Reith2003 Lecture 3: The Artful Brain
Sir Frederick
>http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/reith2003_lecture3_transcript.shtml
In this lecture - which is the most speculative one in the series of five - I'd like to take up one
of the most ancient questions in philosophy, psychology and anthropology, namely what is art? When
Picasso said: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth" what exactly did he mean?
I'd like to take up one of the most ancient questions in philosophy, psychology and anthropology,
namely - what is art? When Picasso said: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth" what exactly did
he mean?
Listen to the audio clip
Watch the video clip
As we saw in my previous lectures neuroscientists have made some headway in understanding the
neural basis of psychological phenomena like body image, how you construct your body image, or
visual perception. But can the same be said of art - given that art obviously originates in the
brain?
In particular what I'd like to do is raise the question: "Are there such things as artistic
universals?"
Now let me add a note of caution before I begin. When I speak of artistic universals I am not
denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise
you wouldn't have different artistic styles - but it doesn't follow that art is completely
idiosyncratic and arbitrary either or that there are no universal laws.
Let me put it somewhat differently. Let's assume that 90% of the variance you see in art is driven
by cultural diversity or - more cynically - by just the auctioneer's hammer, and only 10% by
universal laws that are common to all brains. The culturally driven 90% is what most people already
study - it's called art history. As a scientist what I am interested in is the 10% that is
universal - not in the endless variations imposed by cultures. The advantage that I and other
scientists have today is that unlike we can now test our conjectures by directly studying the brain
empirically. There's even a new name for this discipline. My colleague Semir Zeki calls it
Neuro-aesthetics - just to annoy the philosophers.
I recently started reading about the history of ideas on art - especially Victorian reactions to
Indian art - and it makes fascinating reading.
For example if you go to Southern India, you look at the famous Chola bronze of the goddess Parvati
dating back to the 12th century. For Indian eyes, she is supposed to represent the very epitome of
feminine sensuality, grace, poise, dignity, everything that's good about being a woman. And she's
of course also very voluptuous
The Goddess Parvati
But the Victorian Englishmen who first encountered these sculptures were appalled by Parvati,
partly because they were prudish, but partly also just because of just plain ignorance.
They complained that the breasts were way too big, the hips were too big and the waist was too
narrow. It didn't look anything like a real woman - it wasn't realistic - it was primitive art. And
they said the same thing about the voluptuous nymphs of Kajuraho - even about Rajastani and Mogul
miniature paintings. They said look these paintings don't have perspective, they're all distorted.
They were judging Indian art using the standards of Western art - especially classical Greek art
and Renaissance art where realism is strongly emphasized.
But obviously this is a fallacy. Anyone here today will tell you art has nothing to do with
realism. It is not about creating a realistic replica of what's out there in the world.
I can take a five dollar, camera, aim it at one of you here, take a photograph. It's very realistic
but you wouldn't give me a penny for it. In fact art is about the exact opposite. It's about
deliberate hyperbole, exaggeration, in fact even distortion in order to create pleasing effects in
the brain.
But obviously that can't be the whole story. You can't just take an image and randomly distort it
and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that. The
distortion has to be lawful. The question then becomes: What kinds of distortion are effective?
What are the laws?
So one day I was sitting in a temple in India when I was on a sabbatical and in a whimsical frame
of mind I just jotted down what I think of as the universal laws of art, the ten laws of art which
cut across cultural boundaries. Given our time limits, I'm going to just tell you four or five of
my ten laws - the rest are on the BBC Website, so you can go look it up.
Professor Ramachandran's suggested 10 universal laws of art:
Peak shift
Grouping
Contrast
Isolation
Perception problem solving
Symmetry
Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
Balance
Metaphor
A new book by Professor Ramachandran called The Artful Brain is due to be published by Fourth
Estate at the beginning of next year.
The first law, I call peak shift and to illustrate this I'll use a hypothetical example from animal
behaviour, from rat psychology.
The amazing thing is if you take a longer skinnier rectangle and show it to the rat, it actually
prefers the longer skinnier rectangle to the original rectangle. It says: "Wow! What a rectangle!"
and it goes towards that rectangle.
