I’ve got a feature article in the latest Psychology Today on neuroaesthetics, the ambitious attempt to interpret art through the prism of neuroscience. Here’s the beginning of the article:
Consider the flightless fluffs of brown otherwise known as herring gull chicks. When they’re first born, these baby birds are entirely dependent on their mother for food. As a result, the chicks are born with a very powerful instinct: Whenever they see a bird beak, they frantically peck at it, begging for their favorite food: a regurgitated meal.
What’s interesting is that this reflex can be manipulated. When the chicks are exposed to anything that remotely resembles a bird beak–say, a wooden stick with a red dot on the end that looks like the red dot on the end of an adult herring gull’s beak–they peck vigorously at the fake beak. And when the chicks see a wood stick with three red dots, they peck even faster. The same thing happens when they’re exposed to a long and narrow yellow rectangle. Even though the fake beaks look nothing like real seagull beaks, they elicit a stronger response from the chicks, a phenomenon known as the “peak-shift effect”.
In the instinctive behavior of baby birds lies one of the core principles of visual art–a principle that can explain everything from ancient religious sculptures to abstract expressionist paintings.
Look at an early work by Pablo Picasso: his 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein. At the time, Picasso was determined to reinvent the portrait, to push the boundaries of realism. So he spent months in his Paris studio, studying Stein and carefully reworking the paint on the canvas. After months of staring at Stein’s face, Picasso still wasn’t satisfied. In fact, he didn’t finish the painting until after a trip to Spain. What shifted his perspective has been debated–whether it was the ancient Iberian art or the weathered faces of Spanish peasants–but his style changed forever. When he returned to Paris, Picasso gave Stein the head of a primitive mask. The perspective was flattened and her face became a series of dramatic angles. Picasso had intentionally exaggerated various aspects of her appearance, turning the portrait into an early work of cubist caricature.
Despite the artistic license, the painting is still immediately recognizable as Stein. The portrait calls attention to its own abstraction, but we still know exactly who we’re looking at. Picasso took Stein’s most distinctive features⎯those heavy, lidded eyes and long, aquiline nose ⎯and exaggerated them. He found a way to intensify reality through careful distortion. As Picasso put it, “Art is the lie that reveals the truth.”
What’s surprising about such distortions is that they often make it easier for us to decipher what it is we’re looking at–particularly when they’re done by a master of their craft. Studies show we’re able to recognize visual parodies of people⎯like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon⎯faster than we’re able to recognize an actual photograph of Nixon. Brain imaging experiments demonstrate that the fusiform gyrus, an area involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, as the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. (In the case of Nixon, cartoonists tend to exaggerate his ski-slope of a nose.) In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a “super-stimulus.”
The peculiar connection between baby herring gulls and abstract art has been made most pointedly by V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD. Ramachandran argues that the peak-shift effect explains a wide-variety of art, from the paintings of Picasso to a twelfth century Indian sculpture of the goddess Parvathi, which is a bronze figure with exaggerated feminine features. According to Ramachandran, these creations are all examples of the “deliberate hyperbole” that defines the artistic process. In this sense, the job of an artist is to take the mundane forms of reality⎯it doesn’t matter if it’s a facial expression or a bowl of fruit⎯and make those forms irresistibly interesting to the human brain. “If herring gulls had an art gallery,” Ramachandran notes, “they would hang a long stick with three red strips on the wall; they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why⎯why they are mesmerized by this thing even though it doesn’t resemble anything. That’s all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks.”
While I appreciate the consilient spirit of neuroaesthetics – it’s a genuine attempt to form connections between art and science – I think it’s very important to note that neuroaesthetic theories are merely another form of aesthetics, and not the definitive version. One phrase that’s essential to avoid in discussions of the field is the reductionist cliche that something is “nothing but” [insert neural phenomenon here]. So a Mark Rothko painting might be nothing but perplexed neurons in the V4 area of the visual cortex, or abstract art might be nothing but the peak shift effect. That, I think, is reckless hyperbole. The beauty of art is that it needs to be explained at multiple levels, from the action potential of retinal photoreceptors to the cultural shifts of 19th century France. Each of these descriptions is valid and necessary. There is no privileged kind of discourse when it comes to understanding why we stare at Pollock’s colorful drips of paint, or Cezanne’s mostly empty watercolors. What intrigues me about neuroaesthetics is that it’s another (and mostly novel) way to understand art.* But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
*As Clifford Geertz might have put it, neuroaesthetics makes our descriptions of art thicker.