My lecture for the CAA Conference in Dallas [1], February 2008 entitled "The Attraction of Neuro-Art-History: Getting at Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman" >> Abstract (PDF) >> A slideshow in Flash (c. 40 slides; use your right cursor!) >> Original Lecture Text (PDF)		Map 2020 (2006, in German only) >> www.m-verlag.net		My dissertation on "Neuro-Esthetics" (and introducing Mapology) (2005) >> www.m-verlag.net

And here is now my Dallas lecture (February 21, 2008), shown slide for slide, and briefly annotated (for all REFERENCES, see References):

Slide 1
Hello every BODY!
The title of my lecture is "The Attraction of Neuro-Art-History", and here I will talk about Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman from the perspective of a neuro-esthetician.

[And by the way: Neuro-Esthetics may only be a sub-discipline of Biology [including some "History"], which may only be a sub-discipline of Physics (see WHITFIELD 2007!), which itself eventually may only be a sub-discipline of Mathematics, which in turn may only turn out to be a sub-discipline of MAPOLOGY (i.e., "the map of maps") in the end - and with the latter now being my REAL field of expertise, by the way...]

Slide 2
My venture in Neuro-Esthetics began in 2000, when I took part in an art historical seminar entitled "Abstraction and Naturalism in 20th century art".
When it came to paintings by the so-called "Abstract Expressionists", my colleagues suddenly began to talk about "constitutive blanks" etc. etc. etc.
And my colleagues really seemed to love all these endless art historical quarrels about Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Slide 3
In fact, the question of "WHAT shall I paint?" was really crucial to both Rothko and Newman – and both had been struggling for a non-arbitrary and invariant subject matter for a very long time before ultimately getting at their stable "mature" paintings and (endlessly repeated...) "signature styles".

(And by the way: by the end of this lecture, you will hopefully have seen that Mark Rothko really attempted to paint the whole WHAT(-pathway) of the brain, whereas Barnett Newman really attempted to paint the pure "I" or "Self"! And to some extent, all these long artistic struggles by Barnett Newman (et al.) may indeed be extremely similar to (neuro-)scientific approaches in general, since even (neuro-)scientistis may always have to do the same thing: "purifying" everything until "everything" becomes linear (and therefore mappable) in the end...)

Slide 4
The first physical, mathematical, and neurobiological concept that I will now introduce to you is the concept of an "attractor".

In 1968, POSNER & KEELE studied the learning and classification of patterns (here: "abstract" dot patterns) by having their subjects classify a set of patterns that were distortions and derivatives of just a few "prototypes" or "schemata". However, these prototypes or templates were never shown to the subjects. But when these prototypes were shown to the subjects after the learning phase, the subjects classified them more easily than similar control patterns.
That means: during their learning phase, subjects seem to have "built up" or "extracted" such prototypes just by themselves in a very self-dynamic way and just by some "statistical learning".

And indeed, the brain seems to be full of such "schemata" or "attractors". Apart from being fairly stable and (hence) "true" (cf. DURSTEWITZ & DECO 2007), these attractors speed up perception and classification by attracting all more or less "fitting" instances, and by trying to put all these instances into one single stable "pot" (or more precisely: a "POTENTIAL well" or "basin of attraction") or "category".
Hence, such attractors are even capable of some "pattern completion": e.g., when you see the tail of an elephant, you "intuitively" guess that there must be an elephant – or at least in most cases. And here you have the other side of the coin: attractors may also be heavily automatic and 'unconscious' biases that may mislead perception.

Accordingly, the difference between attractors and gross stereotypes and biases may be quite small sometimes...

Similarly, attractors may not only come in (successive) random patterns (as in Posner & Keele's paper), but also (e.g.) in the form of a succession (shift) of art historical "styles" (i.e., the historical shift from map A to map B to map C: Gothic style > Baroque style > Modern style etc.); hence, Wölfflin's art historical "styles" may simply boil down to (successive) giant attractors or (temporary, culture-specific) "modes of seeing" (Wölfflin) or "performative biases"...(see WOELFFLIN 1915, and ELBS 2005).