Listen to the audio clip
Watch the video clip
Imagine you're training a rat to discriminate a square from a rectangle. So every time it sees a
particular rectangle you give it a piece of cheese. When it sees a square you don't give it
anything. Very soon it learns that the rectangle means food, it starts liking the rectangle -
although you're not supposed to say that if you're a behaviourist. And it starts going towards the
rectangle because it prefers the rectangle to the square.
But now the amazing thing is if you take a longer skinnier rectangle and show it to the rat, it
actually prefers the longer skinnier rectangle to the original rectangle that you taught it. And
you say: Well that's kind of stupid. Why does it prefer a longer skinnier rectangle rather than the
one you originally showed it? Well it's not stupid at all because what the rat is learning is a
rule - Rectangularity. And of course therefore if you make it longer and skinnier, it's even more
rectangular. So it says: "Wow! What a rectangle!" and it goes towards that rectangle.
Now you say: Well, what's that got to do with art?
Well let's think about caricature. What do you do in a caricature? Supposing you want to produce a
caricature of Maggie Thatcher or a caricature of Nixon, what do you do? You take Nixon's face and
you say: What's special about his face? What makes him different from other people. So what you do
is you take the mathematical average of all male faces and you subtract it from Nixon's face. And
you get the big bulbous nose and the shaggy eyebrows. And then you amplify it. And then you get an
image that looks even more like Nixon than Nixon himself. Now if you do it just right you get great
portraiture, even a Rembrandt. But if you overdo it you get caricature, it looks comical. But it
still looks even more like Nixon than the original Nixon. So you're behaving exactly like that rat.
But what's it got to do with the rest of art. Let's go back to the Chola bronze of Parvati. Let's
talk about Indian art. Well the same principle applies. How does the artist convey the very epitome
of feminine sensuality? What he does is simply take the average female form, subtract the average
male form - you're going to get big breasts, big hips and a narrow waist. And then amplify it,
amplify the difference. And you don't say: "My God, it's anatomically incorrect". You say: "Wow!
What a sexy goddess!"
But that's not all there is to it because how do you bring in dignity, poise, grace?
Well what you do is something quite clever, what the Chola bronze artist does is something quite
clever. There are some postures that are forbidden to a male. I can't stand like that even if I
want to. But a woman can do it effortlessly. So what he does is he goes into an abstract space I
call "posture space", and then subtracts the average male posture from the female and then
exaggerates the feminine posture - and then you get elegant triple flexion - or tribhanga - pose,
where the head is tilted one way, the body is tilted exactly the opposite way, and the hips again
the other way. And again you don't say: "My God, that's anatomically inappropriate. Nobody can
stand like that." You say: "My God! It's gorgeous. It's beautiful! It's a celestial goddess". So
the image is extremely evocative and it's an example of the peak shift principle in Indian art.
OK, this is all about faces and caricatures and bodies and Chola bronzes. That seems quite
reasonable, but what about the rest of art? What about abstract art? What about Picasso. What about
semi-abstract art? What about impressionism, what about Cubism? Van Gogh? Monet? Henry Moore? How
can my ideas even begin to approach some of those artistic styles?
To answer this question, you need to go and look at ethology, especially the work of Niko Tinbergen
at Oxford more than fifty years ago. And he was doing some very elegant experiments on seagull
chicks.
As soon as the herring-gull chick hatches, it looks at its mother. The mother has a long yellow
beak with a red spot on it. And the chick starts pecking at the red spot, begging for food. The
mother then regurgitates half-digested food into the chick's gaping mouth, the chick swallows the
food and is happy. Then Tinbergen asked himself: "How does the chick know as soon as it's hatched
who's mother? Why doesn't it beg for food from a person who is passing by or a pig?"
And he found that you don't need a mother.
You can take a dead seagull, pluck its beak away and wave the disembodied beak in front of the
chick and the chick will beg just as much for food, pecking at this disembodied beak. And you say:
"Well that's kind of stupid - why does the chick confuse the scientist waving a beak for a mother
seagull?"
