Leonardo’s Brain

Leonard Shlain uses the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci to ask what humans are capable of. He treats Leonardo as the first true Renaissance Man and revisits his work as an artist, scientist, and inventor in the light of modern neuroscience, using it to explain how Leonardo's creative process worked. Few people in history have been innovative in so many fields, and Shlain sets out to show how and why.

His central idea is that Leonardo's exceptional mind came from a right and left brain that were both highly developed and closely integrated. He suggests this offers a model for how the rest of us might develop. Drawing on earlier and current research, the book uses Leonardo as the starting point for a new look at human creativity.

Shlain was a surgeon who also wrote Art & Physics, and the book reflects his habit of linking ideas from widely separated fields.