Study of Art Gives Insight Into Brain's Structure
Tupac Chopra
Study of Art Gives Insight Into Brain's Structure
By Amy Kane
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Understanding what makes a work of art
beautiful might
be an important clue into the workings of the human brain, a scientist
reported
on Thursday.
In an article in the latest issue of the journal Science, Semir Zeki
proposed a
new field of science -- neuroesthetics -- which would study the
relationship
between art and the brain.
``Visual art obeys the laws of the visual brain, and thus reveals
these laws to
us,'' he wrote.
Artists have a way of tapping into the parts of the brain that are
stimulated
by art, said Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at University College
London.
Full text:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010705/sc/science_brain_dc_1.html
Joe Durnavich
>In an article in the latest issue of the journal Science, Semir Zeki
>proposed a new field of science -- neuroesthetics -- which would study the
>relationship between art and the brain.
>
>Full text:
>http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010705/sc/science_brain_dc_1.html
Thanks. That's an interesting article.
The topic of representations in perception has been popping up lately
and that article contains a good example of how people insist on
thinking that perception is a process of building up a representation
of the world inside us. From the article:
"Scientists are just beginning to use art to uncover
how the brain pieces together images into a coherent
picture."
But a few paragraphs later, we find out that the brain actually takes
the image apart, so to speak, in different regions of the brain, and,
surprisingly, at different times:
"Zeki's research now concentrates on how and when the
various regions of the visual brain are triggered."
"Scientists once thought that parts of the visual brain
react simultaneously, but Zeki's current research is
showing that some areas respond faster to stimuli than
others. V4, which responds to color, reacts faster than
V5, the motion center, Zeki said."
--
Joe Durnavich
Darcy
title "Why we all like Picasso." Subtitle: It's all about brain
wiring: Painters, composers, poets find new neural pathways to beauty.
This one discusses Zeki's work as well as that of another
neurologist.
Excerpt:
A Californian neurologist has posed some startling answers to these
questions, such as his claim that everyone likes Picasso and that
seagulls appreciate abstract art. Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of
the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California San
Diego has also identified eight essential rules for the perception of
art.
[snip]
Abstract art, like Picasso's portraits, does not seem to resemble
anything real either, and is "held up to be the ultimate example of
the ineffable," Ramachandran says. But it elicits our esthetic
response more strongly than even the most life-like photographs for
precisely the same reason that seagulls respond to sticks. We are
wired for it.
Certain cells in an area of the brain called the fusiform gyrus
respond exclusively to facial images, Ramachandran says, but each cell
responds only to one particular perspective on the face.
At a higher level of processing, so-called master cells receive input
from all the lower-level cells and thus respond to all perspectives on
a face. These master cells ignore perspective, which is exactly what
Picasso did with his anatomically impossible portraits.
Picasso's art "liberates you from the tyranny of one particular
viewpoint, and gives you all the views in one image, thereby
hyperactivating the neuron I call the master face cell," Ramachandran
says.
Picasso goes straight to your head, it seems. A perplexing corollary
to this theory is that everyone likes Picasso, although not everyone
knows it. And what's more, brain imaging techniques can prove that
people like it.
Ramachandran says that judgments of dislike can arise when the
stimulating visual information we receive from a Picasso is fed to the
logical left brain. Logic can overpower the brute neuronal
stimulation, and result in a dismissal of the art as frivolous, or
impossible, or just silly.
"There's a sort of bootstrapping going on," Ramachandran said, "with
messages going back and forth between the pleasure centres and the
visual centres. There is no physical evidence yet for that, but we
know the connections exist"
It has long been suspected that Van Gogh's temporal lobe epilepsy
contributed to his artistic genius by fostering this communication,
and Ramachandran says this speculation is supported by many patients
he has met in neurological clinics. Patients have become artistically
gifted in mid-life once they started having seizures, which may have
helped them link seemingly unrelated things, he says. This
meta-phorical linkage is fundamental to artistic expression.
Another of Ramachandran's eight laws, isolation, speaks to the maxim
that 'less is more in art'. Sketches of nudes, for example, are often
more esthetically pleasing than nude photos because the brain has
limited attention, and needs to prioritize those things that get
attention. The artist who sketches nudes is capitalizing on the
genetic fact that the shape of a nude attracts a mate, not the
cluttering noise of skin texture, colour and shadow. Ramachandra says
the artist is revealing the rasa -- a Sanskrit word that loosely
translates as "the essence of an esthetic experience" -- of the nude,
which strikes the brain directly.
Zeki says the brain has discrete centres for form, motion and colour,
and that artists have capitalized on this by stimulating each centre
on its own, with monochromatic designs to hit the form centre, or
kinetic art that de-emphasizes form and colour to hit the motion
centre.
The funny thing is that these artists didn't know why their art was
successful, and it took a neurologist to tell them.
Ramachandran is cautious about the conclusions that may be drawn from
his studies of art, and their implications for the spiritual and
transcendental nature of artistic expression.
He says that despite his reductionist explanation of art, his
discoveries do not explain it away, in the same way that a chemical
explanation of taste and digestion does not explain away a delicious
meal.
Zeki claims that neuroesthetics will reveal the importance of art, by
showing it to be an extension of the visual system, which exists to
increase our knowledge of the world.
It is for this reason, Zeki says, that the philosophers who battled
longest with problems of epistemology, like Plato and Kant, also
devoted much of their time to the study of art.
Furthermore, art allows a safe outlet for all that is evil and sad
about humanity, and gives fictional expression to urges that would
otherwise be destructive.
"Art renders the destructive, isolating, and individualizing effects
of genetic variability safe in its pages, canvasses, and scores," he
says.
A conference next year in California will bring together philosophers
and scientists to discuss neuroesthetics.
Full text: http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20010706/
610887.html