Well the answer again is it's not stupid at all. Actually if you think about it, the goal of vision
is to do as little processing or computation as you need to do for the job on hand, in this case
for recognizing mother. And through millions of years of evolution, the chick has acquired the
wisdom that the only time it will see this long thing with a red spot is when there's a mother
attached to it. After all it is never going to see in nature a mutant pig with a beak or a
malicious ethologist waving a beak in front of it. So it can take advantage of the statistical
redundancy in nature and say: "Long yellow thing with a red spot IS mother. Let me forget about
everything else and I'll simplify the processing and save a lot of computational labour by just
looking for that."
That's fine. But what Tinbergen found next is that you don't need even a beak. He took a long
yellow stick with three red stripes, which doesn't look anything like a beak - and that's
important. And he waved it in front of the chicks and the chicks go berserk. They actually peck at
this long thing with the three red stripes more than they would for a real beak. They prefer it to
a real beak - even though it doesn't resemble a beak. It's as though he has stumbled on a superbeak
or what I call an ultrabeak.
Why does this happen?
If seagulls had an art gallery, they would hang this long stick with the three red stripes on the
wall, they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand
why. That's what all of you are doing when you are buying contemporary art. You are behaving
exactly like those gull chicks.
Listen to the audio clip
Watch the video clip
We don't know exactly why, but obviously there are neural circuits in the visual pathways of the
chick's brain that are specialized for detecting beaks as soon as the chick hatches. They fire when
seeing the beak. Perhaps because of the way they are wired up, they may actually respond more
powerfully to the stick with the three stripes than to a real beak. Maybe the neurons' receptive
field embodies a rule such as "The more red contour the better," and it's more effective in driving
the neuron, even though the stick doesn't look like a beak to you and me - or maybe even to the
chick. And a message from this beak-detecting neuron now goes to the emotional limbic centres in
the chick's brain giving it a big jolt and saying: "Wow, what a super beak!" and the chick is
absolutely mesmerized.
Well now what's this got to do with art, you're wondering?
Well this brings me to my punch line of about art. What I'm suggesting is if those seagulls had an
art gallery, they would hang this long stick with the three red stripes on the wall, they would
worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why - why am I
mesmerized by this damn thing even though it doesn't resemble anything? That's what all of you are
doing when you are buying contemporary art. You are behaving exactly like those gull chicks.
In other words human artists through trial and error, through intuition, through genius have
discovered the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar. They are tapping into these and
creating for your brain the equivalent of the long stick with the three stripes for the chick's
brain. And what you end up with is a Henry Moore or a Picasso.
The advantage of these ideas is you can test them experimentally. You can actually record from
cells in the brain which sort of fire when you show it a face in the fusiform gyrus. Now some of
them will fire only to a particular view of a face. But higher up you've got neurons which respond
to any view of a given face. And I'm predicting that if you present a Cubist portrait of a monkey
face - where you present two views of a monkey's face in the same place - that cell will be
hyper-activated. Just as the long stick with the three red stripes hyper-activates the
beak-detecting neurons in the chick's brain, this Cubist portrait of a monkey face will
hyper-activate these face-detecting neurons in the monkey brain - and the monkey says: "Wow! What a
face". So what you have here is in fact a neural explanation for Picasso, for Cubism.
I've told you about one law so far - peak shift and the idea of ultra-normal stimuli. We have
borrowed insights from ethology, neurophysiology, rat psychology to account for why people like
non-realistic art.
The second law is more familiar to all of you. It's called Grouping.
Many of you may have seen those famous puzzle pictures, like Richard Gregory's Dalmatian dog. You
just see a bunch of splotches when you first look at it but the you sense you visual brain trying
to solve a perceptual problem, trying to make sense of this chaos. And then after a few seconds, or
maybe actually several seconds - 30 or 40 seconds - suddenly everything clicks in place and you
group all the correct fragments together, and lo and behold you see a Dalmatian dog.
Richard Gregory's Dalmatian
You can almost sense your brain groping for a solution to the perceptual riddle and as soon as you
successfully group the correct fragments together to see the dog, what I suggest is a message gets
sent from the visual centres of the brain to the limbic-emotional brain centres of the brain giving
it a jolt and saying: "AHA, there is a dog" or "AHA, there is a face".
