Listen to the interview here:

Pierre Magristretti : My field of research, experimental, is the functioning of brain metabolism, that is, how the brain produces and consumes energy and how dysfunctions in this process can lead to psychiatric diseases and in particular Alzheimer's disease, which I'm working a lot on right now. Among other things, I've created a spin off of my lab that is now in Geneva, precisely, developing molecules that act on those mechanisms that we discovered in the 1990s and 2000s, to enhance the brain to better resist neurodegeneration.
My interest in the mind precisely stems from the very beginning, I became interested in that and over time I cultivated relationships, friendships, discourse especially with the field of psychoanalysis. I wrote two books with a colleague of mine who is a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, François Ansermet, and we wrote two books, one is "To Each His Brain" and the other one is "The Enigmas of Pleasure," where we tried to make a correlation, not rigid, more intellectual, between neuroscience and psychoanalysis to try to understand what were the aspects described by Freudian psychoanalysis and modern neuroscience which also talks about traces, syntactic trace or psychological trace, according to Freud. Then precisely in the field, in the area of this interest that is not in my everyday experimental field, as I say I am a brain mechanic, I study the cellular molecular aspects-I have this other side that amuses me, stimulates me, and so I got interested precisely in this aspect of aesthetic experience, the neurobiology of aesthetic experience. Let's say it relates back to the work in the biology of emotions, of which the forerunner was William James, this American psychologist of the late 1800s early 1900s, brother of Henry James the writer. William James made an early theory of emotions and it is a very interesting theory that is still absolutely valid today, although then as with all theories there were pros and cons. But the idea is this, that a perception, take for example fear which is the simplest: one sees a dog coming at him barking and he is afraid - the perception per se, that is, the sensory process is emotionally neutral, what makes it effective, which gives the connotation of emotion is the response of the body, the somatic response i.e. the increase in heart rate, the dilation of the pupils, a whole series of physical responses that give the emotional coloring to the sensory perception which in itself is neutral. This is in the extreme case of fear but I also go a little further, more recently a friend of mine, Antonio Damasio, has written a key book on his theory, "The Des Cartes Error" and it is a very interesting book in which he essentially takes James' theories and puts them back, in perception but especially in the mental process of imagining something in order to make a decision and then arrive at an action. A very simple example here as well: one has to announce bad news to someone and one wonders, what do I do? Do I call him on the phone, do I send him an email, do I send a text message, do I visit him, and eventually one decides what action to take based on the anticipation of the physical feeling one will have, if he has, for example, a knot in his belly as an unpleasant reaction. He introduced this idea of somatic markers as determinants of decision making, that is, one decides to do a certain thing, one thinks one is rational but in fact there is an emotional component that is made just " embodied"-embodied-a somatic response, anticipating what will happen.

Alex Bolis : So a bridge between emotions and mental images somehow?

P.M. : Exactly, the mental images that then also determine a decision, an action. So what does all this have to do with aesthetic experience? The idea is that one precisely looks at a painting, which to some gives a feeling of well-being, by the way everyone is unique in this kind of interaction with aesthetic experience, or how they live their aesthetic experience, - to another instead it causes anguish. But there is also the idea that the painting that generates this experience in the one who observes, contributes to the very construction of the painting or let's say, the aesthetic object, that is, a dialogue takes place.

Dora Stiefelmeier : The unconscious of the viewer enters subterraneously into the unconscious of the artist who 's done it, and that can be explosive.

P.M. : Exactly, that is, it is the unconscious of the observer ideally meets the unconscious of the one who produced the object.

D.S. : A Stendhal syndrome never happens when one sees a beautiful sunset, even if it is poignant however it does not produce the same thing. That is precisely why I think there is a different mechanism. I would also like to know if it works the same in the negative, you will be very familiar with Viennese Actionism where artists created actions of extreme violence and cruelty to create a kind of Reaktion, a cathartic emotional leap. Can you say it is a Stendhal syndrome in the negative or are they two different universes?

