Leornardo Da Vinci – [TITLE PENDING] A symposium in celebration of the quincentenary of Leonardo’s death. Sponsored by the 92nd Street Y and Stanford University as part of the Symposium on Music and the Brain. Michael Kubovy – University of Virginia Leonardo and the two culture problem I will present the two culture problem (which one might think Leonardo had solved) as instantiated in neuroaesthetics. Howard Morgan – Arca Group Inc. Israel Nelkin – Hebrew University Leonardo on Music The transience of music makes it, in Da Vinci's mind, lesser to painting in that it dies in the process of being created, while the beauty of painting is remembered for a long time. I will present an account of Leonardo's claim within current views of auditory perception, including the notion of reverse hierarchies, the role of predictive coding in audition, and the active/constructive nature of perception. Bio: Eli Nelken is the Milton and Brindell Gottlieb Chair in Brain Sciences and a director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eli's main interest is in the way in which past and future interact in the auditory system - how the past history of sound shapes brain activity and therefore perception of future sounds. Eli's research combines state-of-the-art techniques in animal research with perceptual studies in humans.
Barbara Tversky, Stanford University & Columbia Teachers College Externalizing thought: Thinking Through Drawing Leonardo drew incessantly, that was how he thought. Far different from the serenity of his paintings, his drawings are frenetic, explosive. Yet drawings can't move, they too are still, despite the dynamic processes he was trying to understand, such as the flow of blood in arteries and the flow of water in rivers. He drew analogies from visually similar processes such as these, and used the actions of his hand as he drew as if they were mirroring the actions of nature. I will discuss Leonardo's process and put that in the larger context of using drawing as a way of thinking. Bio: Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology Emerita, Stanford University and Professor of Psychology, Columbia Teachers College. She was born a contrarian and early on began studying how people think about the various spaces they inhabit because the presumption at the time was that language was the foundation of thought. She extended this to the study of the spaces people create for