The Dalmatian dog example is very important because it reminds us that vision is an extraordinarily
complex and sophisticated process. And even looking at a simple scene involves a complex hierarchy,
a stage by stage processing. At each stage in the hierarchy of processing, when a partial solution
is achieved - "Hey it looks a bit dog-like right here" - there is a reward signal "AHA", a partial
"AHA", and a small bias is sent back to earlier stages to facilitate the further binding of the
features of the dog. And through such progressive bootstrapping the final dog clicks in place to
create the final big "AHA!" Vision has much more in common with problem solving - more like a
twenty questions game - than we usually realize.
The grouping principle is widely used in both Indian and in Western art - and even in fashion
design. For example you go to Harrods, and you pick out a scarf with red splotches on it. Then you
often match it with a skirt which has got some red splotches on it. Now what's this all about? Is
it just hype, is it just marketing? Or is it telling you something very deep about how the brain is
organized? I'm going to argue it is telling you something very deep, something to do with the way
the brain evolved.
Vision evolved mainly to discover objects and to defeat camouflage. You don't realize this when you
look around you and you see clearly defined objects.
But imagine your primate ancestors scurrying up in the treetops trying to detect a lion seen behind
fluttering green foliage. What you get inside the eyeball on the retina is just a bunch of yellow
lion fragments obscured by all the leaves. But the brain says - so to speak - "What's the
likelihood that all these different yellow fragments are exactly the same yellow simply by chance?
Zero. They must all belong to one object, so let me link them together, glue them together. Oh my
God, it's a lion - let me out of here!" And as soon as you glue them together, a signal gets sent
to the limbic system saying: "AHA, there's something object-like, pay attention here".
So there's an arousal, and an attention which then titillates the limbic system, and you pay
attention and you dodge the lion.
And such "AHAs" are created, I maintain, at every stage in the visual hierarchy as partial
object-like entities are discovered that draw your interest and attention. What the artist tries to
do is to generate as many of these "AHA" signals in as many visual areas as possible by more
optimally exciting these areas with his paintings or sculptures than you could achieve with natural
visual scenes or realistic images. Not a bad definition of art if you think about it.
That takes me to the third law - the law of perceptual problem solving or visual peekaboo. Now what
do I mean by that?
As anyone knows a nude seen behind a diaphanous veil is much more alluring and tantalizing than a
full-colour Playboy photo or a Chippendale pinup - or a Page Three girl, is that what you call it?
Why?
As I said our brains evolved in highly camouflaged environments. Imagine you are chasing your mate
through dense fog. Then you want every stage in the process - every partial glimpse of her - to be
pleasing enough to prompt further visual search - so you don't give up the search prematurely in
frustration. In other words, the wiring of your visual centres to your emotional centres ensures
that the very act of searching for the solution is pleasing, just as struggling with a jigsaw
puzzle is pleasing long before the final "AHA". Once again it's about generating as many "AHAs" as
possible in your brain.
The fourth law is the law of isolation or understatement.
You all know that a simple outline doodle by Picasso or a nude by Rodin or Klimt can be much more
evocative than a full colour photo of a woman. Similarly the cartoon-like outline drawings of bulls
in the Lascaux Caves are much more powerful and evocative of the animal than a National Geographic
photograph of a bull. Hence the famous aphorism in art: "Less is more".
But why should this be so? Isn't it the exact opposite of the first law, the idea of hyperbole, of
trying to excite as many "AHAs" as possible? A pinup or a Page Three girl after all has much more
information. It's going to excite many more areas in your brain, many more neurons, so why isn't it
more beautiful?
Well when you look at a Page Three girl, the main information about her sinuous soft contours is
conveyed by her outline. Her skin tone, hair colour after all is irrelevant to her beauty as a
nude. By leaving all this out in a doodle or sketch the artist is saving your brain a lot of
trouble.
Listen to the audio clip
Watch the video clip
The way out of this paradox is to consider another visual phenomenon, called Attention. It's a
well-known fact that you can't have two overlapping patterns of neural activity simultaneously.
Even though you've got one hundred billion nerve cells, you can't have two overlapping patterns. In
other words, there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only allocate your attentional resources
to one thing at a time.
