recording.

So they showed a face and they saw these six areas light up then they put electrodes in and then they saw in those six patches cells only responding to faces.

Some responded to the face straight on, one to side views of this face, one to distortions of the face.

And one of the reasons faces are so well represented in our visual life is because they're so well represented in the brain.

And you speak about how in abstract drawings or paintings of the face it really challenges our brains.

Yes, yes, yes.

One of the things for example when you look at de Kooning, when de Kooning moves it becomes abstract.

In many, many of those images you can still see at least the imagination can recreate, figurative structures including faces.

So it's easy to come back to thinking you're looking at a face even though you're looking at a quite abstracted feature.

Eric I want to thank you so much for all that you've done in our field which has had an impact.

I've done it purely for selfish reasons because I enjoy it.

Well you enjoy it and it's also had an extraordinary impact.

I've been very fortunate.

And we're fortunate to have you and I've been very fortunate and I appreciate the opportunity to once again sit down and have this conversation with you.

Jeff thank you for interviewing me.

Thank you.

To be continued.

♪♪ (Dr. Borenstein) Every time I speak with Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel I learn something new.

Most of us are not artists but each of us can have a creative experience when we view art.

And how we view it can help us better understand our brains.

Dr. Kendal's research has had a tremendous impact on brain science.

And our increasing knowledge about the brain is why I always emphasize that when it comes to mental health, with help, there is hope.

Until next time, I'm Dr. Jeff Bornstein.

Goodbye.

♪♪ (Dr. Borenstein) Do not suffer in silence.

With help, there is hope.

Healthy Minds is brought to you in part by: The American Psychiatric Association Foundation.

The Graham Boeckh Foundation.

And the New York State Office of Mental Health.

♪♪ If you would like to watch our expert interview in its entirety log onto bbr foundation dot org slash Healthy Minds.

♪♪