Slide 5
Now, Homo sapiens happens to be an extremely social animal – so that the most fascinating attractor for this species may be THE FACE.

After being exposed to a lot of different arbitrary examples and variants of faces during childhood, children build up a high-dimensional "face space" gravitating around a very stable "average face" or face attractor ("stability from a smoothly-continuously shifting variability...": cf. also JENKINS & BURTON 2008, SUGITA 2004; cf. also Warren McCulloch in LLINAS 2001: 264 – reliability arising from nonreliable systems... ).
Interestingly, all particular instances of faces happen to be encoded as differences and distances to this face attractor or "ideal face"
(see LEOPOLD et al. 2006; cf. also GARRIGAN & KELLMAN 2008; on some evolutionarily and genetically-dynamically-developmentally most stable and beautiful bodily golden ratios see also DI DIO et al. 2007 and WORG 1993, as well as my Seminar-Script, S5 Figures 45 ff., S6 Figure 20a, S7 Figures 33 f.).

And as has already been shown by Francis Galton and Irenäus EIBL-EIBESFELDT (1988), this average visual face is also a quite attracting and attractive one ("koinophilia": [2]) – although perhaps not the most beautiful one, because this visual attractor does not take into account other (and not merely visual...) biases and attractors that may be more individual and culture- and gender-specific.

Besides, the fact that I personally have not seen many "Asian" faces in my own childhood may also be the reason why I have not been ABLE to build up a stable attractor or "familiarity" for "Asian" faces, and hence I am not an expert at differentiating them in their most subtle variations.

Slide 6
So, when you have learnt a lot of particular instances of faces, you will have built up a strong average face or "face attractor".

Now let me make a simple experiment with you: WHAT will you build up when seeing the following pictures or "set of patterns" (but which are not dot patterns...)?

Slide 15
I would guess that you have now built up a "THING"-attractor, that means: a very stable giant attractor that attracts all particular instances of "things" or "shapes" – from clouds to [holy?] faces to temple veils to bodies to Kanisza rectangles etc. (cf. also Cernuschi's "containment schema" in CERNUSCHI 1997; for Rothko's life-long memory of a pit [pot?] or "container" since a "Jewish" pogrom in Lithuania see also BRESLIN 1993: 17 [and big thanks here to John Hallmark Neff, who reminded me about this on February 23, 2008]).

Hence, with his "abstract" and untitled (!) fuzzy rectangles, Mark Rothko may have painted such a GIANT ATTRACTOR for all POSSIBLE "things", which in turn may be smaller attractors themselves, like particular faces, bodies, clouds, temple veils, etc.

Slide 16
And this is exactly what Rothko always pointed out (cf. BRESLIN 1993: 331, 390; CHAVE 1989: 25; cf. also Nicolas de Staël in GAMBONI 2002: 19!): he was not painting a particular "thing", but rather THE "THING" itself, that means: the whole invariant and stable "THING-attractor" containing 'almost everything'.

Slide 17
Or in the words of Nicholas of Cusa (NICHOLAS OF CUSA 1973 [1460]): Rothko may have painted the "forma formarum" or "thing of things" itself.

Interestingly enough, such a giant "THING"-attractor or "forma formarum" has now recently been found in the brain by MALACH et al. 1995 (cf. also EGER et al. 2008). This cortical area has been named "lateral occipital complex", or in short: LOC.

Slide 18
As stimuli for their brain mapping experiments, Malach and co-workers happened to use "abstract" sculptures by Henry Moore, the famous Abraham Lincoln illusion, blurry pictures of teddy bears, etc.
But although the LOC is activated by all things with more or less closABLE "contours", it is nevertheless best activated by all blurred objects and shapes, so that Rothko's (but perhaps not Malevich's...) fuzzy rectangles may indeed be "super-stimuli" (RAMACHANDRAN & HIRSTEIN 1999) for the LOC.

