 Now, question number true, I am going to give you a certain examples, is art a window to the troubled mind. For a long long time, we have used art as a window to try and understand, whether people are having difficulty. We have people have used art to imagine things, you know when you read something, you have to imagine and sometimes your responses to what you see might evoke or might give somebody an idea of what you are suffering. Let me just go to, this is an artist called William de Kooning, have you heard of William de Kooning? He was an abstract painter, William de Kooning developed Alzheimer's disease. He first started by doing this kind of painting, I thought I had a better painting. He initially would draw like this and as he developed Alzheimer's painting, his painting lost its coherence and became less complicated and towards older life as you see, this painting becomes less and less and less coherent. Goya, Francisco Goya started off painting like this and as he grew older, he started getting loss of vision, loss of hearing and he probably developed mental illness because of lead toxicity, which probably came from the lead paints, the white paints that they used and he started doing this, which was more darker and darker and darker and darker. This is a patient with a particular kind of dementia and he started off when his dementia was undetected by painting this and the doctor who was seeing him, got him to paint this throughout his illness until he died and this is his original cartoons, which became more and more menacing as his illness progressed. These were his caricatures of self. Similarly, we are aware that people who have body image disturbance, I am not going to go into the neuroscience, but they perceive their body differently. This person of course, you know and who kept throughout his career thinking of his body as more different, more different and he went and had a whole lot of surgery done. I am not going to go into the science of this because you know, but no, but basically, so some of the things that people have done, psychologists have done, have used artistic representations to try and gauge, you know difficulties. One of these tests is called projective tests, which are still used frequently by psychologists. There are things like the Rorschach Inglot test, because this is a satirical thing of the Rorschach Inglot test about how George Bush took a Rorschach Inglot test. What is called a thematic a perception test, basically you show people pictures and you try and see how they interpret these pictures. Then you use things for children called draw a person test, you know and by getting the kids to draw, you make assumptions about how their mental health status is and this is again called Rosenzweig picture frustration test. So, basically the point I am trying to make is that you can use some of these and these have been used to get an understanding of your mental state. The last section that I would like to end by is art is therapeutics, can we use art as a tool to improve or treat pathological states of brain functioning. Now, is a growing body of scientific work that suggests that art training can improve cognitive functioning. Now, basically practice of various art forms involves different areas of the brain and there has been some work which showed that if you give people, you show people pictures of people dancing or a video of people dancing. The brain areas which are activated during this particular thing of seeing people dancing are the same brain areas which are activated during mathematical reasoning, because they overlap strikingly with the areas which occur when you are watching people dancing. So, often what happens in the arts and a lot of my artist friends do that, they want to justify teaching arts saying you know what teaching arts will give people a chance to become illustrators here. Now, there are much better chances of becoming illustrators in TV studios or doing this and I get very upset with them, because I tell them that you know why people should be taught, why children should be taught arts, because it makes them better mathematicians. Why people should be taught dance or music, because they will be able to solve problems better, because exercising one part of the brain exercises another part of the brain which is used for totally different activities. So, training students in arts may change the structure of their brains in the way they think and there is enough evidence for that. Putting a violin in the hands of a child may help him to do math better and there is emerging evidence for that. Learning to dance or paint improves the child's spatial ability to learn or to read and there have been studies which have shown that you know teaching children music can actually improve their reading skills. Learning to engage and persist which one has to do with art, if you take a lump of clay and you are trying to do something it collapses and then you have to do it again and again and again teaches children persistence skills which no amount of game playing does. So, music has been helped has been used to help injure to treat the injured brain especially in people who have depression. Music has been helped in has been used to help people with Alzheimer's dementia. Do not go into this this is a very busy slide, but a group of people with dementia were taken to an art museum and these are people who could not remember what they had eaten that day and when they were asked what did you see and the one old gentleman made a very good point. He saw Picasso and he could not name the painter although he knew a lot about painting he had forgotten all about that. He said this fellow has learnt to paint paint in a different way you know which means that watching the painting made him use one part of his brain that he was not using and he interpreted the painting with the parts of his brain that were still working. So, painting or watching paintings helped this group of people recruit areas of the brain which they were not normally using you know the parts of the brain which were getting demented were preventing them from using you know working properly