ABSTRACT

The new values, new approaches and new patterns of behaviour with which it is associated are understood typically in terms of the new roles acquired by book-learning, by education and other types of social formation. The stress on modern knowledge of the brain should not lead us to minimize the understanding of the brain available in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The principles governing the growth of the brain ensure that people have neural networks which are appropriate to their environments. The biological basis of the vision is an important aspect of Renaissance aesthetics. It may seem strange to compare what German peasants saw in the sky with what Leonardo painted, but the experience of both relies on the same mechanism. All animals have brains that are adapted by the process of evolutionary selection to enable them to identify and distinguish between objects around them which are either beneficial or damaging, friendly or hostile, potential mates or potential rivals.