Well when you look at a Page Three girl, the main information about her sinuous soft contours is
conveyed by her outline. Her skin tone, hair colour after all is no different from anyone sitting
here. It's irrelevant to her beauty as a nude. So in the realistic photo you have all this
irrelevant information cluttering the picture and distracting your attention away from where it's
needed critically - to her contours and outlines. By leaving all this out in a doodle or sketch the
artist is saving your brain a lot of trouble. And this is especially true if the artist has also
added some peak shifts to the outline to create an "ultra nude" or a "super nude".
What's the evidence for all this? Of course you can test it by doing brain imaging experiments
comparing neural responses to outline sketches and caricatures versus full-colour photos. But
there's also very striking neurological evidence from children with autism. Some of these children
have what's called the savant syndrome. Even though they are retarded in many respects, they have
one preserved island of extraordinary talent.
For example, a seven-year-old autistic child Nadia had exceptional artistic skills. She was quite
retarded mentally, could barely talk, yet she could produce the most amazing drawings of horses and
roosters and other animals. A horse drawn by Nadia would almost leap out at you from the canvas.
Contrast this with the lifeless, two-dimensional, tadpole-like sketches drawn by most normal eight
or nine-year-olds - or even normal adults.
So we have another paradox. How can this retarded child produce a drawing that is so incredibly
beautiful? The answer, I maintain, is the principle of isolation.
In Nadia perhaps many or even most of her brain modules are damaged because of her autism, but
there is a spared island of cortical tissue in the right parietal. So her brain spontaneously
allocates all her attentional resources to the one module that's still functioning, her right
parietal. Now it turns out that the right parietal is the part of your brain that's concerned with
your sense of artistic proportion. We know this because when it's damaged in stroke, for example,
in an adult, you lose your artistic sense. You produce drawings that are often excessively detailed
but lack the vital essence of the picture you're trying to depict. You lose your sense of artistic
proportion. Conversely, since everything else is damaged in Nadia's brain she allocates all her
attention to this brain module - so she has a hyper-functioning art module in her brain. Hence the
beautiful renderings of horses and roosters.
Another example, equally striking. Dr Miller, University of California, has studied patients who
start developing rapidly progressing dementia in middle age, a form of dementia called the
fronto-temporal dementia, affecting frontal lobes and temporal lobes, but sparing the parietal
lobe. And guess what happens. These patients suddenly start producing the most amazingly beautiful
paintings and drawings - not all of them but some of them - even though they had never had any
artistic talent before the onset of their dementia. Again, it's the isolation principle at work.
With all other modules in the brain not working the patient develops a hyper-functioning right
parietal. There are even reports from Alan Snyder in Australia that you can temporarily paralyze
parts of the brain in normal volunteers - all of us less gifted people here. Imagine just zapping
bits of your brain and unleashing hidden talents. If that happens, it will truly be a brave new
world.
We don't have time to talk about all my other laws in detail. But I'll just mention the last law on
my list - and in many ways the most important, yet the most elusive: Visual Metaphor. You all know
what a metaphor is in literature as when you say it's the East and Juliet is the sun. But you can
do the same thing in visual art - both in Western art and in Indian art. For example, when you look
at the Chola bronze of the dancing Shiva or Nataraja with multiple arms you are not meant to take
the multiple arms literally or call it a multi-armed monstrosity like the Victorian art critic, Sir
George Birdwood, did. Funnily enough he didn't think that angels sprouting wings were monstrosities
- although I can tell you as a medical man you can have multiple arms, but wings on scapulae are
anatomically impossible!
The multiple arms are meant to symbolize multiple divine attributes of God and the ring of fire
that Nataraja dances in - indeed his dance itself - is a metaphor of the dance of the Cosmos and of
the cyclical nature of creation and destruction, an idea championed by the late Fred Hoyle. Most
great works or art - be it Western or Indian - are pregnant with metaphor and have many layers of
meaning.
Everyone knows that metaphors are important yet we have no idea why. Why not just say: "Juliet is
radiant and warm" instead of saying: "Juliet is the sun"? What is the neural basis for metaphor? We
don't know but I'll have a stab at this question next week in my Oxford lecture on synesthesia.
We could be at the dawning of a new age where specialisation becomes old-fashioned and a new 21st
century version of the Renaissance man is born.