in their everyday lives, but getting them to recruit other areas of the brain seemed to help them. Mindful art therapy you know it is about mindfulness when you take a brush as I explained earlier you have to be mindful and this is very useful for children who cannot be mindful you know children who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder etcetera you train them to do this and side by side what they do learn the brain learns to sustain attention which is very necessary for these kids. So, which brings me to arts therapy for a whole series of people with brain and mind disorders I am not going to go into details, but there are various art interventions for example role play and psychodrama you know and sculpting has healing effects because in the human brain the hand has greater representation in the brain than say the leg or other parts of the body. So, when you use your hands to do things you actually massage much larger areas of the brain side by side which are used then for other things. Some people have said the theatre is the ultimate fitness product brain fitness product what I would like to leave you with is the thought that art can be used to rewire the brain and this is called neuroplasticity and it is very very important in this group of people who are called digital natives you know some of you are probably digital natives yourselves who are the digital natives who grow up with technology from childhood who grow up with face book from childhood you know these are people where whose brain spend more and more time on technology related tasks and less time exposed to other people. So, it drifts away from the fundamental social skills of meeting other people responding to other people and often you will find that in today's day and age there is a lot of violence that happens among young people because they have not realized how much or how little it takes to hurt the other person and this is classic. If you look at these bulletin boards and things where people are always flaming each other you know I am shocked and surprised by the amount of violence and hatred and vitriol and acid there is in these online conversations, but you can get away with it. If you did that to another human being you would have to face that person's hurt on the internet you do not have to you just get flamed back so that makes you flame back. So, the next time you meet another human being which may be two years later you have no qualms in taking a stick and poking it through you have no qualms about taking a rod and poking it through somebody's private parts. So, in a way this whole digitalization that is occurring and taking away from our social skills is actually making people more and more and more violent and difficult. The effect is apparently strongest in these people who are digital natives people in their teens and 20s who have been digitally hardwired since toddlerhood. I would like to focus on the fact that technology while it gives us great gifts is also creating a decline in visual imagination is also creating a decline in problem solving everything is on the internet I can Google everything. So, I really do not have to do too much of thinking because somebody has done it before if I have to do an assignment it is already done you know. So, it is make life immeasurably useful, but it is made life less human and in that sense you know art makes you more human. I would like to read out what professor Susan Greenfield who was the head of the royal academy said in her speech. She said the current teenage generation is headed for mass loss of personal identity by spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive virtual two dimensional cyberspace. It is as if all that young gray cortical matter is being scattered and defoliated by a kind of cognitive agent orange depriving them of moral agency imagination awareness of consequences which is what I was talking about. The substitution of virtual experience for real life encounters the impact of spoon fed menu options as opposed to free ranging enquiry you know a decline in linguistic and visual imagination you know bro and atrophy of creativity contracted brutalized text messages lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking computer games are emphasizing process over content method over meaning in mental activity and this is worrying. This is worrying because as I explained the consequences that we are seeing in a few short years is brutalizing, but we do not want to lose the internet we do not want to lose Facebook. So how do we balance the gifts of both and in that context you know and in the context of what we as neuroscientists have learnt about art you know art education utilization of art and the word is conciliance of using science to investigate art and using art to inform science I think is a way forward that we need to examine far too long these have been seen as you know two different rooms and nobody from this room will come to that room and nobody from that room will go into that room. And we now understand as far as the human brain is concerned art is science and science is art thank you. We also see find the flower to be beautiful isn't it, two things like one is is there a neural footprint of what the butterfly has in ours and the other thing is like they do not have that much big brain and volume as we have. It is not the question of big brain I mean since you brought up big brain women have smaller brains than men do but it is now accepted as of two weeks back they are more efficient brains because all the non essential parts have been trimmed and it is about trimming in the human brain but that is a different question the question that you asked is are the butterflies processes you know part of our processes and the answer is yes you know so the last two days have been asserting that nature is a very stingy processor of things evolution uses the same processes ad nauseam over and over again it does not make new processes. So the same genes which are used for color perception have been retained through you know the higher the so called higher evolved animals but having said that the bower bird