On Neuroesthetics:
Santa Cruz vintner Randall Grahm ventures far afield this weekend in his quest to unlock the secrets of great wine: He's traveling to UC Berkeley to meet with top international neuroscientists studying how the brain responds to taste and smell.
"There's a struggle right now in the land of wine," said Grahm, who owns Bonny Doon Vineyard, "for the soul of wine."
If soul seems an unlikely topic for a scientific gathering, there's nothing mystical about the public program unfolding Saturday at the UC's Berkeley Art Museum at "Flavors of Experience," the Fifth International Conference on Neuroesthetics.
Research in the relatively new field shows that the quality known as soul -- call it beauty, integrity, greatness, originality or something beyond words -- is embedded in biology. It seems a great wine -- or a meal, or a scent -- is one that fires up certain tissues in the pleasure-reward zone located in a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex.
What excites Grahm is the thought that if creative people knew more about how the brain responds to their work, their experiments could achieve greatness more often. In theory, while a wine with soul could never be designed with blueprints, knowledge of the brain's pleasure-response map could help guide the winemaker in his intuitive efforts.
At the same time, according to the researchers in neuroesthetics, scientists could learn much from artists about the role of memory, language, culture and emotion in the brain's response to pleasure -- factors traditionally considered rather squishy for laboratory study. What tastes good has a strong genetic basis, but pleasure ultimately is an individual experience colored by one's personality and background.
The sponsor of the conference, Elwin Marg, 87, a Cal professor emeritus of vision science and optometry, is driven by the belief that scientists and artists must overcome their historical split and compare notes to figure out how the brain works.
"One of the most important activities people can have is to understand how the brain works," Marg said. "It's a very fundamental question, and there's been a lot of progress in the last 50 to 100 years. But we have so much more to learn than we have learned."
In the past half-dozen years, Marg said, the field of neuroesthetics has emerged. Building on knowledge of brain structures gleaned from imaging technologies such as MRI, neuroesthetics deals with pinpointing how the brain responds to such emotional experiences as taste, empathy and -- the topic of next year's conference -- the many varieties of love.
"Why do we like things that give us pleasure?" asked Marg, who keeps on a shelf in his office a number of brains floating in formaldehyde in glass jars -- relics of a bygone research project. "When we hear music or have a favorite gastronomic dish, it must be in here," he said, putting a finger to his cranium, "and that's what we're getting at."
The top-billed scientist at the conference is Semir Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at University College London. Seki, who will be a visiting professor at Cal this spring, wrote the book on neuroesthetics in 1999 with "Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain," and two years later founded the Institute of Neuroesthetics, which combines with Marg's Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation to host yearly conferences and award "Golden Brain" trophies to investigators at the forefront of research on vision and the brain.
Art is an extension of the visual brain, Zeki wrote in his book, and artists are in a sense neurologists.
"We are gradually beginning to acquire a better understanding of the emotive power of art," Zeki said by e-mail last week. "One interesting result has been the demonstration that works of art that are judged to be beautiful by an individual engage a specific part of the pleasure-reward centers of the brain."
Most important, Zeki said, neuroscience is growing to embrace material long considered exclusive to the humanities. "All art and literature and music are products of the brain, and their study gives us important clues as to how the brain is organized," he said.
Also on the conference roster are scientists who have studied the brain's response to eating chocolate, the varied neurological responses to Pepsi and Coke, odor responses in the brain in response to sex and the electro-chemical action of taste in the mouth.
The artists attending plan their own set of challenges for their scientist peers. For example, Ed Epse Brown will conduct a ceremony around the eating of one potato chip.
"When you're not busy or watching TV or smoking or drinking and when you give your full attention to a potato chip, there's not much there," said Brown, a Zen priest and a former co-manager and wine buyer at Greens in San Francisco. "What it meant for me when I started eating things more carefully is that you learn from your experience rather than need some boss from within.
"It's literally that you experience things closely enough that you know from your experience what is really enjoyable and nourishing and what isn't," he said.
Grahm, the vintner, will continue his pursuit of wine with soul when he goes home. Among the things he's learning, two stand out: The job can't be rushed, and the answers aren't in some mystical realm but in the ground beneath his feet.
"The old Randall would say, 'This is all wrong, it all has to be changed.' The new one is like, 'Let's really look closely at what we have to try to discern if there's any real genius, excellence, specialness, in what we have -- learning how to look,' " he said. "I've got this funky vineyard, and I'm trying to find out what, if anything, is exquisite about it."
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