Listen to the audio clip
Watch the video clip
With that I conclude my lecture on Neuro-aesthetics. Have we understood the neural basis of art? Of
course not. We have barely scratched the surface. But I hope the "laws of art" I've discussed might
give you some hints about the general form of a future theory of art.
The solution to the problem of aesthetics, I believe, lies in a more thorough understanding of the
connections between the 30 visual centres in your brain and the emotional limbic structures. And
once we have achieved a clear understanding of these connections, we will be closer to bridging the
huge gulf that separates C.P. Snow's two cultures - science on the one hand and Arts, philosophy
and humanities on the other.
We could be at the dawning of a new age where specialisation becomes old-fashioned and a new 21st
century version of the Renaissance man is born.
Sir Frederick
>http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/reith2003_lecture3_qanda.shtml
Ken Arnold: (from the Welcome Trust). What happens to your laws when you start thinking about
literature and music and dance?
Ramachandran: Let's take music. In Indian ragas, for example, there's a raga called the Darbari
Kandra, where you have this extremely sad raga, which is really melancholy.
the Darbari Kandra raga
Listen to the raga
And I think what you're doing there is taking the infant separation anxiety cry, which is quite
melancholy, and then amplifying it, doing what I call a Peak Shift. So some of these principles cut
across these modality boundaries. But let me say that with vision, we know all the intricate
mechanisms, the 30 areas. We know the detailed circuitry of these areas. We know a lot about how
these areas might have evolved. We know the laws of perception and you can start studying these
laws of aesthetics visually. With hearing, us primates are not intuitively auditory creatures - we
are highly visual creatures - and we know very little about the auditory regions of the brain, much
less than we know about vision. So it's simply a better place to put your money on - visual
aesthetics. But I think that some of these principles may indeed apply to other aspects of
aesthetics.
Jan Atkinson: Director of the Medical Research Council visual development unit, University College,
London. In development there's a puzzle, which is that newborns like schematic faces better than
scrambled images of faces. But what they really like is bulls-eyes and spirals. And this seems to
contravene your idea of a shift peak. Because I'm puzzled as to what the ecological value or the
evolutionary value of something like a spiral might be or a bulls-eye.
Ramachandran: On the contrary, what I'd argue is that there are some neurons which are picking up
those images -- and the bulls-eye for some reason is hyper-activating those neurons. Indeed it
would be very interesting to do preferential looking experiments in children where you show a
Picasso versus a normal face. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually prefers the Picasso. Now this
raises another question. If I am right about universal laws and principles, then why doesn't
everybody like a Picasso? There are these neurons firing away - AHA! - so why doesn't everybody
like a Picasso? The answer is - you're not going to like this - everybody does, but most people are
in denial about it. To put it differently, there may be a core-level visceral reaction, based on
the activity of these neurons, that in fact is universal. But the brain is not one monolithic
entity. There are so many layers kicking in and it's possible - even though the core, visceral
reaction to the Picasso is: "My God, What a face!" another part of your brain, the left hemisphere
kicks in and says: "She looks weird. Don't tell her she's beautiful". And that kicks in and forbids
you - or censors your responses. And much of your ability to appreciate new forms of art consists
not necessarily of developing new templates, so much as removing these layers of culture, these
encrustations imposed on you by society. And then you start appreciating at a more gut level that
style of art.
Jan Atkinson: Well I'll come back at you and we'll definitely do the experiment.
Ramachandran: OK.
John Race: There have been some experiments done recently, I think, in which a large number of
female faces have been collapsed into a single average face. And apparently this average face is
regarded is as more attractive than any of the individual faces, which seems to be another
contradiction of the Peak Shift principle.
Ramachandran: First of all I would say that if you average lots of faces, it looks more pretty than
any one face and partly, of course, if there's lots of distortions - somebody has a huge big wart
or a huge big nose - you're averaging these out and this explains why the regression to the mean
looks aesthetically pleasing. But I would maintain that if you take that average face and you
heighten the maleness or the femaleness in some quirky way - so I would maintain the most beautiful
male face or the most beautiful female face is not necessarily the average. I think they've just
done the experiment wrong. I think you get a reasonably good-looking face, which is average because
you avoid all the blemishes. But to make it especially attractive and evocative and beautiful, you
need to do something with it. And in fact if you see the most beautiful actors and actresses, there
is something a little bit more than just the average good-looking guy or good-looking girl.
