Dinner for Thinkers

Tonight for dinner I'll be having both Noah Charney, The author of  "This is your brain on art : A neuroscientist's lessons on why abstract art makes our brains hurt so good", and Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher who talked about her unique experiences she had when suffering from a stroke on the world renowned "TED" talks. Noah Charney an art historian and novelist discusses in his article how he sees art through his observations and art crime background. He explains that the reason abstract art is such a challenge is because it teaches us how to view art and even the world in a new way. He then compares top down thinking to bottom up thinking. Top down thinking being where we use what we know to solve problems and bottom up thinking requiring no apriori thinking or prior knowledge. On the other side of the perspective you've got Jill Bolte Taylor, a woman who values her personal experience the most. In her TED talk, she discusses how the right hemisphere of the brain controls spatial abilities and the left side deals in language. Jill Bolte Taylor goes on to explain the feeling and experience she had when she lost the left side of her brain the morning she had a stroke. Both Noah Charney and Jill Bolte Taylor experienced something new. Noah Charney saw a new way to look at art a different perspective that taught him how to look at not just art but the whole world differently. Jill Bolte Taylor lost parts of her left side of her brain and talked about how she experienced what it was like to just see the world through the right side of her brain and how she saw the world to be completely different. In my opinion, I believe these two scholars would discuss the different ways they've come to see the world through these new experiences, but they would for the most part keep the night pleasant.