Slide 19
In fact, within today's neuroscientific "standard model" of object perception (see, e.g., PALMERI & GAUTHIER 2004), the LOC prominently features as the first step in some "holistic-topological" processing (including "binding" processes accompanied by Gamma-oscillations: see JIANG et al. 2008; cf. also HE 2008) within the so-called ventral visual "WHAT"-pathway of the cortex. This WHAT-pathway finally ends up in an ever more differentiated "semantic knowledge" and "naming" processed by more anterior brain areas like the temporal pole, the anterior insula, and the prefrontal cortex (see KRIEGESKORTE et al. 2007, PATTERSON et al. 2007; SHAFTO et al. 2007; cf. also Slide 40 further below).

Hence, in a certain sense, Rothko may have literally become "stuck" in his LOC as an "impasse" or "dead-end" (!), without "shifting further" to more anterior and more specific brain areas...

Slide 20
And even most small children first draw a rather invariant blurry blob that POTENTIALLY CAN "stand for" all kinds of closABLE things [with the exception perhaps of autistic children, who may paint "naturalistically" from the very beginning: see the paper by Nicholas Humphrey in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 6,6-7 (1999): 116-43; and as I (accordingly) said in Dallas on February 21, 2008, with regard to John Onians' theory about the astonishingly "naturalistic" artists at the neolithic cave of Chauvet: the "first artist may have been an autist[ic]" – and "our" genes may still be evolving...?].

Only later on, some children will differentiate and refine these blobs ever more – finally ending up with perspective dices or skilled renderings of particular bodies (see WILLATS 2005).

Slide 20b
And as has been convincingly shown by Anna CHAVE (1989), Mark Rothko may have made the reverse process instead: by "abstracting" from arbitrary shapes more and more, he finally may have got to the "primal-original" LOC (and a baby's original "blurry vision"?) again...

Slide 21
In fact, this ever higher differentiation toward ever more refined attractor landscapes may also occur in the development of locomotion, where a single giant attractor at the beginning ("gravity" - see the big "potential well" at the top in the slide above!) is differentiated and modulated ever MORE toward a RICHly differentiated POTENTIAL landscape CONTAINING ever MORE POSSIbilities and more specific and smaller attractors (i.e., smaller "potential wells" within the big one) like "crawling", "skipping", "leaping", "jumping", "running", "walking", etc. (see also THELEN & SMITH 1994).

[... And by the way: PD M.D. Hansjörg Bäzner from the University Clinic of Mannheim once told me that he had seen many cases of deteriorating brains undergoing the reverse process instead: with progressive dementia, ever more attractors (and POSSIbilities) are ruined and ultimately vanish – beginning with the latest (and least stable) smaller attractors (like leaping, jumping, etc.), and ending up (when finally being dead in the grave?) with the first and most stable giant attractor (i.e., gravity)... ]

Slide 21b
And in fact, the MORE differentiated the POTENTIAL landscape (and its attractor landscapes or maps) of an individual map-maker, the more "sensitive" this map-maker may be...
(Cf. also LI et al. 2008 with regard to some "exaggerated sensory sensitivity" following the reorganization and differentiation of "odor maps" [i.e., attractor landscapes] after classical conditioning...).

Slide 22
And even when you are 'reading' pictures and droodles (cf. my Future Projects) with an "interpretative impulse" (Hans Prinzhorn) or "mapping impulse" (Svetlana Alpers), your brain may always be looking for attractors or "inferring familiar meanings" (being accompanied by so-called Gamma-oscillations in the brain? - Cf. also SANDKUEHLER & BHATTACHARYA 2008!).