David Lodge: (novelist and critic) I mainly thought about this issue in relation to literature,
rather than art. You can produce rules which allow you to identify literature. It doesn't mean that
everything in that category is good, is valuable. It seems to me you have to do the same for art.
In that case you have to give the criteria which would separate art from non-art. But within the
category of art you could have all kinds of different evaluations.
Ramachandran: Well let me give you a partial answer to that. Let's take kitsch art. Kitsch art has
a lot of these rules - grouping, and maybe even Peak Shift and maybe this and that. But instantly,
if you're a sophisticated art critic or a person who buys art in auctions, you know this is kitsch.
Now one cynical view would be what's kitsch for one person is high art for another. It's completely
arbitrary. Well I don't agree because you all know that you can mature from kitsch to genuine art,
but you can't slide backwards once you have. So the question then becomes a challenge for me -
well, what's the difference? Kitsch art employs the same principles so what's the difference
between kitsch and the genuine article? I would answer that what happens in kitsch is that you go
through the mannerisms of real art, superficially deploying these principles without really
understanding them. And if you go and look at some kitsch works of art, that's what happens. But it
doesn't quite grab you in the same way because you haven't done it properly. The same holds for
literature or for music or any of those things.
Sylvia King: (from Jubilee Arts in West Bromwich). I'm very excited about what you've said but also
a little bit disturbed because I work with people who think art's not for them. We work with people
from the Asian community, from the African-Caribbean community and from the white working-class
community. And actually - to me - I thought that what you were indicating, maybe the future is that
we could get rid of some of the barriers so that those diverse communities actually aren't
discriminated against because of their norms and how they see it. And certainly those working-class
communities and what they like and see as valuable and aesthetically pleasing - and all those
limbic bits in your brain get stimulated … between that, popular culture, high art and all the
rest, we might start seeing the spaces in between and find something quite interesting.
Ramachandran: Obviously, a lot of art is about snobbery and it's used as a status symbol - "I have
something unique". Those aspects, they're very important questions from a political, social point
of view. But it's not something that I have tried to get into. But going back to Indians and
Africans and other ethnic groups, I think that what I'm saying should, if anything, encourage them
to go back to their roots and say: "I don't want to have a Euro-centric view of art. Art history -
most of it - is about Picasso and Van Gough and Renaissance art. I should go back and look at our
art, which is several thousand years old. In fact it's claimed that Picasso drew a lot of his
inspiration from African art. So suddenly you can go back and draw inspiration from it and you
should be encouraged rather than discouraged.
Joe Holyoak: I'm an architect. Your 10% seems to be about a residue of atavism, if I understand it.
If we believe in human development, can we assume that 10% is going to decrease as time goes on? Or
conversely, in the past was it 15% or 20%? Is it fixed or is it dynamic?
Ramachandran: Well that's raising questions about the evolution of the human race and the future of
our brains and things like that. What I would say is I agree with your point that it's in a sense
an atavism, which is what I was saying about the gull chick and the three stripes and all of that.
A closely related question is: If it's universal, is it universal only among humans? What about
animals - do they have art? And you all know about elephants and chimpanzees producing works of
abstract art, which are sometimes sold to prominent art critics as works of art. But let me mention
Bower Birds. If you go to Bower Birds in New Guinea, they produce the most incredibly beautiful
bowers. It's often 20 or 30 times the size of the little nondescript-looking bachelor bird. And
principles like Grouping - they take all the berries that are red and put them together. And
Linearity - they have tidy rows of berries. They even bring in jewellery like little bits of
cigarette foil and then group them together. And they have elaborate archways into their bowers. So
some of these principles I'm talking about like Peak Shift and Grouping and things like that I
think cut across not just cultures, but across species barriers. I think you could take one of
those Bower Bird bowers and put it in a Madison Avenue art gallery and if you don't tell people,
somebody might buy it, paying a lot of money for it.
