Review: The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric R. Kandel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting book starting with a review of “the scene” in Vienna prior to WWI, describing the art scene and Freud and his research. After this overview, the book turns into a somewhat pop-science review of brain science and psychology. It concludes using the learnings of the Viennese to illustrate the science, and to further discuss creativity. I found the first part, the history, quite unexpected and interesting. The author described how artists discovered new ways to present their art using new thinking about human perception. These perceptual cues are then described from the perspective of brain science and psychology. Quite deep. There have been quite a few books that covered the science that this book covered in the past year, and it seems I’ve read more than a handful. This came across as a deeper technical discussion than those pop-science books, and it had a unique angle of relating it to art and early psychology. It was still quite readable.

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