"The Age of Insight is a product of my... fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. ...I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna and document its three major phases."

“Mountcastle discovered that tactile sensation is made up of several distinct modalities; for example, touch includes... hard pressure on the skin as well as a light brush... He found that each distinct submodality has its own private pathway within the brain and that this segregation is maintained at each relay...”

“As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell... Thus, the small iconographic images on Adelle's dress are not simply decorative... they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. ...designed to match the sitter's seductive face and her full-blown reproductive capacities.”

“Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes...”

“Unlike vision, touch, or smell, which are prewired and based on Kantian a priori knowledge, the spatial map presents us with a new type of representation, one based on a combination of a priori knowledge and learning. The general capability for forming spatial maps is built into the mind, but the particular map is not. Unlike neurons in a sensory system, place cells are not switched on by sensory stimulation. Their collective activity represents the location where the animal thinks it is.”

“As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism. ...This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l’Herbe... Manet's painting... reveals a theme... the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality. ...also startlingly modern because of its style. Several decades before Cézanne began to collapse three dimension into two, Manet here had already flattened the viewer's sense of perspective...”

“The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths.”