Neuroscience and Abstraction

“We do not see what is there — we see what we want to see.”

This sentence captures both art and neuroscience. Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel reminds us that vision is not a passive recording of reality, but an active process of interpretation, shaped by memory, emotion, and expectation.

About 150 years ago, with the spread of photography, landscape and portrait painting began to lose their dominance. A time of unprecedented experimentation — a true age of big bang — had begun.

Monet captured fleeting impressions of light.

Picasso deliberately broke away from form.

Kandinsky visualized music.

Dalí gave shape to the unconscious.

Dadaism sought destruction itself as art.

Suprematism made ideology visible.

Artists were no longer painting what was merely seen. They turned instead to what could not be seen—light, emotion, rhythm, the unconscious, ideas. The invisible became the true subject of painting.

This shift echoes Kandel’s insight: we do not perceive the world as it is, but as our brains construct it. Vision is filtered through memory, feeling, and desire, creating an image in mind that is uniquely our own. In this sense, abstraction is not about obscurity. It is an attempt to reveal the very mechanism of human perception. As recognizable forms disappear, our inner world comes into sharper focus.

Representation became the domain of photography. Painting moved beyond imitation, toward exploring the mind and brain that experience reality. Thus, what cannot be seen came to stand at the center of art.

Standing before an abstract painting, we often ask, “What is this supposed to be?”

But perhaps the more important question is:

“Why do I see and feel it this way?”

Abstraction returns that question to us.