or the butterfly actually makes art for art sink for enjoyment they do it for a particular purpose they do it for the purpose of looking for nutrition finding nutrition or ensuring genetic survival. We are the only species you know which actually creates a work of art and says hey come watch it I get nothing out of it other than the fact that you say wow wow beautiful now a days of course I get a little bit of cash but most of art was created the cave of lasco were not created to sell at you know Sotheby's auction they were made because somebody just wanted to represent you know mammoths woolly mammoths running you know the people who made the chola bronzes made it because they were enamored by the beauty of women you know or vice versa but so in that sense art is slightly different because most of art is in the strict evolutionary sense is non-functional what do you do with it you can't eat it I don't know whether I have answered your questions no it was a non-technical answer it was a more emotional answer. So they see a vision stimulus let it be a picture or whatever then if you ask them to draw again the same thing they come up with a very what is a their own representation absolutely which is I mean which explains the Rasa as he said the abstract level of correct so then like would you say that this one is the way that information is stored no what I was saying was that in children process the information differently from adults and that is because they see it in parts whereas we learn to put everything together and make a three dimensional representation because we are using these things and having used it for a very long time we have refined the process you know it is very simple if a child is asked to kick a ball the child has to decide that I am standing here and then has to kick the ball you know three times out of four the child is going to fall is going to miss the ball and but then he or she will manage to do it after having put all these things together you do not even have to think twice right because the same processes you are doing but in your brain they have got by doing it so many times they have got become an algorithm where you do not have to go through the to all the component processes does the act of perception for art depends upon the prior knowledge from person to person absolutely that is you know some of the slides that I was showing showed that if you are aware of the value of that your perception of that object changes which is why some people are able to sell shit for whatever amount of money and I mean it both in the figurative and the real sense no no no I did not say development of imagination does not have I said there are stages so there are stages where there is pretend play pretend play does not happen in if you take a one year old take two one year one year olds and put them together they will never play with each other this one will go playing his or her one one and a half years old will play with his or her toys that one will play with his or her toys you know it is almost as if the other one did not exist when you become two or three you start saying give me yours give me yours then when you are four or five you actually engage together to do pretend play let us play house house or whatever yeah so it goes through stages and these stages are dependent on brain maturity and some kids cannot do that because their brain does not mature for example autistic kids can never play with another child they would rather play with their mechanical toy and they will do it very well they will you know give them a Lego set they will do all kinds of things much better than the other kids but person to person imagination not there will go whichever way you want we have very difficult questions let me tackle your first one your your second one first how does the mind distinguish between good and bad the mind does not distinguish between good and bad the mind is taught good and bad by environmental circumstances but having been taught that we have error detectors which tell us is this the direction I want to go in you know if I step like this will I manage to cross the wire or won't I manage to cross the wire you know if I pick up this thing will he get upset with me or won't he get upset with me you know and we have processes in the brain which do that we have processes in the brain which act as breaks which is one part of the brain which grows later so a younger person does not have the capacity to restrict himself or herself a small child will go and pick it up without thinking that should I ask or shouldn't I ask an adolescent is more likely to do something impulsively without thinking of the consequences than an adult is because an adolescent lacks that part of the brain I mean in full maturity which are the breaks of the brain which says hang on wait think and then do so there are processes for that but as to whether something is good essential the value judgments these are things human beings have learnt over time you know for example is killing people good or bad you know is a difficult question because we are all taught killing is bad but then we will be the first one to say hang x y z and that is good because it you are acting on behalf of the larger mob you know so these are slightly difficult questions and these are shaped by our social circumstances shaped by our education if you are in the south of the USA hanging is good but if you are in New York state you would go out on parade saying hanging is bad so I don't know does that answer your second question but the first one was this is a whole talk by itself it is actually 20 talks by itself now by that I understand you to mean that that consciousness has to exist before anything else exist which means a sense of self has to exist before anything else exist I am therefore I think now this actually comes from a much earlier understanding which is this whole mind body dichotomy that the mind is somehow different from the brain isn't it what we are more and more realizing is that the mind is actually created because of crosstalk of different neurons in the brain and yet if I say this I will be guilty of