For example, when you are looking at a face, you will clearly "infer" a face (i.e., you will find and elicit one single and unique attractor). But when you are looking at a bi-stable ambiguous Rubin-vase, you will be torn between two equally strong attractors. And when you look at a Salvador Dali enigma, you will find even MORE superposed attractors. And when it comes to Rothko's blurred abstract rectangles and "POTENTIAL images" (GAMBONI 2002) in the end, you will perhaps find myriads of POSSible attractors and Gombrich's "fitting potentialities" (e.g., temple veils, clouds, faces, bodies, or WHATever...)...

Slide 23
Accordingly, within some dynamical systems theory of the brain (see THELEN & SMITH 1994, FREEMAN 2000, DURSTEWITZ & DECO 2007), you CAN now think of the whole "brain" (or "nervous system"? or "SELF"? or "map-maker"?) as a self-dynamic POTENTIAL landscape (see also my homepage: www.shiftology.org [3]) containing myriads of such permanently shifting and superposed attractor landscapes on all spatio-temporal scales
(from microscopic landscapes of fast neuronal membrane potentials up to macroscopic and very slowly shifting evolutionary fitness landscapes [i.e., the momentaneous balance of arbitrarily biased and imperfect (mal-)adaptations within the "unbendable (but rather lax...) constraints" of Physics and Gibbs' potentials? - Cf. also SAKS et al. 2007, ALCOCK 2005, WHITFIELD 2007] – cf. also Slide 5 above on some "evolutionarily and genetically-developmentally-dynamically stable attractors")...

And this intrinsically dynamic Potential landscape may sometimes be "sensorily" modulated by contingent – and sometimes even non-controllABLE – perturbations (or shifts) from a seemingly "outer world" (see LLINAS 2001; cf. also the small animation above with the flashing "contingent perturbation" arrow!).
(And this "outer world" is likely to be much "BIGGER" than I CAN think, i.e., much bigger than my own poor language, vocabulary, words, and maps activABLE by myself...).

Hence, each individual SELF (or map-maker) may POSSEss an individual POTENTIAL landscape with individual attractors, capacities, associations, maps (i.e., "potential Landscapes"; cf. [4]!), biases, familiarities, sensibilities (i.e., ABILities to detect/map the slightest shifts...), ABILities and POSSIbilities (cf. NICHOLAS OF CUSA 1973 [1460]), which are built up by some rather arbitrary statistical learning and by ever more complex superpositions, modulations, and differentiations, perhaps ultimately ending up with extremely differentiated and "abstract" linguistic sentences like "I CAN see this", "I CAN hear that", etc. (cf. also GARRIGAN & KELLMAN 2008 and TAINE 1870: the belief in the existence of some "pure senses" may only be a "late abstraction" itself: "learning is a top-down process, which begins at high-level areas of the visual system [including high-level attractors?], and when these do not suffice, progresses backwards to the input levels" [Garrigan & Kellman], and: ”Les sensations élémentaires qui composent directement nos sensations ordinaires sont elles-mêmes des composés de sensations moindres … Quant aux éléments et aux éléments des éléments, la conscience ne les atteint pas, le raisonnement les conclut; ils sont aux sensations ce que les molecules secondaires et les atomes primitifs sont au corps; nous n’en avons qu’une conception abstraite, et ce qui nous les représente est non une image, mais une notation” [Taine 1870: 188]).

(Cf. also my animation above and J. Z. Young's "changing potentialities" and Charles Sherrington's "enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns" in ECCLES 1953: 193, 269).

And here, "creative" map-makers may be more capABLE of shifting (and simulating) within their rich potential landscape and maps (see FINK et al. 2008 on the "creative" recombinatorial play with flexibilized attractors and maps via alpha-oscillations in fronto-parietal circuits; cf. here also SANDKUEHLER & BHATTACHARYA 2008).

Slide 23b
And if I had the potential function U(x,t) (i.e., a mathematical map(-ping)) (cf. the animation above) of each individual brain or Potential landscape, I would be able to predict each individual's behaviour? (For a very first attempt to model such a U(x,t) by some U(x) of the visual cortices V1-V3 see KAY et al. 2008; BUT cf. also Nicholas of Cusa about the imPOSSibility of such a U(x,t) in [5]!).

