It’s not every day one encounters glossy images of twentieth-century abstract paintings alongside illustrations of a monkey brain. Yet this is precisely the mash-up Eric Kandel successfully presents us with in his new book, in which he seeks to reconcile the cultures of art and science. Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, says that our noggins fire in a special way when we look at abstract art. To prove his point, he brings neuroscience into the art museum.

A river of ink has been spilled over the meaning of the Abstract Expressionist movement, typically focusing on artists’ intentions and historical considerations. Kandel takes a different tack and asks: what does the art do to us? This has a precedent. The “beholder’s share” theory was developed at the Vienna School of Art History at the turn of the nineteenth century. Grounded in psychological principles, it holds that art is incomplete until viewed. The greater the ambiguity, the greater the viewer’s contribution. Enter abstract art, “with its lack of reference to identifiable forms,” which, Kandel writes, puts greater demands on the imagination. Abstract art forces our visual system to deal with an image “fundamentally different” from the type our brain has evolved to handle. Kandel says there is neuroscience to back that up.

The brain wants to identify what it sees.

The brain wants to identify what it sees. To do so, it utilizes a hard-wired part of the sensory–cognitive system. When