Eric Kandel, Art and Neuroscience

In neurological perception theory, there are often said to be two interacting processes:

• Bottom-up perception: the eye receives sensory data directly from the world—shapes, edges, colors, recognizable forms.

• Top-down perception: the brain actively interprets what it sees using memory, culture, emotion, expectations, archetypes, and prior knowledge.

Kandel and others argue that figurative art gives the brain more immediate cues: a face, a tree, a body.

On the other hand, Abstract art removes these common cues or rather, reconstructs those cues.

So the viewer must participate more actively by providing their meaning of the art. Abstract art asks the viewer to projecting meaning, to organize the visual relationships, to draw from their own memories and feelings.

Abstract art is also asking the viewer to tolerating ambiguity and to construct their own associations internally.