And since each individual map-maker (or Potential landscape or Self) may have individual attractors, sensitivities, and maps, there may be no such thing as some "universal laws of (sexually attractive) beauty", either...

[... AND BY THE WAY: Since "we" still lack high-precision whole-brain real-time maps, I do not want to speculate here further about some fast "emotion" processing pathways involved in the viewing of Rothko's blurred rectangles... Interestingly enough, the LOC happens to be partly overlapping with the brain's (and Zeki's) colour area V4 (see ZEKI 1999). Hence, Rothko may have reduced the colours in his late paintings more and more, so as not to be distracted by V4 – and in order to focus on the powerful LOC alone... Or to speak with Rothko himself: "if you ... are moved [i.e., shifted] only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!" [RODMAN 1957: 93 f.]...
Accordingly, as long as there is no GLOBAL brain MOVIE just showing (mechanistically, physically...) this complex – and almost musical! – attractor dynamics & shifts & selective stabilizations in vivo and in real-time (down to a resolution of nano-seconds and nano-meters), I will not believe any of this huge mass of "cognitive scientists" increasingly using mentalistic concepts, static fMRI-blobs, static hypotheses, ideological terms and "social biases" in their extremely selective and extremely LOCAL & STATIC maps, papers and books (i.e., rather arbitrary terms and concepts like "attention", "prediction", "decision", "default mode", "theory of mind", "qualia", "empathy", "emotions", "cognition", "will", "consciousness", "Self", "Self-objectification", "disembodiment", "trust", "reward", "altruism", "memory", "intuition", "recollection", "familiarity", "evolution", "selection", etc. etc. etc.), since the ultimate goal of scientists may only be some "pure" mapping of maps and shifts with the least preconceived hypotheses and (methodical) biases [cf. also Ceterum censeo]...
BUT OF COURSE, I perfectly know (with MACH 1900) that all these poor scientists have to publish as many papers as possible in order to keep their bodies upright...]

Slide 24
Now, let me make another experiment with you: what will you build up in your brain when seeing the following pictures?

Slide 31
As has been noted by Yve-Alain Bois in 1988, perception is first of all about perceiving a more or less closABLE FIGURE against a GROUND (cf. also PANOFSKY 1964 [1925]!). Accordingly, in this painting by Barnett Newman, you CAN more or less easily make out such more or less "clear" (or with Wölfflin: "linear"!) FIGURES or ZIPS against a more or less homogeneous GROUND or "Ganzfeld" (cf. METZGER 1930, ADCOCK 1990, SHIFF 2002).

And by the way: a seemingly synesthetic Swedish baronesse once read a similar painting by Barnett Newman as an auditory POWER spectrogram of "wild crying geese flying over the tundra" (see HESS 1971: 66 f.), and these birds crucially have to deal not only with visual (ENDLER & DAY 2006), but also with auditory figure-ground segregations.

Slide 32
With his zips or figures, Barnett Newman may have found some super-stimuli for the Temporo-parietal Junction in the brain, or in short: the TPJ. And this area is just lying adjacent to the parieto-insular-vestibular [!] cortex, by the way...

Slide 33
Interestingly enough, this multimodal cortical area is activated by all vertical gestalts and figures, including BODY images
(see BLANKE et al. 2005, ARZY et al. 2006 – the latter carrying out a so-called "evoked POTENTIAL mapping study", and differentiating further between the TPJ and some "extra-striate body area" (EBA, a cortical area partly overlapping with the LOC, by the way: see DOWNING et al. 2001 and Slide 25 above...); cf. also Cernuschi's "verticality schema" in CERNUSCHI 1997).

And even more intriguingly, this same area has been found to be active in all tasks involving the "Self" or "I" as opposed to some "Others", as in "shifting" between first and third person perspectives (RUBY & DECETY 2004; cf. also VOGELEY et al. 2001, FARB et al. 2007, KEDIA et al. 2008).

