The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

The third experimental approach to aesthetics would be to record from cells along the visual pathways in primates and compare their responses to art versus any old picture. The advantage of recording from single cells is that it may eventually allow a more fine-grained analysis of the neurology of aesthetics than what could be achieved with GSR alone. We know that there are cells in a region called the fusiform gyrus that respond mainly to specific familiar faces. You have brain cells that fire in response to a picture of your mother, your boss, Bill Clinton, or Madonna. I predict that a “boss cell” in this face recognition region should show an even bigger response to a caricature of your boss than to an authentic, undistorted face of your boss (and perhaps an even smaller response to a plain-looking countercaricature). I first suggested this in a paper I wrote with Bill Hirstein in the mid-1990s. The experiment has now been done on monkeys by researchers at Harvard and MIT, and sure enough the caricatures hyperactivate the face cells as expected. Their results provide grounds for optimism that some of the other laws of aesthetics I have proposed may also turn out to be true.

THERE IS A widespread fear among scholars in the humanities and arts that science may someday take over their discipline and deprive them of employment, a syndrome I have dubbed “neuron envy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Our appreciation of Shakespeare is not diminished by the existence of a universal grammar or Chomskian deep structure underlying all languages. Nor should the diamond you are about to give your lover lose its radiance or romance if you tell her that it is made of carbon and was forged in the bowels of Earth when the solar system was born. In fact, the diamond’s appeal should be enhanced! Similarly, our conviction that great art can be divinely inspired and may have spiritual significance, or that it transcends not only realism but reality itself, should not stop us from looking for those elemental forces in the brain that govern our aesthetic impulses.

CHAPTER 8

  The Artful Brain: Universal Laws

Art is the accomplishment of our desire to find ourselves among the phenomena of the external world.

—RICHARD WAGNER

BEFORE MOVING ON TO THE NEXT SEVEN LAWS, I WANT TO CLARIFY what I mean by “universal.” To say that the wiring in your visual centers embodies universal laws does not negate the critical role of culture and experience in shaping your brain and mind. Many cognitive faculties that are fundamental to your human way of life are only partly specified by your genes. Nature and nurture interact. Genes wire up your brain’s emotional and cortical circuits to a certain extent and then leave it to faith that the environment will shape your brain the rest of the way, producing you, the individual. In this respect the human brain is absolutely unique—as symbiotic with culture as a hermit crab is with its shell. While the laws are hardwired, the content is learned.

Consider face recognition. While your ability to learn faces is innate, you are not born knowing your mother’s face or the mail carrier’s face. Your specialized face cells learn to recognize faces through exposure to the people you encounter.

Once face knowledge is acquired, the circuitry may spontaneously respond more effectively to caricatures or Cubist portraits Once your brain learns about other classes of objects or shapes—bodies, animals, automobiles, and such—your innate circuitry may spontaneously display the peak-shift principle or respond to bizarre ultranormal stimuli analogous to the stick with stripes. Because this ability emerges in all human brains that develop normally, we are safe in calling it universal.

Contrast

It is hard to imagine a painting or sketch without contrast. Even the simplest doodle requires contrasting brightness between the black line and white background. White paint on a white canvas could hardly be called art (although in the 1990s the purchase of an all-white painting figured in Yasmina Reza’s hilarious award-winning play “Art,” poking fun at how easily people are influenced by art critics).

In scientific parlance, contrast is a relatively sudden change in luminance, color, or some other property between two spatially contiguous homogeneous regions. We can speak of luminance contrast, color contrast, texture contrast, or even depth contrast. The bigger the difference between the two regions, the higher the contrast.

Contrast is important in art or design; in a sense it’s a minimum requirement. It creates edges and boundaries as well as figures against background. With zero contrast you see nothing at all. Too little contrast and a design can be bland. And too much contrast can be confusing.