Neuroaesthetics, Part Last One

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

(Visitors might want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 first. Do not feed the animals.)

This is it, the last post in my Neuroaesthetics fourlogy. (It is too a word, it’s one more than a trilogy.)

The series came out differently than I imagined. At first I was simply going to introduce and summarize the subject, but instead it’s become my own take on this new field of neuroaesthetics, its flaws, and its potential implications upon art. Pretty cool, I must say.

But I feel like I’ve done a sketchy job of it. There were a lot of things I left out in Parts 1, 2, and 3 and I know I wasn’t particularly good at linking to my references. In my research for these posts I’ve amassed over thirty different bookmarks and a handful of PDF files (and my computer was not happy when I made it open all of them at once), so I got lost quite often.

So in this last post on the subject, Part Last One, I’ll share some of the tidbits, quotes, and links that definitely deserve some airtime—no in-depth, pretentious mumbo-jumbo here.

How does this principle—the peak shift effect—relate to human pattern recognition and aesthetic preference? Consider the way in which a skilled cartoonist produces a caricature of a famous face, say Nixon’s. What he does (unconsciously) is to take the average of all faces, subtract the average from Nixon’s face (to get the difference between Nixon’s face and all others) and then amplify the differences to produce a caricature. The final result, of course, is a drawing that is even more Nixon-like than the original… This leads us to our first aphorism: ‘All art is caricature’. (This is not literally true, of course, but as we shall see, it is true surprisingly often.)

Ramachandran and Hirstein, The Science of Art (pdf)

I love how they make a bold statement and then try to take it back.

It may be an amusing paradox to describe painters as neurologists, studying the brain in their own special way. But the real substance of this claim is, first, that paintings are designed to have specific kinds of psychological effect on viewers; and second, that specific kinds of psychological effect are produced by specific kinds of activity in the nervous system. I do not want to dispute either of these ideas. They have been commonplace for more than a hundred years, and they are both surely true. But if we can think of paintings in this way, the same is true of many other things. For example, hamburgers and ice-cream are designed to produce a specific kinds of psychological effect on consumers: the experience of tasting hamburgers in one case and the experience of tasting ice cream in the other. And these specific psychological effects are produced by specific kinds of activity in the nervous system.

…It tells us nothing about Picasso and Cezanne that doesn’t apply equally to Haagen Dazs and MacDonalds.

John Hyman, Art and Neuroscience

I think there are two types of surrealism. First there is the Magritt type that involves deliberate and whimsical violation of the rules of perception (such as my law of avoiding ‘suspicious coincidences’), e.g. the rules of occlusion, opacity. etc., as an attention grabbing ‘arousal’ device. To borrow a linguistic analogy, the artist is playing with the syntax—rather than semantics—of visual images. The second type is the Dali kind, which involves violation of high level visual semantics or meaning rather than early syntactic rules. The objects he creates are not literally impossible physically (e.g. melting clocks) but are highly improbable and dream-like. My theory has very little to say about all this except to point the way, since its really a form of conceptual art — one is really talking about violation of high-level concepts rather than low-level, purely visual rules. (And the same argument holds for conceptual art whose goal is to visually intrigue or even shock the viewer.)

Ramachandran, Sharpening Up “The Science of Art” (pdf)

Again, what does this have to do with art? Well, this brings me to my punch line about art. What I’m suggesting is that if those seagulls had an art gallery, they would hang the long stick with the three red stripes on the wall, worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why–why am I mesmerized by this thing even though it doesn’t resemble anything? That’s what you are doing when you buy contemporary art. You are behaving exactly like those gull chicks.

Ramachandran, The Artful Brain (pdf)

Of course, I make art specifically to fulfill my life-long dream of becoming a gull chick

Over the past few years Vislab has contributed to neuroesthetics by exploring visual art in relation to the known physiology of the visual brain.

Underlying the approach are three suppositions:

That all visual art must obey the laws of the visual brain, whether in conception or in execution or in appreciation;

That visual art has an overall function which is an extension of the function of the visual brain, to acquire knowledge;

That artists are, in a sense, neurologists who study the capacities of the visual brain with techniques that are unique to them.

An Introduction to the Institute of Neuroesthetics

“I’ve been studying the organization of the primary visual brain for nearly 30 years,” he says. “If I can’t make a single statement about why it is that people go to art galleries, then I don’t feel I’m doing too well.”

Semir Zeki, Beauty and the Brain, American Science Online

These days, I can take a toothbrush, throw it on a silver tray, and proclaim, “I call this art, therefore it is art.” (Or Damien Hirst can say the same of a cow pickled in formalin.) For this reason, we would be better off speaking of the laws of aesthetics rather than laws of art (which is a much more loaded term). Such laws of aesthetics may have been hardwired into the visual areas of our brains (as well as the connections between them and limbic emotional circuits) to defeat camouflage, segment the visual scene, and discover and orient to object-like entities. Before the visual-processing stream culminates in the climactic “aha” of recognition, there are probably several mini-ahas along the way. One could posit that the goal of visual art is to generate as many such mini-ahas and ahas as possible by using cleverly contrived visual patterns (4). Although hardly a complete description of visual aesthetics, this is a start.

Ramachandran, Beauty or Brains?

And, for good measure, here are a ton of links:

I hope you all enjoyed this series but it won’t matter how much you applaud—I’m not doing an encore.

Neuroaesthetics Adventures

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