And in fact, maintaining a vertical BODY or SELF upright, stable, and "independent" is no trivial task (even with the support of a cathedra or chair), as you can more or less clearly see here in Newman's painting Cathedra of 1951 (and, by the way, in Newman's biography and life as well):

Slide 34
Here, Barnett Newman not only paints a very hard edged and clear ("linear") white zip near the middle (a clear Self or body? A sharp cry?), but also a hardly perceivABLE and rather blurry and unstable cobalt blue zip on the right (an unstable Self or unclear body? A faint echo call? - Cf. also Slide 31 above!).

Slide 35
And now come the art historical quarrels again: WHAT does Barnett Newman paint?
Does he paint BODIES or erect FIGURES (which is supported by a double-exposure photograph by Hans Namuth, but which is fervently rejected by Yve-Alain Bois)?
Or does he paint the SELF instead (which is supported by Newman himself and by Yve-Alain Bois)?

Or does he paint both BODY and SELF at once?

Slide 36
But the most intriguing function of the TPJ may remain its role as an INHIBITOR and modulator of imitative tendencies, "mirror neurons", and bodily motor responses (see BRASS & HEYES 2005), and hence this area (together with prefrontal areas for some "triadic relation" between "Self", "Other", and a common "goal": see KEDIA et al. 2008, OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008, VOGELEY et al. 2001) is critical for distinguishing and differentiating between some "Self(-agency)" and some "Others", or more precisely: "'other' BODIES".

[... and interestingly enough, the so-called "females" seem to be less ABLE to inhibit their ("unconscious"?) "social biases" and "emotional contagions", and hence activate their TPJs (in order to inhibit the mirror neuron network, and in order to clearly differentiate between some SELF and OTHERs) to a lesser degree than so-called "males", including perhaps Barnett Newman (see SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. 2008)...]

This complex ABILITY of inferring "other" Selves in "other" ("similar", "familiar") bodies [including tools as extensions of my body, and including my "own" body in front of a mirror, by the way...] while simultaneously discriminating between all these simulated POSSIBLE Selves, has also been called "Theory of Mind", "mental state attribution", "self-objectification" or "disembodiment" (OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008, CORRADI-DELL'ACQUA et al. 2008; cf. also ARZY et al. 2006).

And in some pathological cases, such a "disembodiment" may even extend to so-called "out-of-body experiences" (see BLANKE et al. 2005).
(And by the way: Barnett Newman's canvases are among the most physically abused and attacked paintings in the History of Art...).

However, with these very recent speculations about the "TPJ", "EBA", "Self", "Self-Agency", "body images", "mirror neurons", "imitation", "empathy", "social biases", "inhibition of mirror neurons", "disembodiment", "self-objectification", "mental state attributions", and "Theory of Mind (ToM)", I have shown you now the utmost frontier of today's neuroscientific map-makings (in the wake of Neolithic cave-paintings?).

Slide 37
And since I have now not much time any more to go into the most fascinating mapological details, I only add here this: you have seen now how difficult it is for extremely biased neuroscientists and art historians to map and to disentangle or dis-link or dis-associate such attractors like "body images", "Self", "I", and "Others" (cf. also PANOFSKY 1957 [1939] on the extreme difficulty of some purely "pre-iconographical" analyses, and the problem of "empathy" as well; HOWEVER, although writing about nearly all art historical problems [including "empathy" and mirror(ing)s], Panofsky was not POTENT enough to analyze Germany's Hitlermania, and he was seemingly not ABLE to speak with modern artists like Barnett Newman, either...).