oversimplification reduction you add absurdum because it can't be just that however once you kill the brain and brain activity stops there is no mind so the truth lies somewhere in between I am afraid I am not competent to answer that question because as neuroscientist we really don't know but more and more the evidence points to the fact that you know between the these circuits the positive and the negative doing circuits somewhere the mind is constructed but the mind is also constructed out of what we have learned out of what many generations have learned and put together you know these whole cultural memes etcetera this is difficult question to answer. Can aesthetic be generalized can something be built which everybody thinks looks nice. What do you think yeah I tend to agree that you know there are some things that you will react to human brains will always react to missing information like I showed this dappled things you will always look at something as but aesthetics also has a major cultural component to it that there are certain things you like because you been taught to like it you been taught to value it like sitar music so again the answer lies somewhere in between and as a neuroscientist I have learnt you know to stay in the equator never to stay either on the north pole or the south pole you know. When we are imaging any conditions in the f m r i we managed to put one condition at a time so when we are trying to image the influence of music on a mind so how close are we mapping that particular condition because multiple conditions cannot be taken at a time in the f m r i which is a problem you know you cannot really have very complex phenomenon and say that we are responding to this which is why I was laughing at this whole thing of the neurosynema you showing people cinema you know what people are reacting to you know are they reacting to the music are they reacting to the editing etcetera. But it is slightly easier when you are playing one snatch of music and you are showing response to that and yet you can never be sanguine that this is the exact reaction to this so often you know when we talk about this as scientists we say this perhaps may be related to this may be associated with that right now there are no causal explanations what is there are associated or associated observations this is associated with this nine times out of ten this is the association of brain activity that is associated with listening to this particular thing so I cannot make assertions I can make suggestions asking that you must have observed many experiments in those experiments are how consistent sir are these. So, if we take ten subjects at a time you say twenty random samples at a time and play a music so during those conditions how close are those subjects so showing similar activities similar neuronal activities when they are imaged. They are because see what you do is you create conditions where one group of people are given a particular condition another group of people are not given a particular condition or given a a a placebo condition. So, somebody is given say music another person is given some sort of white noise you do not create a condition where somebody just sits in the you know lies there and daydreams somebody has to be listening. So, you create as as comparable a condition as possible you can always knock holes in my experimental condition, but we will have to create better and better conditions remember that these the some of the data that I presented are things which have been done for the first time it is a brave new world you know and you know the last thing that I told you guys was that art and science have to talk to each other. Otherwise this is not going to happen and now art and sciences started talking to each other, but our languages are so different somewhere you have to start and I totally agree with you that the conditions that you create to study these have to be refined more and more and more. Sir, where does belief has to influence everything? What do you mean? Sir, any belief sir how is belief going to influence anything sir if we are taking any condition at that time say music in a how how deep is the core of belief. By belief what do you mean you are talking of faith. Sir, belief any sort of belief sir belief that say even we come through a culture we have made to believe that music can make us feel better. Sir, this is belief sir how is belief that belief part is going to influence. It does it does no I showed you evidence which says that you know something is shown to be valuable your response changes and if something is shown to be non valuable your response changes. Now, if you are going to get in belief faith religion etcetera these are complicated subjects you know and we are no longer we are we are not there yet. These are these are valid subjects for enquiry, but these are so complicated because there are so many multiple elements there we are no longer we are just at this stage of very simple enquiry here you are right these questions need to be asked. I do not think we still have the tools to answer them you should think up you know how to ask these questions you are. So, you should ask these questions. I will learn from art students. You will have to create the conditions, but you are absolutely right you are saying something here. With this art and science like talking to each other coming together what I feel I could be wrong we are mostly looking at the science of arts rather than the art of science. And is it not that the science of art is actually taking away the artistic side of arts as he said that is there something that can generally appeal to everyone. So, you are trying to create more professional kind of things and that. And why is that not artistic? Because it is basically more say professional oriented or materialistic kind of thing. So you are not just creating art for the sake of arts you are doing it because you want to sell it to a larger audience. And it can through the media and all it can also be used not only for selling your stuff for money, but also for you know propaganda and many other. And art for arts sake does not sell