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 ART AND THE
SENSES

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Bacci and Melcher-FM.indd ii 10/4/2010 12:52:14 PM
 ART AND THE
SENSES
Edited by
FRANCESCA BACCI
and
DAVID MELCHER

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 1
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 Preface

Siân Ede

A book devoted to ‘the Art and Science’ of anything immediately suggests a binary
attitude to the way we consider the workings of the world and of ourselves in it; the
categorizing of the five senses suggests a further attempt to take taxonomizing to
possibly reductive extremes. The ‘Art and the Senses’ symposium, held in Oxford in
, examined those interfaces between art and science and between the senses, and,
because all the speakers were exquisitely thoughtful academics, the level of interaction
and the complexity of the discourse was profound, with each side exceptionally willing
to listen to the other perspective and even subsequently announcing new approaches
in forthcoming research. In this paper I look briefly at the way we communicate our
experience of the senses and at the poetic language necessary to convey something of
the felt physiological experience.
The experience of actually living in the world is multiply layered. We translate the
input from discrete sense organs into a blur of embodied sensation and, because we
are more than unself-conscious diatoms or zoophytes, we bring or ‘bind’ a range of
associations acquired from memory to make sense of the prelinguistic experience,
translating it more reflectively into what emerges as thought, and eventually even into
self-conscious awareness of thought—and thence to the pronouncements we make in
art history and scientific discourses. In humans, language is the key to this translation
and by language I include art, besides the spoken and written word, symbolic systems
where meaning is attributed to forms not literally associated with their referents. This
is so even in science. The palaeontologist Steven Mithen has created a hypothetical
framework for explaining the emergence of the human mind in later Homo sapiens
(Mithen ). Over millions of years we developed four kinds of intelligence, he
suggests: a natural history intelligence; a technical intelligence; a social intelligence;
and more recently, the capacity for language. At some point in the evolution of the
mind these separate facilities began to interact. The evolutionary psychologist Nicholas
Humphrey proposes that the significant factor in an increased cognitive fluidity was
the development of a capability to see into the minds of others, a consequence of
advanced social intelligence. This internalized the communication processes which
had taken place between individuals in a social group in the outside world and self-re-
flexively enabled the different domains in the individual’s private mind to ‘talk to’ each
other. An increasing facility with language may have been the critical factor: social

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 vi preface

intelligence beginning to be invaded by non-social information, thereby making the

non-social world available for consciousness to explore, with a consequently rich
expansion of connective ideas (Mithen ). The ability to use language, both as a
form of external social communication and as a means of internal cognitive thought-
processing coincided with the compulsion to make art—generally thought to have
occurred between   to   years ago (although new archaeological finds keep
pushing the dates back). Our responses to objects in the world, then, are processed
through a sequence which begins with the sensory stimulus, is made sense of through
an internalized top-down–bottom up feedback loop and may end with intelligent
awareness in a kind of prelinguistic state, followed by self-conscious reflective thought,
expressions both internalized and communicated to others through language and art.
This process has recently been beautifully illustrated in an essay by the writer and
critic A. S. Byatt in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Byatt ). In consider-
ing the impact of this great seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, Byatt points out
that her pleasure in Donne’s complex poetic conceits comes not so much from their
stimulus to her senses, as from the effort of the mental activity required to experience
the full intellectual force of the metaphorical constructs. Metaphysical poets, she says,
‘describe not images but image-making, not sensations but the process of sensing, not
concepts but the idea of the relations of concepts’ [my italics].
On the one hand, Byatt’s statement is surprising. Art, and famously, Donne’s
ability to give a vigorous representation of the sensually, not to say, erotically charged,
certainly directly communicates to our physical senses—and there are many equiva-
lents in classical and romantic art, and even, too, in abstract, non-representational
works which contain hints and disruptions. Why else do we sometimes feel that
shiver up the spine, that almost palpable sense of ‘qualia’, the sense of being almost
in the here and now, almost being able to smell the rose, feel the arrows, cry the tears?
In a contemporary visual equivalent, Jane Wildgoose presents a sensuous arrange-
ment of objects with the heightened clarity afforded by a skilful use of digital photog-
raphy which have an immediate physical appeal. Art isn’t the real thing but its sensuous
imagery triggers a deeply felt physical response which stimulates the mind through
the emotions, almost below the level of consciousness.
But Byatt takes this physical response to art yet further and analyses the way the mind
reconstructs our physical responses into mental imagery, emphasizing that the more
complex the metaphorical connections, the more deeply pleasurable they are. They are
at their most exciting when in our minds we reconstruct new images, making new links
beyond those already laid down in memory, forming a brand new connection, a con-
cept, or ‘conceit’. All the best artists, whether visual or poetic, invent new ways of seeing,
sometimes making arbitrary connections, visually and conceptually, surprising us to
think freshly. The pleasure is at its most intense when we are able somehow to observe
the workings of our own minds, and those of the artist, in the very act of new meta-
phorical connection-making. Sensory perceptions and intelligent conceptions com-
bine. Different parts of the brain are involved in perceiving through the different senses
which then draw on memory to recreate new concepts, purely from thought. The
secondary pleasure in Jane Wildgoose’s images comes from our knowledge of the