And it may be exactly this BIG problem of SEEMINGLY nobody (or more precisely: no BODY?) being ABLE to clearly differentiate between BODIES and SELVES which may lie at the core of several thousand years of cruelty, wars, and all kinds of fatal "social" and "nationalsocialist" biases and synchronizations (cf. also PANOFSKY 1957 [1939], ELBS 2006, Hitler's "Gleichschaltung" of a "Volkskörper" [via "mass-synchronizing" automatic "mirror neurons"?] and [6]).
For what is the logic behind the following: I kill you (i.e., your body) because I hate you (i.e., your "Self" as a potential map-maker?) being an Israeli or Palestinian...?
(And you see here once again that Confucius' old political advice of "criticizing the linguistic terms at first" CAN be quite critical in daily practice...).

Accordingly (and especially for medical doctors within some "personalized medicine"), there may be no such stupid "things" (and "linguistic terms"...) like "Jews", "Americans", "Germans", "women", "men", "parents", etc., but only BODIES (that all have to – and want to? – be maintained and sustained...?).

And as already noted by EPLEY et al. 2008 (reflect upon it!):
"If social disconnection increases the tendency to seek humanlike agents in one’s environment, then a strong sense of social connection should decrease this tendency to seek humanlike agents. A lack of motivation to connect with other humans should decrease the tendency to perceive humanlike traits in these other humans as well. This reasoning suggests that when evaluating other individuals, people who are especially socially connected might also be more likely to dehumanize those to whom they are not socially connected."

[... AND BY THE WAY: The paper by BRASS & HEYES 2005 was subtitled "Is cognitive neuroscience solving the correspondence problem?", which indeed – strictly mapologically speaking – should read: "Are cognitive neuroscientists solving a mapping problem?".
After all, mirror neurons seem to boil down to neurons involved in mapping 'other' (but 'similar') bodies & their movements onto my 'own' body map – and which in fact is not a trivial problem because of the different coordinate systems involved: e.g., think of a small child learning to lace up its shoes from "its" "parents", who sometimes have to align with the child's perspective [cf. the POV-shot in the slide above!] in order to facilitate the child's learning process... For such coordinate-free and invariant "tensor mappings" and attractors see also LLINAS 2001: 66, 236 f. ... And here you see once more: in the end, EVERYTHING may boil down to a problem of maps and mappings [and there may even be no landscape without a map]...[7]
As a result – and as already noted by PANOFSKY 1957 and OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008 – mirror neurons may be not sufficient for some "successful empathy" [whatever that may be...] and "Theory of Mind", because "similar motor responses" may not guarantee some "similar feelings" or similar "Selves" or similar "Potential landscapes" on both sides [for how can I be certain about such "similarities"?]: just take the famous example of a man from Ladakh who is greeting a man from Europe by protruding his tongue toward the latter... Hence, mirror neurons may only be necessary for quite simple mass-synchronizations of bodies (see above; and see here also some "social contagion" within a baby-mother interaction circle: baby is laughing > mother is laughing > baby is laughing > etc.). But in daily life (where even spouses have to take a very long time for becoming mutually synchronized!), "social uncertainties" and "misunderstandings" between "cultures" and individuals due to INDIRECT and unreliABLE linkings (despite evolutionary struggles for ever better disambiguations via gaze, context, dynamics, words, language, etc.?) and extremely limited maps will always prevail [cf. MASUDA & OHTSUKI 2006!] – unless "our" brains and neural maps were synchronized directly, i.e., neurotechnically via DIRECT "brain-gates" (see my Seminar Script, Seminar-Script, S6 Figure 15)?
And by the way: "Evolution" may not only be a "struggle for life", but rather: a struggle for ever better (POWERful) maps (or: Dawkins' "memes"?)...]

Slide 37b
And by the way: Barnett Newman painted and titled his Vir heroicus sublimi(u)s (pace Panofsky!) at exactly the same time (in 1951) when U.S. president Truman decided NOT to drop atomic bombs on Korea (!) by firing U.S. General McArthur – which impressed Barnett Newman very much (see HESS 1971: 81).

Accordingly, only a "new man" and SELF will perhaps be ABLE to POSSESS some total SELF-control (cf. here also the recent paper by OH & LEWIS 2008 discussing Western vs. Korean (!) preschoolers’ inhibitory control correlating with Theory-of-Mind capABILIties, and self-control...).

