This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Emerging Mind, given by Villanour S. Ramachandran, was originally broadcast in 2003.

Good evening. Tonight, science crosses into art. No cultural divisions here.

We've come to the Patrick Centre for the Performing Arts in Birmingham to talk about the artful brain. That's the title of the third in this year's series of wreath lectures given by one of the world's leading neuroscientists, Villanour Ramachandran. If you followed his first two lectures, you'll be familiar with some of the extraordinary workings of the brain.

Why, for example, people who've lost an arm or a leg can still feel pain in a phantom limb,

or how occasionally someone who's visually blind can see via a different route to the brain,

the phenomenon of blind sight, as it's called.

Research into these unusual conditions and others is currently leading to a greater understanding

of how the normal human brain works.

But can such investigative techniques be applied to our appreciation of art?

What happens when we hear a Mozart symphony or a Shakespearean sonnet or admire a painting by Titian or Lucian Freud?

What forms and informs our sense and sensibility of what we're seeing and hearing?

Our audience here in Birmingham includes art historians, musicians, novelists, painters as well as scientists,

and later on they'll have the chance to respond to what they hear this evening.

From our Reith Lecture at 2003,

the Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition

at the University of California, San Diego,

Professor Villanour Ramachandran.

Thank you very much.

In this lecture, which is the most speculative one in the series of five,

I'd like to take up one of the most ancient questions in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, namely, what is art?

When Picasso said, art is the lie that reveals the truth, what exactly did he mean?

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