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 preface vii

fact that she is playing on imagery familiar in art-history, from the vanitas paintings
of the seventeenth century, which she has particularly studied (Fig. ), and also through
the symbols of death familiar to us from Victorian funeral ritual, all of which set up
a cascade of association-making.
In addressing the effect of Donne’s disparate image creation, Byatt pictures the
reader’s brain at work in bringing many layers of understanding together, describing
‘millions of cells with connecting dendrites and long questing axons, some of which
can cross into the opposite hemisphere of the brain.’ At first sight this appears to be
purely the technical language of science—‘cells’, ‘axons’, ‘brain’—but metaphors
are unavoidable. Her language is both physically representational and intellectually
loaded. ‘Cells’ themselves were so-named by Robert Hooke peering down his micro-
scope and reminded of monks’ separate enclaves. I’m not sure whether scientists at
their microscopes would use Byatt’s anthropomorphized active participle ‘questing’
to describe the presumably flailing axons but that seems exactly what they are doing

Fig. 1 Jane Wildgoose, Vanitas Still Life at the Wildgoose Memorial Library, 2005.
(See Colour plate 1)
(photo: courtesy of the artist)

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 viii preface

in her description. And ‘hemisphere’ is not quite technically or semantically correct

if one considers the two walnut halves of the wrinkled cortex but has a hint of associa-
tion with that the other sphere we know, the earth itself—the brain/the world both
forming complete circles containing all we know. It is hard to escape poetic conceits
even in science.
The word ‘dendrite’ refers to a mineral crystallization in a branching or tree-like
form inside another mineral bearing such a crystal formation; in a nerve-cell, the fine
branch of a dendron. ‘Dendrite’ comes from New Latin, from the Greek for dendron
or tree. The ramifications (literally) of this image are beautifully brought out in
Andrew Carnie’s artwork Magic Forest, in which the viewer wanders through an
ethereal woodland of lacy winter trees, at once dreamlike and familiar, and suffused
with the kind of poignant evanescence that is indicative of the artist’s individual style
(Fig. ). The ‘trees’ are actually images of living brain cells viewed through a laser-
scanning confocal microscope, drawn with the aid of computer imaging techniques,
stained with fluorescent dyes, and projected onto layers of fine fabric. We can sensu-
ously enjoy the experience but also relish a new knowledge of the scientific processes
and combine the two—our sensuous brain, our thinking brain operating together,
flickering from thought to sensation and back, to widen our understanding.

Fig. 2 Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2001. (See Colour

plate 2)
(photo: courtesy of the artist)

