Splendors and miseries of the brain : love, creativity, and the quest for human happiness / Semir Zeki.

Chichester, UK ; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

viii, 234 pages, 2 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Abstraction -- The brain and its concepts -- Inherited brain concepts -- The distributed knowledge-acquiring system of the brain -- The acquired synthetic brain concepts -- The synthetic brain concept and the platonic ideal -- Creativity and the source of perfection in the brain -- Ambiguity in the brain and in art -- Processing and perceptual sites in the brain -- From unambiguous to ambiguous knowledge -- Higher levels of ambiguity -- Michelangelo and the non-finito -- Paul Cézanne and the unfinished -- Unfinished art in literature -- Conte by Arthur Rimbaud -- The brain's concepts of love -- The neural correlates of love -- Brain concepts of unity and annihilation in love -- Sacred and profane -- The metamorphosis of the brain concept of love in Dante -- Wagner and Tristan und Isolde -- Thomas Mann and Death in Venice -- A neurobiological analysis of Freud's civilization and its discontents.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [213]-226) and indexes.