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    Leonardo's Brain: Understanding da Vinci's Creative Genius
    Leonardo's Brain: Understanding da Vinci's Creative Genius
    Leonardo's Brain: Understanding da Vinci's Creative Genius
    Audiobook8 hours

    Leonardo's Brain: Understanding da Vinci's Creative Genius

    Written by Leonard Shlain

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Bestselling author Leonard Shlain explores the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci, seeking to explain his singularity by looking at his achievements in art, science, psychology, and military strategy (yes), and then employing state of the art left-right brain scientific research to explain his universal genius. Shlain shows that no other person in human history has excelled in so many different areas as Da Vinci and he peels back the layers to explore the how and the why.

    Leonardo’s Brain uses Da Vinci as a starting point for an exploration of human creativity. With his lucid style, and his remarkable ability to discern connections in a wide range of fields, Shlain brings the listener into the world of history’s greatest mind.

    Shlain asserts that Leonardo’s genius came from a unique creative ability that allowed him to understand and excel in a wide range of fields. From here Shlain jumps off and discusses the history and current research on human creativity that revolves around the right brain-left brain split. Most of us now know that there is a split between the right and the left side of the brain; the left primarily controls our rational mind, the right our emotions.

    Shlain discusses the cutting edge research that is refining our understanding of the split brain model and deepening our knowledge about the nature of human creativity. There is more integration between the left and right brains than previously thought. Shlain argues that Leonardo was unique in human history for the degree of integration that he showed. He also speculates on whether or not the qualities of Leonardo’s brain and his creativity presage the future evolution of man.

    Leonardo’s Brain integrates art, history, science, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy uniting all of the ideas that Leonard Shlain studied and wrote about since the publication of the influential and bestselling Art and Physics in 1991.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateOct 7, 2014
    ISBN9781491529812
    Leonardo's Brain: Understanding da Vinci's Creative Genius
    Author

    Leonard Shlain

    Leonard Shlain was a bestselling author, inventor and surgeon. Admired among artists, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and educators, Shlain authored three bestselling books: Art & Physics, Alphabet vs. The Goddess and Sex, Time, and Power. He delivered stunning visual presentations based upon his books in venues around the world including Harvard, The New York Museum of Modern Art, CERN, Los Alamos, The Florence Academy of Art and the European Council of Ministers. His fans include Al Gore, Norman Lear and singer Bjork. Shlain died in May 2009 at the age of 71 from brain cancer shortly after the completion of this book. His legacy continues with his children who helped bring this book to publication: Kimberly Brooks, artist and founding editor of the Arts and Science Section of the Huffington Post, Jordan Shlain, doctor and founder of Healthloop.com and Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and director of the Sundance documentary, Connected, about the ideas in Leonardo’s Brain, as well as Leonard Shlain’s final year. Visit www.leonardshlain.com.

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    Reviews for Leonardo's Brain

    4/5

    37 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very interesting man. Way Ahead of its time. Pleasant voice, concise and informative audiobook. Good job. Thanks.
    • 5/5
      This was time well spent. I learned so much! It was well written, interesting, fun, and a total pleasure. Thank you so much to the Author and his family for spending such precious time on this. I am ever so grateful that they did, especially at such a difficult time. If you’re considering this book, please read or listen to this treasure.
    • 2/5
      Didn't care about historical knowledge of the period, did Leonardo invented everything, was his mind the greatest, it gets ridiculous!
    • 3/5
      i have to give a rating right in the middle because the book is at once exceptionally well done and at certain instances abysmally thought out. his grasp of neuroscience and ability to join multiple disciplines is outstanding, but his infantile understanding of theological complexities and nuance leaves a stain on the work that cannot be ignored. whatever your religious background, to say that islam, judaism, and christianity worship the same god is a thought even a fourth grader would move beyond. syncretism has no place in a work that clearly shows that things are this, not that. some truths are mutually exclusive.
    • 5/5
      Interesting content, great narrator. I loved Leonard before but now I absolutely fascinated by him.
    • 3/5
      Part biography of da Vinci, part neuroscience and, part speculation, this is the last offering of the late doctor who passed away in 2009. The profile of the quintessential Renaissance man, his many accomplishments and some shortcomings, are fascinating. The neuroscience, about the two hemispheres of the brain and the Corpus Callosum which bridges them, are well and truly interesting and, presented in a way that the layman can understand. But the ideas which posit that Leonardo was able to bend/blend time & space, was the first cubist, first scientist, and so on... are just a couple of the many truly incredible claims that the author makes and which ruin the book by relegating the book as the work of a crackpot.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the book and I especially enjoyed reading about Leonardo's scientific discoveries. While I liked the book, it took me a very long time to read, as the author rambled in a long winded fashion about all of Leonardo's accomplishments and then threw in some theories of his own.