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 preface ix

In unpacking the multiple layers of image-making—perceiving the object through

one or multiple senses, feeling it physically with an implicit potential to act, internal-
izing it as a symbol or metaphor, bringing remembered associations into play and
then re-creating a new concept or conceit—I would further surmise that the pleasure
is the consequence of a release of endorphins, a small reward for seeing an unusual
juxtaposition and then being creative with it. This occurred to me recently when I was
talking to a physicist who was describing the immense satisfaction he felt when
solving an equation. And it ties in with research undertaken by the neuroscientist
V.S. Ramachandran who in attempting to systemize (rather in vain, I tend to think)
a finite set of rules for what he calls ‘neuroaesthetics’, explains that when we identify
an unfamiliar object from background noise (essential in crude survival terms) we are
given a sensory reward, because perceptual processes link to the limbic system which
controls emotions (Ramachandran and Hirstein ). How much richer is this
experience if we now consider the extra intellectual pleasure we gain from the act of
internal image-making itself and our self-conscious awareness of this process.
All this connection-making seems rather dense when we come to regard the five
senses in their original Aristotlean separateness, but in our experience of life and art
we do not think and feel in a modular way.
This is cleverly illustrated in a work which looks quizzically at the material science of
sensual processing and turns it into art resonant with many meanings. In projects enti-
tled ‘Seeing’ and ‘Hearing’ the artist Annie Cattrell worked with neuroscientists Steve
Smith and Mark Lythgoe to capture fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imaging) digital data as brain images relayed while subjects were caught in the act of
looking and listening, and then used Rapid Prototyping to transform these isolated
processes into computerized virtual models (Fig. ). Using three-dimensional com-
puter information, stereolithography, the images were transferred through laser
technology into a variety of different materials, such as wax, resin, and nylon, so they
could be seen and felt as ‘real’. Out of these she made waxy resin sculptures, embed-
ding them in solid square ‘brain-boxes’ made of transparent hot-cure resin. These
split-second images of the brain in the act of seeing and hearing are more than simply
representational. They are the impenetrable made visual and tactile. As the viewer’s
own saccadic eye movements shift about the light and shine of the transparent
materials, so the images continually change position and shape, the hi-tech imaging
reflecting the hi-tech imaging of the observer’s brain. Here is a work that operates
on many levels then, using technology to yoke a sensual response to an intellectual
concept—we feel, imagine, think, and learn at the same time—a rewarding piece of
art-science metaphysics.
It is salutary to realize that one of the best ways of understanding the senses is
through the work undertaken by neurologists and psychologists on people who have

Head On: art with the brain in mind, catalogue for Wellcome Trust exhibition at the Science
Museum, (London, The Wellcome Trust, ) curated by Caterina Albano, Ken Arnold, and
Marina Wallace p. . Dr Mark Lythgoe assisted by suggesting ways of using the technology to
realize the concept; Dr Steve Smith provided the fMRI scans, D Systems the Rapid Prototyping,
and Hobarts the encapsulation of the models.

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 x preface

Fig. 3 Annie Cattrell, Seeing, 2001.

(photo: courtesy of the artist)

a deficit in particular ones. Such experiences can throw real insight into the workings
of the normal mind. When such deficits are described as literature the language
employed is not the language of logical explanation, the preferred language of science.
It is, instead, a poetic discourse which affects the reader by eloquently describing visual
images, affecting the emotions through heightened rhythms and cadences which rever-
berate silently in the mind, reaching the other senses through the imagination. Literary
writing is an apt medium in which to reflect on the art and science of the senses, because
threaded through the metaphor, simile and other vivid sensuous re-evocations are
veins of rational presentation and contemplation in an attempt to convey exactly what
experience is like. Of particular interest is the way in which a deficit in one sense relies
on imagery from the other senses to describe sensation.
The American poet and writer Stephen Kuusisto was born prematurely and suffers
from the retinopathy of immaturity and also nystagmus, ‘darting eyes’. He is not
completely blind but sees the world through a blur of colour and motion. His book,
The Planet of the Blind, describes his refusal to acknowledge his disability and his risk-
taking struggle to maintain a normal life from childhood through to adulthood, even
riding a bicycle and negotiating new cities on his own (Kuusisto ). The book is as
much about failure and stubbornness as it is about depicting the world of the visually
impaired but it leaves a strong sensuous impression on the reader. Kuusisto is famil-
iar with the visual arts through sporadic close-up studies of books, or through visiting

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 preface xi

galleries with friends and it is interesting how he speaks of his world-view in terms of
paintings:
Faces loom, adults are rising from the vista like sensate stones. These are gorgeous mirages
of not-seeing, moments red and green and black as the studios of Matisse. The moments are
seriocomic: a white horse stands at the circus, no, it’s a bed-sheet in the wind . . .
(Kuusisto )

This is a good example of how a sensory ‘bottom up’ perception is shaped through
applying a ‘top-down’ rationalization when memory and a kind of internal logic are
brought into play, and illustrates how much we impose our conceptions on our
perceptions in order to interpret what we are seeing.
Kuusisto goes on:
Dear Jackson Pollock, I’ve entered your Autumn Rhythm. The irregular or sometimes certain
flight of colour and shape is a wild skein, a tassel of sudden blue here, a wash of red. The
very air has turned to hand-blown glass with its imperfect bubbles of amethyst or hazel blue.
I stand on the ordinary street corner as if I’ve awakened at the bottom of a stemware vase. The
glassblower’s molten rose has landed in my eyes . . .

