EXCERPT What’s going on in the artist’s brain during the creation of a work of art? Before we can even begin to answer this question, we must recognise that it contains a hidden normative dimension. It’s obvious that we aren’t interested in every neural episode that occurs during the creative process, but only those that are somehow relevant to this process. The threshold of relevance may extend deep below the threshold of consciousness, encompassing nuanced emotional responses and faint traces of memory of which the artist is unaware, but it can’t include everything. For instance, even if one acknowledges the importance of synaesthetic effects in the composition of visual works, this import only makes sense if it’s limited to specific connections between the visual and other sensory modalities, e.g., alignments of colours and temperatures, shapes and sounds, etc., no matter how minimal the intensity of these connections. More generally, this notion of relevance makes no sense unless we understand the creative process as resulting in a genuine work of art, or, at the very least, as aiming at such a work. If nothing else, we are entirely uninterested in the brains of anyone trying to pass something off as art, however fascinating they might be in other respects. Herein lies the question’s normative supposition. Of course, this opens onto a far more difficult and controversial question: What is a genuine work of art? Or perhaps even: What is the purpose of art?…