Why Abstract Art Stirs Creativity in Our Brains

Are art and science of distinctly different cultures? The former often seems fixated on human experience, the latter on physical processes.

In his most recent book, , published this year, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel argues that such a separation no longer exists. The best-known abstractionists, like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Dan Flavin, and Willem de Kooning, Kandel writes, effectively created “new rules for visual processing.” Abstract art, says Kandel, is therefore the key to understanding both how art and science inform one another, and together, they might open up entirely new ways of seeing and imagining. Where figurative painting provides the human brain with clear visual information—images of a person, a house, a boat, etc.—abstract art reduces, he says, “the complex visual world around us to its essence of form, line, color,