His experience of the world also involves a compound of other sensory intelligences
focused around spatial orientation:
Delicate, skinny, inordinately active, I was sharpening a sixth sense that fostered the impres-
sion in my parents that I could see far better than I really could. Such acting requires a capa-
cious memory; in the gaudy nets of pastel colours where I lived, every inch of terrain had to
be accurately remembered. In the heart of every blooming and buzzing confusion, I found
a signpost, something to guide me back along my untutored path. . . . I suppose this plum-
meting through the world involves the same inexplicable faith known to skydivers. Fast blind
people have exceptional memories and superior spatial orientation. By the age of five, I was
a dynamo. Wanting to see me run, my mother saw me run and guessed that I must be seeing
more than I really could. And so I landed like the bee who sees poorly but understands destina-
tion by motion and light and temperature.

The brain quickly reads sensory stimuli and brings ready-made meanings to the fore
to assist interpretation. The desire to make sense of things seems unavoidable, so much
so that given a few hints, we can imagine things that are not actually there. An auditory
equivalent of this top-down/bottom up processing is amusingly described in Jonathan
Raban’s sailing book Coasting:
The engine, the engine. Its thump and clatter, all mixed up with the smell of diesel oil and the
continuous slight motion of the sea, is so regular and monotonous that you keep on hearing
voices in it. Sometimes when the revs are low, there’s a man under the boards reciting poems
that you vaguely remember in a resonant bass. Sometimes the noise rises to the bright non-
sense of a cocktail party in the flat downstairs. At present, though, you’re stuck with your usual
cruising companion at sixteen hundred revs, an indignant old fool grumbling in the cellar.
Where’d I put it? Can’t remember. Gerroff you, blast and damn you. Where’d I put it? Can’t
remember . . .
(Raban )

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 xii preface

Deaf, blind, and speechless as the consequence of scarlet fever ate the age of two,
Helen Keller describes her multi-sensory deprivation:
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut
you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way towards the shore with plummet
and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like the
ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no
way of knowing how near the harbour was.
(Keller )

She is writing here with eloquent hindsight using the image of the lost ship to give a
more acute sense of her sensory deprivation, but the isolation of her situation is more
intense because she had no language with which to articulate her feelings. Her first
realization of the power of self-expression comes in a famous breakthrough. Her
devoted teacher Anne Sullivan has been introducing her to language by getting her to
feel an object and then spelling out the written word on her hand.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle
with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under
the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water,
first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers.
Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought;
and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant
the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand . . .
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new
thought.

She was learning not simple vocabulary but setting down an understanding of
generic ideas which would bring in top-down processing to speed up her understand-
ing when she came across a new object. She goes on to understand the nature of
conceptual thinking:
I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups – two large beads, three small
ones, and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again
and again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for
an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have
arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis,
‘Think.’
In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. That
was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.

We can see here how the senses are a route not simply to an animal sensation
but form part of a chain of intelligent and self-aware construction of the outside
world.
The artist Alexa Wright effectively illustrates the brain at work where the body
sense ought effectively to be absent altogether in a project she undertook with neuro-
scientists and patients with phantom limb syndrome, which occurs where people who

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 preface xiii

have had amputations continue to experience sensations in the non-existent limb.

