Neuroesthetics
Explore the burgeoning field of neuroesthetics
There’s something provocative happening in the field of Neuroscience, and it involves the uncovering of secrets kept for centuries by the world’s preeminent artists.
These secrets involve the most complex, and the most powerful entity in existence: the human brain. It appears that artists have known some basic truths about this enigmatic organ long before scientists – or anyone else. Yet it took until 2002 for scientists to formalize a field of study that capitalizes on these truths.
Neuroesthetics is the empirical study of the underlying neural pathways and brain networks that contribute to the states of mind that enable creations of art. But instead of starting with the brain to understand how brain anatomy and function give rise to the creative process, scientists begin with groundbreaking, domain changing, famous works of art.
In an interview with Psychology Today, science writer Jonah Lehrer calls neuroesthetics a type of “reverse-engineering. ”
“There’s a reason we still look at Mark Rothko. There’s a reason we look at Rembrandt. By reverse-engineering you can not only learn something interesting about art but also learn something interesting about the brain,” Lehrer said.
Lehrer became interested in the intersection of science and art while working in the neuroscience lab at Columbia University, and reading Proust. While working with a post-doctorate student who was studying the chemistry of memory, he was reading Proust’s novels during all his free time of waiting for experiments to finish.
While reading the first volume in Proust’s epic seven-volume work, “Remembrance of Things Past,” (or more accurately translated from French as “In Search of Lost Time”) Lehrer had an insight he couldn’t ignore. Proust, publishing his seminal work in 1913, had already deciphered how human memory works.
In other words, Proust had presupposed neuroscience’s future work on memory that would start almost 70 to 90 years later. For instance, Proust details a character’s journey of tasting and smelling certain foods to remembrances of his childhood. At the time Proust wrote his story, scientists did not know how the senses in the brain functioned. Yet here is a passage from Proust’s story where he deeply intuits the brain’s anatomy:
“But when from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
Almost a century later, neuroscientists now know that the neural pathways of smell and taste connect directly to the hippocampus – which happens to be the area of the brain that regulates long-term memory.( see What is Memory?). Lehrer writes in his book “Proust Was A Neuroscientist,” that the thalamus processes the other senses of sight, touch, and hearing. These senses, according to Lehrer, are “much less efficient at summoning up our past.”
Lehrer, deciding he loved science but hated working as a scientist, wrote of other artists in “Proust Was A Neuroscientist,” showing how they intuited other essential brain processes long before scientists empirically solved these questions. These artists included Walt Whitman, Paul Cezanne, Virginia Wolff, and Igor Stravinsky.
Lehrer told Natasha Mitchell, science journalist and host of the blog “All In The Mind,” that while reading Virginia Woolf ‘s book “Mrs. Dalloway” he saw again, something occurring between the questions that neuroscientists sought answers to, and the same questions that writers investigated.
“These people weren't just creating art to tell stories, to entertain their audience, they really wanted to express truth, and for them expressing truth was a 'flight into the mind' as Woolf put it. You know, she defined the task of the novelist as studying the mind, capturing consciousness,” Lehrer said.
Finding a new field
Ironically, around the same time that Lehrer decided to write about the cross section of science and the arts, the new field of Neuroesthetics was gaining traction. Attracting neuroscientists, psychologists, artists and art historians, the field is a true interdisciplinary combination of interests, educational backgrounds, and bodies of knowledge.
At first mention, the combination of an objective field such as science with the most subjective of all fields – art – raises serious doubts. Especially since most of the neuroesthetic research in the visual arts since the early 2000s has focused on abstract art.
Simply bring up the name of “Picasso” to a group of individuals, and you’ll get many, diverse, and opposing opinions. Perhaps more popular today than 40 or 50 years ago, Picasso still stirs controversy.
Other abstract artists as well, especially those who don’t use any realistic images or hints of organic forms or shapes elicit extreme – sometimes emotional - opinions on what art is, and what art isn’t.
Yet according to neuroscientists, Picasso intuited something about the brain that they now confirm empirically: people identify caricatures of people faster and more accurately than realistic pictures. Picasso’s early portraits where he started on his journey toward Cubism especially signal his unusual understanding of how the brain processes faces.
Picasso began his experimentation with distorting portraits as he painted his friend Gertrude Stein. In 1905, he spent many months in his Paris studio reworking Stein’s image, trying to move beyond the standard, realistic principles of capturing a face. He was experimenting with what artists now call representational art.
He became dissatisfied, and put the painting aside to travel to Spain where many believe he spent hours studying the masks and mythic images of ancient Iberian art.
He came back to Paris with a style of painting that changed his art – and much of the world’s opinions on art – forever. When he returned, he reworked Stein’s face again. The final image, taking more than 90 sittings, portrays a contorted body, a flattened face with distinct angles, severely misshaped, dark-lined eyes, and hair that appears artificially placed rather than organically growing.
Yet for those who knew Stein, and for Stein herself, this intensely distorted image, appearing almost illusory, depicts her more accurately than any photographic type of reproduction. It conveys her “essence,” many friends noted.
As unlikely as it seems, the reason for viewers perceiving their friend’s resemblance more acutely than a realistic rendering has to do with the brain’s neuroprocessing.
