What makes a person creative? How does the brain create art? Where is the boundary between genius and madness?
What do Fyodor Dostoevsky, who has epilepsy, and Prince Myshkin, who invented it, have in common? How did Franz List and Vasily Kandinsky's state of sensory interference enable music perception, and how did Jorge Luis Borges transform his vision loss into an instrument of perception? Why Martin Ramirez created his literary masterpieces locked inside the walls of a psychiatric hospital, while Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath paid with their livesfor their talent?
This book is a journey into the depths of the human mind, where creative impulses and mental illness, memory and forgetting, dreams and reality are intertwined in one pattern.
Mario de la Pedra Walter, a neurologist and passionate art lover, will take you on a journey from cave paintings to neural networks, and from Mexican surrealism to pop art in New York. This bridge between science and art will change your perception of great geniuses and of yourself forever.“If the shimmering colors before our eyes, the tastes that flood our tongues, the chilling touches, all our doubts and anxieties, the moments of indescribable fullness and despair, were the product of electrochemical reactions between neurons, would not God also be a secondary phenomenon of matter?” Mario de la Pedra Walter
