Robert Pepperell Art and Extensionism There is an enduring, widespread, and deeply held belief that the con- scious mind is located in the brain. One of the consequences of this belief is that many researchers who seek the causes of mental phenomena do so among the neural processes in the skull. As aesthetic experience is one kind of mental phenomenon it seems natural therefore to look to the brain if we want to explain it. The recent series of books, papers, and articles from eminent neuroscientists, psychologists, vision scientists, and others that apply knowledge from science to extend our understanding of art rep- resent just such a ‘neurocentric’ approach. Foremost among this work is that of Semir Zeki, who can justifiably claim to be the prime mover behind the hybrid discipline of neuroaesthetics—a bold attempt to use neuro- biological principles to account for subjective qualities in visual art, music, and taste. In the Epilogue to what is perhaps the founding text of the new disci- pline, Inner Vision, Zeki (1999) states that what prompted him to write the book was a wish to ‘…learn whether there are any general statements that one can make about visual art in terms of what happens in the brain’ (p. 217). His hope, vindicated as it turns out, is that ‘…looking at art as a prod- uct of the brain, through the workings of the brain and its functions, will continue’ (ibid.) Subsequent texts such as those by Livingstone (2002), Ramachandran (2004), Solso (2003), Martindale et al. (2007), Skov (2009), as well as papers included in the Journal of Consciousness Studies series on ‘Art and the Brain’ (Goguen 1999), Spatial Vision’s series on ‘Vision Sci- ence and Art‘ (Pinna 2008), and talks delivered at several international conferences on neuroaesthetics all testify to the growing interest in accounting for art in broadly neurobiological terms. But if we look across the disciplinary waters to the arts themselves we find, perhaps unsurprisingly, a rather different emphasis. Attempts to account for aesthetic experience by philosophers of art, art historians, art theorists, and artists themselves rarely make reference to what Zeki calls the ‘strong biological foundations’ of the process—a fact he notes. Perhaps