The Penn Humanities Forum presents:

"What Art Can Tell Us About How We See"

Speaker: Margaret Livingstone, Harvard Medical School

Margaret Livingstone's work places art history into a fascinating conversation with neurobiology. She argues that artists have over the centuries developed a kind of working theory of how we see, which anticipates contemporary scientific research on the neuro-processing of visual information. Drawing on examples that include da Vinci, Matisse, Chuck Close, and others, she shows how the great painters intuitively grasped such crucial features of human visual processing as the separate pathways for color versus luminance or the different resolutions of central versus peripheral vision.