Art, it seems, needs to be explained. Neuroscience is but the latest of the sciences (the list includes psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, ophthalmology and sociology) to task itself with rationalising what is an essentially irrational enterprise. Yet as philosophers, historians and theorists have repeatedly discovered, art is adept at evading delineation, at turning its definitions against its definers.

Periodically there is a tide of enthusiasm about ‘art–science integration’. We are in the midst of one now. But invariably, little of value remains when the tide runs out. This is not because those who participate lack honourable intentions, but because true integration is hardly ever the aim. Rather, science too often assumes for itself the role of investigator while art is pinned to the table as the experimental subject, anaesthetised and mute. How many scientists, I wonder, would welcome the tables being turned?

So, it is refreshing—and encouraging for those committed to genuine art–science integration—to find a book with the title Neuroscience and Art that treats art as a deeply complex human activity while, at the same time, harnessing science in its broadest sense as a mode of inquiry that can reveal rather than obscure that complexity.

The ‘cultural’ component in the subtitle of Amy Ione’s book signals that art too is taken here in its broadest sense to include images (still and moving), decorative designs, diagrams, texts (prose and poetry), assemblages, organised sounds and technologies. One of the joys of Neuroscience and Art is the range and diversity of its subjects and sources—taken from many sciences and many arts—and the liveliness of the composition into which this material is woven.

Organised into three main parts, each of the book’s twelve chapters provides an opportunity to consider cultural artefacts of varying familiarity through an instructive scientific lens, or lenses. The early chapters provide some historical context and introduce its diversity of subject matter, while a set of case studies in Part II expands its vistas still further by, for example, discussing the novelist Iris Murdoch, giving a neurobiological take on cinema or addressing the traumatic impact of war on art.

What we gain from this “neurocultural perspective”, according to Ione, is a better understanding of “how everything in the world is filtered back and forth between the brain and the cultural milieu.”  What does not emerge from this perspective, however, is a narrow linear argument or simple conclusion. Certainly, there is nothing here to claim—as a book with the title Neuroscience and Art might be expected to claim—that our experience of art can be reduced to something like the activation of neural ‘reward centres’, or the brain’s Default Mode Network.

Instead, the argument presented by this richly illustrated book reflects the nature of its subject matter, which is multifaceted and nonlinear, with aspects that defy definition and, ultimately, explanation.