itself for money? Not necessarily I could it could sell, but that is not my primary intention. It is your primary intention and today when somebody creates a painting you do not create it to hide it in their room. Very few people do. Yeah, but they do some people do. Well some people do most people who do science do it just for the joy of learning. See I get a little concerned when one makes this whole this distinction again you are creating two rooms that the artists do it for pure love and happiness. And the scientists have got a what is the word you used a materialistic bent and they want to find bricks and mortar. That is the very the very cold water on the dialogue that we are trying to create. That is the that is the older way of thinking what we should actually be thinking is that can we help each other understand each other. There is no shame in saying that look like I said how can I be bored in a better way how can you be creative in a better way. If I have the way of learning how to be happier and it has come through scientific knowledge would you throw it away saying that it is a materialistic way of getting happier. This is the philosophical discussion that we are having, but it is this whole schism between north pole art and south pole science which I do not think is helpful any longer today. We need to come as I said to the equator where you know there was a there was this writer called Edmund Wilson I do not know whether you guys have read him. He created this word called conciliance where one discipline merges with the other discipline and becomes stronger for it both both become stronger for it and that is something that has to happen. Maybe I will just put my question in a different way. We are trying to understand art through the mirror of science is it to improve art or to increase its marketability. It is to improve your understanding. It does not need to lead to something it needs to lead to knowledge. Why cannot it just need to knowledge to lead to increase knowledge. Sir, may I add something. Sure, sure please. Sir, knowing the molecule constituent of anything does not take away subjective experience Sir, if we know the molecule constituent of sugar, know where it takes away the sugar sweet when you are having it. So, this is a very similar I think the gap that is created in art and science and in India I have always found this that the students are groomed in a way in which they have their sense of anti-science is created and they are always groomed in a way in which they come out and attack science that science too materialistic. Sir, and I just simply want to add that if we know the mechanism of anything, know where it takes away the subjective experience of anything and art is a subjective experience and right now whatever it is explained. Sir, it speaks of the mechanism how the subjective experience are working in the human body. So, that know where it takes from us how it should be. So, what is the particular experience of art and this is nothing do with demeaning art or being dismissive of poetry literature. How would you react to that. I mean basically that is a totally different dimension again I am not opposed to trying to understand the process. I am just a bit worried about for example, that you mentioned neuro-cinema. Now, why is it that you actually neuro-cinema or for that matter neuro-marketing why do you want to understand all that what is the ultimate use that it is going to be put to. So, I am basically worried about that. Yeah, but then see that is depends on how you use a particular invention. Now, you can use dynamite for various things you do not necessarily have to put it into a waste coat and you know bust you know kill people. You can use it for other things you can use space travel for a particular thing you can use it to shower rockets on your enemy. So, why something is used and the potential for harm for anything is something peculiar to human beings that human beings will find harmful uses for anything. So, but that does not necessarily mean that one should stay in a cave and not venture out and see the world and create things and find you know new knowledge. So, that is a Luddite argument that is a Luddite argument is not it that one should not have more knowledge because it can always be used to to destroy you are not happy with that. Sir, in those brain images how do we interpret those images that is more activity in one region and that region is what that region is a dedicated region of the brain. It is not a localized. It is localized, but it is there are no dedicated regions in the brain, but there are regions which we know subserve certain functions, but the brain keeps talking to each other I mean the areas of the brain keep talking to each other. So, now we know and this these are earlier studies earlier studies looked at this f m r i they looked at areas where there was increased activity increased utilization of oxygen in the brain. So, you assume that there is increased activity because more oxygen is being burnt, but now what we are the areas that we are moving into obviously none of those things are here is you are now looking at circuits areas that fire together work together you know and that is very interesting, but it is in its infancy. So, people are now looking at circuits for example, this resting state potential I showed you a picture I did not elaborate, but people areas which rest together are probably talking to each other are gossiping with each other and areas which get activated together they are also circuits. So, we are now able to see which circuits get activated when you know certain things are done and that does not mean that that circuit is dedicated to that no no it is not dedicated as I said the brain is very very I mean the you know nature is very stingy it does not have different circuits for different things uses the same thing for different purposes you know this whole that that was this whole earlier thing where you felt this part is for this that part is for that used to do mapping of the bumps on your on your skull. Now, it is far more complicated than that and far more economical than that.