Neurologists understand that sensations arise as a result of a dynamic plasticity in
the brain which allows it to re-map bodily awareness, often very soon after the limb
has been removed. Areas on the cortex which formerly received sensory input from the
amputated limb continue to be activated from parts of the brain on adjacent areas of
the cortex linked to parts of the body surface close to the amputated limb, so it feels
as if the limb is still there, though not always in a normal state. ‘One man had a phan-
tom arm fixed at right angles which he had to accommodate when passing through
a door,’ writes neuro-psychologist Peter Halligan who with his colleague John Kew
worked with Wright, ‘another was plagued by his phantom arm floating up through
the bedclothes when he was trying to sleep’.
The subjects of Wright’s photographs were gratified to see their non-existent sensa-
tions made visible and the neurologists claimed that this helped them to be more
therapeutically accurate. Exhibited in conventional gallery spaces as art, the images are
moving because of their paradoxical ordinariness, enabling viewers to share an inti-
mate identification with the subjects’ unconventional self-perceptions (Figs.  and ).
That the brain can compensate for loss, even if in strange ways, that it can continue
to alter and re-programme itself, is somehow both reassuring and surprising too.
But though we are talking here of actual material plasticity with real change in brain
tissue and the brain’s capacity to invent and reinvent experience, it almost explains the
flexibility and scope of the imagination.
In a work currently showing at Liverpool Biennial called Outsidien, the Norwegian
artist Sissel Tolaas walked with Liverpuddlians from the north, west, south, and east
of the city and using high-end technology, collected smells from the streets. She then
took the smells back to her laboratory in Berlin where she used micro-capsulation to
infuse micro-eggs with oils which respond to touch or friction to be diffused into the
atmosphere. This might be sensuous enough but Tolaas recognized the need to
stimulate a higher, more introspective smell awareness through the use of a language
which could be communicated further. For this part of the project she worked with
linguist Andrew Hamer, who specializes in Liverpool’s Scouse dialect, and asked the
participants to describe the smells of their city. The resulting vocabulary is delightfully
pungent, funny, and somehow accurately suggestive of Liverpuddlian character and of
particular places in the city:
The smell of a filthy channel, for example is MOODO
a tobacco factory NEEK
lemonade OOR
a pub SMOUBEE


Wellcome Trust sci-art report, September ; Wellcome News Supplement, Science and Art
; also conversations with the artist.

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 xiv preface

Fig. 4 Alexa Wright, After Image, 1997.

(photo: courtesy of the artist)

rubbish is BIISH
leather SKENN
take-away food – TCKOO
natural flowers NIIS
a train TRAKEE
a caramel factory SUIIS

One cannot think about the effect of taste (and smell) without referring to the
most iconic passage in literature, that describing Proust’s sip of tea in which had been
soaked a morsel of madeleine. The incident has become a touchstone for explaining
the almost magical effect that taste and smell sometimes have on memory, evoking
an immediate and vivid ‘qualic’ sensation of an often unlocatable sense of time past.
In evolutionary respects smell is a primitive sense, and its receptors transmit signals
to the olfactory bulbs which lie close behind, the most direct process system of any of
the senses. This short pathway has direct links to the limbic system, which deals with
vigilance and emotions and there are also links to the hippocampus where memory
is stored. However, there is no contact with the parts of the brain responsible for
language or speech. This might explain why we have a limited vocabulary for smell

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 preface xv

Fig. 5 Alexa Wright, After Image (RD2), 1997.

(photo: courtesy of the artist)

beyond analogy (smells ‘like’) and why, like Proust, we often find it hard to locate the
original source of a sudden waft of familiar perfume.
Proust is a master in evoking the sensuous filtered through the intellect, so the plea-
sure is doubled. But it takes him four pages of close introspection to chase the original
stimulus and the ripples it then sets up.
Here is Proust’s initial moment:
I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner
had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me
and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite
pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.
And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its
brevity illusory – this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with
a precious essence’ or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.


Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (–). Information on smell and memory is well
described in chapter  of Douwe Draaisma’s compelling book on memory Why Life Speeds Up
as You Get Older ( Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

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 xvi preface

In trying to locate the source of this overwhelming sensation, Proust takes a couple
more sips but finds that the initial impact is becoming diluted, the memory still elusive.
He tries to re-trace his thoughts, acknowledging how difficult it is to maintain a con-
centration on one’s own thought processes, trying to give his mind a rest by distracting
it and then searching within himself again.
It is interesting how Proust describes this memory pursual after one sensation in
terms of the other senses:
I do not yet know what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance,
I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed. Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths
of my being, must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying
to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic;
scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up
colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible inter-
preter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the
taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period
in my past life. [my italics]

The reader shares the tension, the effort required, until:

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine
which on Sunday mornings at Combray . . . my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in
her own cup of tea or tisane.

