Jean-Pierre Changeux, a neurobiologist and a member of the French Academy of Sciences, is an honorary professor at the Collège de France and at the Institut Pasteur. He is the author of such highly successful works as Du vrai, du beau, du bien, Matière à pensée, La Nature et la Règle and L’Homme de vérité, all published by Editions Odile Jacob.
Pierre Boulez is a conductor and composer (Le Marteau sans maître) and the founder of France’s renowned Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music (Ircam). He is recognised as a leading twentieth-century creator and a foremost thinker in the musical domain. From 1976 to 1995, he held the chair of ‘Invention, Technique and Language’ at the Collège de France.
Philippe Manoury was named composer of the year, in 2012, for La Nuit de Gutenberg.

Scientific advances in medicine, biology and the neurosciences during the past thirty years have revolutionised our understanding of how the nervous system, and particularly the human brain, functions.
One of the major challenges of this century will be to understand the relations between the elementary building blocks of the brain and such complex activities as the perception of beauty and artistic creation.
What is music? What is a work of art? Does it make sense to talk about the neuroscience of art? How could it be researched? These are some of the questions that are discussed here by an artist, for whom theoretical questions have always been essential, and a scientist, for whom the brain is a privileged research subject.

• Jean-Pierre Changeux and Pierre Boulez: two major intellectuals in the arts and in science.
• A book to help us understand the magic of the workings of the human brain.