While how art works indeed remains an enigma (Opinion, FT Weekend, April 23), neuroscience and Marcel Proust come to the rescue.
Our brains (Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligence) use memory-based models to make predictions of future events, and the best art breaks some expected patterns while teaching us new ones.
The artist (as Proust wrote of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in The Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time) finishes the work and says to us: “Now look”. And at this point the world “appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear”.
The great artists shoot you in the brain, but you don’t notice it at that moment because they use a silencer.
Jose Antonio Martin
Madrid, Spain
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