He goes on to remark:
taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent,
more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the
ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their
essence, the vast structure of recollection.

One doesn’t have to be diagnosed as synaesthetic to recognize how the input from
different sensual stimuli quickly blur and are made sense of through multiple associa-
tion. Language is second-hand (note the bodily metaphor there) to the immediate
physical stimulus but it helps us combine an intellectual and creative response.
In considering simultaneously the Art and Science of the senses, the felt or imag-
ined experience and the material processes involved, our minds cannot reconcile the
ambiguity of such a dual approach, but there is pleasure in blending together physical
understanding and an intellectual appreciation of how it works. The heightened
language of poetry aids this exploration, bringing together the second-hand vigour of
sensuous experience with an intellectual pleasure in making links and analogies to
communicate feelings normally too deep for words.

References
Byatt AS (). Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind. In A Guibbory (ed.) The
Cambridge Companion to John Donne, pp. –. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Keller H (). The Story of my Life. Doubleday, New York.

Bacci and Melcher-FM.indd xvi 10/4/2010 12:52:18 PM

 preface xvii

Kuusisto S (). The Planet of the Blind. Faber and Faber, London.
Mithen S (). The Prehistory of the Mind. Thames and Hudson Ltd, London.
Raban J (). Coasting. Collins Harvill, London.
Ramachandran VS and Hirstein W () The science of art: a neurological theory of aesthetic
experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, –, –.

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Bacci and Melcher-FM.indd xviii 10/4/2010 12:52:18 PM
 Contents

Preface v
List of contributors xxiii

Introduction 
. Making Sense of Art, Making Art of Sense 
Francesca Bacci in conversation with
Achille Bonito Oliva
. The Science and Art of the Sixth Sense 
Nicholas J. Wade
. The Art of Touch in Early Modern Italy 
Geraldine A. Johnson
. The Multisensory Perception of Touch 
Charles Spence
. Aesthetic Touch 
Rosalyn Driscoll
. Rendering the Sensory World Semantic 
Elio Franzini
. Sculpture and Touch 
Francesca Bacci
. Touch and the Cinematic Experience 
Jennifer M. Barker
. Hearing Scents, Tasting Sights: Toward a Cross-Cultural
Multimodal Theory of Aesthetics 
David Howes

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 xx contents

. The Science of Taste and Smell 

Tim Jacob
. ‘Sound Bites’: Auditory Contributions to the Perception and
Consumption of Food and Drink 
Charles Spence, Maya U. Shankar, and Heston
Blumenthal
. Thinking Multisensory Culture 
Laura U. Marks
. Sighting Sound: Listening with Eyes Open 
Simon Shaw-Miller
. The Sight and Sound of Music: Audio-visual Interactions
in Science and the Arts 
David Melcher and Massimiliano Zampini
. Improvisation in Time: The Art of Jazz 
David Melcher interviews Greg Osby and
Skip Hadden
. Musical Tension 
Carol L. Krumhansl and Fred Lerdahl
. Cause and Affect: A Functional Perspective on Music
and Emotion 
Guy Madison
. The Mystery of Representation: A Conversation
with Vik Muniz 
Vik Muniz and David Melcher
. Pictorial Cues in Art and in Visual Perception 
David Melcher and Patrick Cavanagh
. The Many Dimensions of the Third One 
Ruggero Pierantoni
. Film, Narrative, and Cognitive Neuroscience 
Jeffrey M. Zacks and Joseph P. Magliano

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 contents xxi

. Mirror Neurons and Art 

Vittorio Gallese
. Pictorial Art Beyond Sight: Revealing the Mind of a
Blind Painter 
Amir Amedi, Lotfi B. Merabet, Noa Tal, and
Alvaro Pascual-Leone
. Visual Music in Arts and Minds: Explorations
with Synaesthesia 
Jamie Ward
. Visual Music and Musical Paintings: The Quest for
Synaesthesia in the Arts 
Cretien van Campen
. Dance, Choreography, and the Brain 
Ivar Hagendoorn
 Neuroaesthetic of Performing Arts 
Beatriz Calvo-Merino and Patrick Haggard
. Multisensory Aesthetics in Product Design 
Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein and Paul Hekkert
. Architecture and the Body 
Alberto Perez-Gomez
. Architecture and the Existential Sense: Space, Body,
and the Senses 
Juhani Pallasmaa
. Multimodal, Interactive Media and the
Illusion of Reality 
Elena Pasquinelli