Through neuroimaging devices such as functional magnetic resonance imaging f(MRI), neuroscientists have identified a part of the brain that works solely on face identification called the fusiform gyrus. This structure lights up exclusively during an f(MRI) when individuals are identifying faces rather than nonface objects. (see Neuroimaging.)
And, scientists have discovered, this area lights up more readily and quickly when individuals view caricatures or distorted images of people. Scientists theorize that because caricatures exaggerate features of individuals that highly differentiate them from others, the fusiform gyrus easily identifies these individuals. These exaggerations become visual stimuli.
One of the leading experts in neuroesthetics, V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, has written on the effects Picasso’s art, and the connection to how the human brain processes imagery.
In the journal article, “The Science of Art,” Ramachandran along with philosopher William Hirstein of Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois, investigate the question of how art so aptly captures the essence of something in order to evoke a direct emotional response.
They state in the article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that the answer to this question happens to also provide the answer to “what art actually is.”
“Indeed, as we shall see, what the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object,” the article states.
The researchers note that it’s not necessarily a coincidence that abstract art identifies the ‘essential features’ of an image. They theorize that this exaggeration of pronounced features centers on a scientific principle called the “peak shift effect.”
The Peak-Shift Effect
Discovered about the middle of the 20th century by Oxford scientist Niko Tinbergen, the peak-shift effect shows that the brain’s hardwiring focuses on parts of objects, discarding redundant parts. He made this discovery by studying seagulls and observing how baby chicks frantically tap the red-striped beak of their mothers.
Tapping results in a meal - the regurgitated meal from the mother. Tinbergen soon saw that he could trigger this frantic tapping without any beak at all. Simply substitute the real beak with a wooden stick painted with a red stripe, and the chicks pecked at the stick as well. If he painted three stripes on the stick, the chicks would go even crazier, tapping harder and faster.
In other words, by abstracting and exaggerating the main characteristic of a mother gull's beak, scientists can strengthen the baby chicks’ responses. They call this a peak-shift effect because they have “shifted” the stimulus.
Neuroscientists now believe that this correlates with how the human brain, specifically the fusiform gyrus, responds so well to caricatures or exaggerated features on faces.
They also believe that this principle helps explain why people will stand in awe in front of visual artworks, especially abstract art, attracted by the emotional essence of the visual image before them.
What about abstract beyond recognition?
Ramachandran and Hirstein note in their research that many object to their hypothesis because many works of abstract art –including Picasso’s resulting Cubism - are unrecognizable. The researchers point again to Tinbergen’s “super stimulus” of three red stripes on a brown stick. He was able to get the chicks to respond more remarkably by replicating a stimulus, and even producing a better one, or a “super” stimulus. Similar to a Picasso painting hanging in an art gallery, the stick became the seagulls’ Picasso.
“Likewise, it is possible that some types of art such as cubism are activating brain mechanisms in such a way as to tap into or even caricature certain innate form primitives which we do not yet fully understand,” the authors note.
Also, the authors cite several physiologists who note that primate brains also have specialized mechanisms like those of faces and caricatures for other visual stimuli such as color, depth, and motion. Perhaps artists use a peak-shift effect along color and motion dimensions as well as the “form” dimension.
Studying neuroesthetics
This article discussed only two forms of art, fiction writing and painting. However, neuroesthetic researchers also investigate significant musical compositions as well to understand how hearing operates within the brain’s anatomy.
Since the field is so new, numerous areas of research are open to students fascinated with the intersection of art and science. And there are several paths open to students with psychology backgrounds to study and conduct research in this area.
Contact psychology schools for more information on degrees in neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the psychology of creativity. To conduct research and teach, usually a PhD (see PhD programs in Psychology) is required. However, some universities and research organizations hire research assistants with master’s degrees (see Master's in Psychology).
The Mona Lisa
Although abstract art is a fascinating treasure trove of information for those in the field of Neuroesthetics, the field doesn’t only study modern art. Paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Goya will stop museum goers in their tracks, still capturing the attention of viewers hundreds of years after their completion. Why are we so captivated by masterpieces? In other words, why do our minds become transfixed before certain visual simuli?
One of the most famous of all paintings, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the Mona Lisa, has had art historians, critics, and painters intrigued for centuries. They have studied her enigmatic expression, questioning it, debating it, wishing it would speak the thoughts of the mind behind its creation.
Now neuroscientists are entering the debate. Is she smiling? Frowning? Smirking? Perplexed? What is it about her expression that leaves us questioning what’s going on behind those slightly puffy, probing, and confident eyes.
Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard and author of Vision and Art, has a theory. She states that da Vinci harnesses the structure of the retina to drive viewers into this state of perplexity.
This scientist believes that how we use our retinas to look at Mona Lisa’s face will determine how we perceive the particular emotion behind it.
For example, a first glance at the painting draws our eyes to her eyes, which means we observe her mouth using peripheral vision. When using peripheral vision, our retinas focus on the shadows by her cheekbones, causing her lips to appear curved or smiling.
But if we look instead immediately to her mouth, our retinas ignore her cheekbone shadows, and it looks as if she’s rather expressionless.
The juxtaposition between the expressionless perception and the smiling perception has kept viewers debating for 500 years, this neuroscientist told the New York Times.
For Livingstone, the mystery is solved. It’s da Vinci’s trick. Now to prove it to the rest of the world.