P.M. : Yes of course. For me the best example is at the limit a Rothko painting because it is very neutral, one sees what one wants in it. The 'idea is that emotion depends on the somatic state one is in. Since I am a neurobiologist I was interested to know what are the biological mechanisms of this and you start to know in the sense that, for what it is of perceptions, the sensory, olfactory, gustatory, visual and auditory modalities. Especially the gustatory and olfactory are interesting, they converge to a region of the brain which is called the amygdaloid nucleus (or the amygdala) and by the way talking about olfactory and gustatory experience -- of course one recalls Proust's "Madeleine" who precisely with this olfactory-tastatory experience produced 1500 pages of Recherche, in the sense that it reactivated a whole series of emotions, here of emotions that are however generated in the body. That is, a brain without a body never has emotions. This neuronal pathway goes precisely from the olfactory-gustatory epithelium to the amygdala, or even from the visual system (however, that is additional). What does the amygdala do? It projects from there to the neurovegetative system and the neuroendocrine system, the hypothalamus and is therefore an effector system that changes the state of the body. For example, the neurovegetative system increases the heart rate, increases the release of certain hormones and so on, so the body is modified just physically by perception in which the amygdala plays the role of translation. Then pathways have been highlighted more recently, neuronal pathways that do a kind of permanent monitoring of the state of the body, in the viscera in particular, and bring it back to areas of the brain. One in particular is called theinsula, which projects to the effector motor areas and therefore can also produce an action. There is a system of translating perception into body state modification, a system that monitors this body state or informs brain areas. Around this of course is the question of the unconscious, and this I have particularly developed in the two books mentioned above. The idea is that perception leaves a trace at the synaptic level, we remember something because the synapses are changed and are more efficient. There is not only a neurological i.e. brain aspect but also a body aspect and that is why we can activate perceptions for example a music? It reminds us of a lot of things, even maybe even starting from the body we can reactivate some representations. Anyway, the idea is that in aesthetic experience there is a permanent dialogue between the brain and the body, and that is to have an aesthetic experience we need a body that responds to the perception and really makes us physically "feel" an emotion. This dialogue between the creator of the work of art and the viewer in my opinion is important, I agree with you that there are two unconscious coming together.

Mario Pieroni : There is a misunderstanding about artistic reality. That is, to say that a work of art you don't like and enjoy, what does that mean? That you don't know what the artist wants to express through the work they are making. So it is a huge misunderstanding in art, in that works are promoted that are worth absolutely nothing, why? Exactly here is the game of finance, of other operations, of business because it really leverages the fact that they don't know the artist's work. The artist is neither good nor bad, the artist is outside these categories so you have to look and know the work, if you don't know you suffer. It is interesting today to talk about this-because one is practically used according to aesthetic pleasure and instead the work of art you have to know it, you have to deepen it, to know...and as Emilio Prini, a great artist of ours who is no longer with us, used to say, "let's leave something to the archaeologist, in a thousand years you will understand what we did not understand today."

P.M. : Yes, yes, at the same time to say art likes or dislikes is okay, it's a short cut isn't it? But one could do an exercise and write down what also arouses me a little bit in the body this art, this creates for me I don't know a tremendous anguish and I don't understand why and then I buy it because I like to be anguished sometimes or not, I don't buy it, or it's a harmony of colors I don't know but there is clearly this sensory and somatic impact in the viewer that in the ideal world connects to what the art has produced.

Comments

Excellent interview, both for the high level
of the topics covered and for the quality of the form: colloquial that gives a perfect rhythm to the dialogue.

You have me to express my opinion about what was stated in the meeting I had with Magistretti. I don't think I am the right person because as a surgeon I have dealt with everything else. I am therefore expressing my own personal thoughts. Meanwhile, I very much agree with the title of one of the books written by Magistretti " to each his own brain." I have always believed that the function of our DNA inherited from our parents has been modified by our environment since our conception.
I certainly agree that a body without a brain has no emotions, but the opposite is also true. There can be no dialogue between body and brain because they are one and the same. Therefore, I cannot understand what the neutrality of sensory perception is.Perception cannot be divorced from the rest of the body and the body's reaction can only be the result of the individual's experience, which is absolutely unique and unrepeatable. Stendhal syndrome can be had even for a beautiful sunset but it is obvious that there is a difference because in the 'work of art there is the intervention of man with his creativity. And one who has understood nothing of what the artist meant can have it too. I do not see then how the viewer can make his unconscious collimate with that of the artist.
I don't think then that in making decisions these are conditioned by an emotional component. We believe that we choose but in reality we do what our brain dictates to do the choice is a pious illusion. The dialogue between viewer and painting clearly exists, but it is an entirely individual dialogue. Why talk about unconscious coming together when all at most are ideas coming together. The topics covered are many and each would deserve a good debate.
Professor Alberto del Genio, professor emeritus of surgery - Luigi Vanvitelli University, Naples

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