Index 

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Bacci and Melcher-FM.indd xxii 10/4/2010 12:52:18 PM
 List of Contributors

Dr Amir Amedi Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess
Hospital, Department of Neurology,  Brookline Avenue, Boston MA , USA
Dr Francesca Bacci Centro Interdipartmentale Mente/Cervello University of Trento,
Palazzo Fedrigotti, Corso Bettini ,  Rovereto (Trento), ITALY
Dr Jennifer M. Barker Moving Image Studies, Department of Communication,
Georgia State University,  One Park Place, Atlanta, GA .
Mr Heston Blumenthal The Fat Duck Restaurant, High Street, Bray, Berks SL AQ
Dr Beatriz Calvo-Merino Department of Psychology, City University London
Northampton Square ECVOHB, London, UK and Honorary Research Fellow,
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London), Alexandra House,
 Queen Square, WCIN AR, London, UK
Dr Patrick Cavanagh Vision Sciences Laboratory, Department of Psychology,
Harvard University,  Kirkland StreetCambridge, MA , USA
Rosalyn Driscoll
Dr Elio Franzini Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di, Milano, Via
Festa del Perdono ,  Milano, Italy
Professor Vittorio Gallese Department of Neuroscience, Section of Physiology,
University of Parma, Via Volturno, /E,  Parma, ITALY
Dr Ede Sign
Mr Ivar Hagendoorn
Patrick Haggard
Paul Hekkert Industrial Design Engineering, Delft
Dr David Howes Dept of Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University,  de
Maisonneuve, boulevard West, Montréal, Québec Canada, HG M
Professor Tim Jacob School of Biosciences, Biomedical Building, Cardiff University,
Museum Avenue, Cardiff CF US
Dr Geraldine Johnson Department of History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford
OX PT
Dr Carol Krumhansl Department of Psychology, Cornell University,  Uris Hall,
Ithaca NY -, USA

Bacci and Melcher-FM.indd xxiii 10/4/2010 12:52:18 PM

  list of contributors

Fred Lerdahl
Dr Guy Madison Department of Psychology, Social Sciences Building, Umeå
University, S-  Umeå, SWEDEN
Dr Joe Magliano Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb
IL , USA
Dr Laura Marks Art and Culture Studies, Simon Fraser University,  University
Drive, Burnaby BC, CANADA VA S
Dr David Melcher Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Corso
Bettini, , Rovereto, ITALY
Dr Lofti Merabet Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess
Hospital, Department of Neurology,  Brookline Avenue, Boston MA , USA
Vik Muniz
Professor Juhani Pallasmaa Architect, Juhani Pauasmaa Architects, Helsiuki
Professor Alvaro Pascual-Leone Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, Beth
Israel Deaconess Hospital, Department of Neurology,  Brookline Avenue, Boston
MA , USA
Dr Elena Pasquinelli Institut Jean Nicod, UMR , Pavillon Jardin, Ecole Normale
Supérieure, , rue d'Ulm, F- Paris, FRANCE
Alberto Perez-Gomez
Ruggero Pierantoni Visiting Professor, Dizraeli School of Architecture, Carleton
University, Ottawa, CA.
Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein
Maya U. Shankar
Dr Simon Shaw-Miller Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck
College, University of London,  Gordon Square, London WCH PD
Professor Charles Spence Department of Experimental Psychology, University of
Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX UD
Noa Tal
Dr Cretien van Campen Synesthetics Netherlands, Rubicondreef   JC Utrecht,
The Netherlands
Professor Nicholas Wade Department of Psychology, University of Dundee,
Nethergate, Dundee DD HN
Dr Jamie Ward School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN
QH
Dr Jeff Zacks Department of Psychology, Washington University in St Louis, One
Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO -, USA
Massimiliano Zampini

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