Slide 38
And as now recently shown by HERRMANN et al. 2007, a Chimp is slightly better at mathematics and technics (tool use) whereas Homo sapiens as an "ultrasocial animal" excels at making inferences (e.g., when making up or simulating "hidden intentions" & "hidden causes" & "other minds" in "other" "bodies" – e.g., when being in a "typically human"(?) "default-state" of a "wandering mind" [MASON et al. 2007], or when being in a task-free situation like traveling on the underground, which may even elicit some "paranoid thinkings" and "schizophrenia" in some hypersensitive subjects [see explicitly FREEMAN et al. 2008]) and at dealing with social skills and biases (including some “Theory of Mind”, imitation, mobbing, empathy, envy, jealousy, love, lust for revenge, warfare, etc.).

(See here also CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007 on the "metaphysics" of baboons: “a theory of mind and the motivation to share knowledge [i.e., to gossip, and to mutually map each other?] served as the driving forces behind the evolution of flexible vocal production” (:281 - and hence [cf. also Hans Kummer!], language (vs. naming!) may only be a rather unreliable tool or methodical detour for manipulating (i.e., synchronizing) NOT the "world" (like technics), BUT "other" bodies or potential map-makers in a "Machiavellian" manner...), and: "they [vervet monkeys, baboons] make good psychologists but poor naturalists" (:129). And while echoing some quite "paranoid" thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hobbes: "The result of all this social intrigue [among baboons] is a kind of Jane Austen melodrama ... Any way you look at it, most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons” (:12). And that's why I (OE) always joke: the "best" "of all POSSIble worlds" may be a "society" of autist[ic]s, robots, monads, solipsists, and perfect map-makers without any social biases, "social uncertainties", and the need for "social games"...).

And if you are still not ABLE to see the deep multidisciplinary links and associations I have tried to hint at in this very short time, you may just read this simple statement by Barnett Newman in the end (from NEWMAN 1990 [1962] : 251) – and then you will perhaps see the full POTENTIAL of a future “Neuro-Art-History”:

Slide 40
Now, let me summarize my lecture.
There are four take-home messages for you:
First, think of each individual brain (or: SELF?) as a dynamic (and also homeo-dynamic and thermo-dynamic...?) POTENTIAL landscape containing myriads of permanently shifting, stabilizing, increasingly differentiated, and superposed-modulated attractor landscapes.
Second, when thinking of Mark Rothko, do always think of the LOC as well.
Third, when thinking of Barnett Newman, do always think of the TPJ as well.
Fourth, do always watch out for blind spots like hidden "social biases" (i.e., "idola fori") and "unconscious" interminglings – because not being ABLE to map all these biases, attractors, map-makings, and maps (i.e., when just using maps instead of some "self-conscious" mapping maps = "Self-consciousness"...?) may have already turned out to be extremely fatal...
(Cf. also ALCOCK 2005: "Once you know [i.e., once you have been ABLE to map...] that our genes have the capacity [i.e., the POTENTIAL] to make us work on their behalf without regard to our welfare or that of most other people, then it is easier to fight against our evolved impulses [i.e., to "inhibit" and to map my "inherited" maps, "biases", "attractors", etc....?]."

Slide 40b
Or if you prefer a summary in JUST ONE single image, then you may look at the slide above (from ELBS 2005: 69)... (Published already in 2005, but, of course, read by no body...)

Thanks to every BODY – and I [!] hope that this lecture here was not "for the birds" (Barnett Newman)...

(P.S.: According to Mark Rothko, if you had really "understood" his paintings now, you should now be terrified, shocked, and dissolved in tears; according to Barnett Newman, if you had really "understood" his paintings now, there would immediately be no totalitarianisms, state capitalisms, wars, insensitivities, biases, and cruelties any more; and if you had really "understood" Piet Mondrian [and George Lucas, by the way...], you would now have reached the equilibrium...?)