Semir Zeki
Encyclopedia
Semir Zeki is a professor of neuroesthetics
Neuroesthetics
Neuroesthetics is a relatively recent sub-discipline of empirical aesthetics. Empirical aesthetics takes a scientific approach to the study of aesthetic perceptions of art and music. Neuroesthetics received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the...

 at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

. His main interest is the organization of the primate
Primate
A primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...

 visual
Visual system
The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which enables organisms to process visual detail, as well as enabling several non-image forming photoresponse functions. It interprets information from visible light to build a representation of the surrounding world...

 brain
Brain
The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...

. He published his first scientific paper in 1967. Since then he has written over 150 papers and four books: Splendours and Miseries of the Brain (2008), A Vision of the Brain (1993), Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999) [which has been translated into six languages] and La Quête de l’essentiel, which he co-authored with the late French painter Balthus
Balthus
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist....

 (Count Klossowski de Rola). In 1994, he began to study the neural basis of creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...

 and the aesthetic
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 appreciation of art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

. In 2001, he founded the Institute of Neuroesthetics, based mainly in Berkeley, California.

Formative influences

When at school, Zeki got acquainted with work on the brain, especially from John Zachary Young
John Zachary Young
John Zachary Young FRS , generally known as "JZ" or "JZY", was an English zoologist and neurophysiologist, described as "one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century .....

 and vowed to work with him, which he did, at University College London. He initially studied anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, then switched to medicine
Medicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

, finally taking a PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...

.

Zeki then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

, and at St. Elizabeths Hospital
St. Elizabeths Hospital
St. Elizabeths Hospital is a psychiatric hospital operated by the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health. It was the first large-scale, federally-run psychiatric hospital in the United States. Housing several thousand patients at its peak, St. Elizabeths had a fully functioning...

, Washington, DC before returning to University College London as Henry Head Research Fellow of the Royal Society.

Time at University College London

Since 1970 Zeki has been based at University College, being appointed the Professor of Neurobiology in 1980. He was Co-Head of the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London from 1994 to 2001.

Zeki has conducted anatomical and physiological studies of the primate visual brain. Since 1987, he has used positron emission tomography
Positron emission tomography
Positron emission tomography is nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide , which is introduced into the body on a...

 (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...

 (fMRI) to study the human visual brain.

Zeki has lectured on the subject the world over. Among the more than 50 named lectures he has given are The Ferrier
David Ferrier
Sir David Ferrier, FRS was a pioneering Scottish neurologist and psychologist.-Life:Ferrier was born in Woodside, Aberdeen and educated at Aberdeen Grammar School before studying for an MA at Aberdeen University...

 Lecture (Royal Society), the Sir Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine...

 Lecture (Académie des Sciences, Paris), the Philip Bard Lecture (Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

), the Paul Broca
Paul Broca
Pierre Paul Broca was a French physician, surgeon, anatomist, and anthropologist. He was born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Gironde. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that has been named after him. Broca’s Area is responsible for articulated language...

 Lecture (Lyon
Lyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

), the Getty
Getty Center
The Getty Center, in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus for cultural institutions founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. The $1.3 billion center, which opened on December 16, 1997, is also well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles...

 Public Lecture (Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

), the David Marr Lecture (Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

), the Koetser Lecture (Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

), the Burda Lecture (Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

), Sigma Tau Lecture (Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

), the Donders Lecture (Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

), and the Hayaishi Lecture (Osaka
Osaka
is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...

) and Carl Bernhard Lecture (Stockholm).

He has also lectured specifically on art and the brain at various institutions around the world, including the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

 (London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

), the Musée d'Orsay
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...

(Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

), Gemäldegalerie (Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

), Akademie der Bildenden Kunst (Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

) and the Mondriaanhuis, Amersfoort
Amersfoort
Amersfoort is a municipality and the second largest city of the province of Utrecht in central Netherlands. The city is growing quickly but has a well-preserved and protected medieval centre. Amersfoort is one of the largest railway junctions in the country, because of its location on two of the...

, the Netherlands. In 2003 he curated the exhibition Colore e Cervello at the Casa Rusca in Locarno
Locarno
Locarno is the capital of the Locarno district, located on the northern tip of Lake Maggiore in the Swiss canton of Ticino, close to Ascona at the foot of the Alps. It has a population of about 15,000...

, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

, to coincide with the Retrospective Exhibition of the works of the Italian painter, Piero Dorazio.

He has served as a Trustee of Fight for Sight
Fight for Sight
Fight for Sight is the UK’s leading charity dedicated to funding world-class research into the prevention and treatment of blindness and eye disease....

, London and of the Minerva Foundation, Berkeley, California. He was a member of the National Society Council of France from 1998 to 2002 and is a member of the Board of Scientific Governors of The Scripps Research Institute
The Scripps Research Institute
The Scripps Research Institute is an American medical research facility that focuses on research in the basic biomedical sciences. Headquartered in La Jolla, California, with a sister facility in Jupiter, Florida, the institute is home to 3,000 scientists, technicians, graduate students, and...

, California. He was Editor of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences and has served on the editorial boards of several other journals specialized in neurobiology.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign member of the American Philosophical Society
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...

, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Academy of Medical Sciences
The Academy of Medical Sciences is the United Kingdom's national academy of medical sciences. It was established in 1998 on the recommendation of a group that was chaired by Michael Atiyah. Its president is John Irving Bell....

 (London), a member of the Academia Europeae and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
The European Academy of Sciences and Arts was created in 1990 in Salzburg, Austria by heart surgeon Felix Unger of Salzburg; the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, Franz König; and the political scientist and philosopher Nikolaus Lobkowicz....

. He is also a member of the Scientific Board of Governors at The Scripps Research Institute
The Scripps Research Institute
The Scripps Research Institute is an American medical research facility that focuses on research in the basic biomedical sciences. Headquartered in La Jolla, California, with a sister facility in Jupiter, Florida, the institute is home to 3,000 scientists, technicians, graduate students, and...

.

His Prizes include the Minerva Foundation Prize, The LVMH
LVMH
LVMH Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton S.A., better known as LVMH, is a French multinational luxury goods conglomerate headquartered in Paris, Île-de-France, France. The company was formed after the 1987 merger of fashion house Louis Vuitton with Moët Hennessy, a company formed after the 1971 merger...

 Science pour l’art Prize, the Rank Prize in opto-electronics, The Electronic Imaging Award, the Koetser Prize and the King Faisal International Prize in Biology.

Scientific achievements

Zeki's scientific achievements include:
  • Discovery of the many visual areas of the brain and their functional specialisation for different visual attributes such as colour and motion.
  • Finding neurons in a part of the monkey
    Monkey
    A monkey is a primate, either an Old World monkey or a New World monkey. There are about 260 known living species of monkey. Many are arboreal, although there are species that live primarily on the ground, such as baboons. Monkeys are generally considered to be intelligent. Unlike apes, monkeys...

     visual system that would respond only when a particular colour, rather than a particular wavelength, was in their receptive field
    Receptive field
    The receptive field of a sensory neuron is a region of space in which the presence of a stimulus will alter the firing of that neuron. Receptive fields have been identified for neurons of the auditory system, the somatosensory system, and the visual system....

    s. For example, he showed that a red
    Red
    Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nm. Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared , and cannot be seen by the naked eye...

    -sensitive neuron
    Neuron
    A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...

     would continue to respond to a red stimulus, even when it was illuminated mainly by green
    Green
    Green is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520–570 nanometres. In the subtractive color system, it is not a primary color, but is created out of a mixture of yellow and blue, or yellow and cyan; it is considered...

     light
    Light
    Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...

    . This was the first study relating colour perception to single cell physiology in the brain.
  • Showing that processing sites in the visual brain are also perceptual sites.
  • Showing that we see different attributes of visual input at different times.
  • Charting the activity of the brain in time and showing that different visual areas have different activity time courses.
  • Studying the neural correlates of subjective mental states, such as love and beauty, and more recently, hate


His work has led him to believe that all major artists are instinctive neuroscientists with the in innate understanding of how the human brain looks at the world. He claims they are consistently trying to find a visual language for those concepts because, according to Zeki, seeing is not a passive process.

External links

  • http://www.neuroesthetics.org
  • http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk
  • http://www.neuroestetica.org
  • http://plaisir.berkeley.edu
  • http://profzeki.blogspot.com/
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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