Nick Chater: (University of Warwick). It seems to me that you've described aesthetics very much
from the point of view of object recognition. But it seems a lot of appreciation of visual and
other aesthetic experiences is not really concerned with recognition, but with pattern. And if we
take the example of music that seems particularly clear - that although perhaps one aspect of a
particular Raga maybe viewed as similar to the cry of a mother. Or maybe some particular pattern on
a stick may be of interest to a seagull because it appears rather like the mother seagull,
presumably that's just not the general case. There must be all kinds of very general aspects of
perceptual organisation concerned with patterns which also drive aesthetic instincts.
Ramachandran: Believe it or not, much of perception, a lot of it has to do with segmenting the
world into objects before you proceed to say: What is it? And categorise it and identify it and so
on and so forth. We don't realise this because we live in a world where you can easily see objects.
But up there in the tree tops when you're evolving, recognition, delineating objects, finding out
which pieces belong together to constitute one object, paying attention to that and then reacting
to it appropriately, evolutionarily is an extremely important aspect of perception, in fact that's
what most of perception is about.
Can I make one other point? I just thought of something. Going back to the point about objectness,
you could say… Well let's take somebody like Monet or Van Gough where the emphasis is not on
objectness but on colour. Well guess what? What I'm calling Peak Shift or Ultra-normal - a long
stick with the three stripes - that's about objects and about spatial vision. But you could play
the same trick in other domains. For example we know there are 30 areas in the brain, there are
areas just concerned with colour alone. They don't care about form or shape, especially in us
primates. And what tends to happen is in that map of the brain, you bring different regions of the
visual image which have the same colour together in one region of the map. In other words it's an
abstract map of colour space, not literal space, but of colour space in your brain. So you could
produce peak shifts or caricatures or ultra-normal stimuli not in the form or object domain, but in
the colour space or colour domain. And then you get heightened water lily colours, heightened
sunflower colours which are absurdly exaggerated colours deliberately underemphasising form or
shape. And that harks back to the isolation principle I was talking about - to heighten your
experience of the intense water lily colour or the sunflower colour. So what I'm saying is some
works of art do tap into other things besides objects, such as colour or sometimes movement, as in
kinetic art.
Professor Richard Gregory: (Rama's teacher). Do you think one could put your laws into a computer
and have a computer at least draw cartoons, particularly with your Peak Shift idea?
Ramachandran: Well that's a good idea and I think what's going to happen is that the better your
understanding of the laws and the more you can specify them in a sequence of steps in the form of
algorithms, and you can put them into a computer, you'll produce an image that's certainly more
aesthetically pleasing than a random scribble. Now whether it would be a great work of art, simply
because you've deployed these laws, or simply kitsch, that's the tricky bit. How do you make it
non-kitsch and real, a work of genius? We haven't got there yet.
Sue Lawley: Do you think you can, Richard?
Richard Gregory: Well I think you could test your laws in a way and show how much extra is needed,
so it might be an interesting thing to try out. Maybe you could define kitsch by the computer's
failure.
Aaron Sloman: (philosopher in the school of computer science, University of Birmingham). There's an
artist called Harold Cohen, who has produced a computer programme, which shares its first name with
me - Aaron. And if you go to Google and type "Harold Cohen Aaron" you can get a link to a version
of this programme where you can click and it will paint you a picture. Or you can buy it. Its
pictures are amazing. They really sell. I know people who have framed large versions of them on
their walls. How it does it, he doesn't really explain except that it does it something like the
way he would do it if he were painting them.
Ramachandran: That's a good conclusion!
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcn...@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
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Phrases of the week :
As SETI pioneer Carl Sagan noted in his preface to a book on the interstellar recordings borne by
the Voyager spacecraft, "For those who have done something they consider worthwhile, communication
to the future is an almost irresistible temptation, and it has been attempted in virtually every
human culture. In the best of cases, it is an optimistic and far-seeing act; it expresses great
hope about the future; it time-binds the human community; it gives us a perspective on the
significance of our own actions at this moment in the long historical journey of our species."
"You tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."
--Homer J. Simpson
"Trying is the first step towards failure."--Homer J. Simpson
:-))))Snort!) AHOWR AHOWR!
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