COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, SEPTEMBER 2016In 1959, C.P. Snow, the molecular physicist who later became a novelist, delivered a lecture in which he declared that Western intellectual life is divided into two cultures: that of the sciences, which are concerned with the physical nature of the universe, and that of the humanities—literature and the arts—which are concerned with the nature of human experience. Too often, humanists constrain themselves to a cultural echo chamber, maintaining little contact with the realm of the sciences. But Snow, having lived in and experienced both cultures, had the insight that this divide came about because neither discipline understood the other’s methodologies or goals. He argued that by bridging the chasm between their two cultures, scientists and humanists could not only further the pursuit of human knowledge but also benefit human society.
This divide has always been of interest to me because I began my academic endeavors as a student of history and literature seeking to understand the artist’s response to the rise of Hitler and Fascism in Germany before World War II. Later, I would turn to study the human mind, first through the lens of psychoanalysis, and ultimately through biological exploration of the brain itself. Throughout this journey, I have straddled the divide between science and the arts. My scientific research on the brain did not supplant my studies of art and the human experience, but served as a bridge that allowed me to come back to the humanities—a means of understanding the human mind and its creativity in all their mystery, complexity, and beauty.
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