Neuroaesthetics
An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific objectivity to
the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of many masterpieces.
The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to stimulate the brain's amygdala,
for instance. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings, that finding might
explain why many people find these pieces so moving.
Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from
Mondrian's geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock's seemingly haphazard
arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to like such
works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an inclination to follow the
crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching a shape to its
rotated image, for example, people often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see
others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that this mentality would have even more
impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.
Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by
asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous abstract
artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to judge which they
preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many were labelled
incorrectly -volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's messy brushstrokes
when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of trials, volunteers
generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they believed it was by an
animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense the artist's vision in paintings, even if
they can't explain why.
Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works that are
neither entirely abstract nor clearly representational. In one study, Pepperell and
his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how powerful they considered an artwork to
be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. The longer they took to answer
these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny, and the greater their
neural activity. It would seem that the brain sees these images as puzzles, and the harder
it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding is the moment of recognition.
And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of
horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour? Mondrian's works are deceptively
simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously composed, and that
simpiy rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. With the originals,
volunteers'eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the image, but with the altered
versions they would flit across a piece more rapidly. As a result, the volunteers
considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they later rated the work.
In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to compare
original paintings with ones which he had altered by moving objects around within the
frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a Van Gogh
still life or an abstract by Miro. Vartanian also found that changing the composition of
the paintings reduced activation in those brain areas linked with meaning and
interpretation.
In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analysed the visual
intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists use a key
level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but too much results
in a kind of 'perceptual overload', according to Forsythe. What's more, appealing pieces
both abstract and representational, show signs of 'fractals' - repeated motifs recurring in
different scales, fractals are common throughout nature, for example in the shapes of
mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is possible that our visual system, which
evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier to process such patterns.
It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a
handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation. This has led
some to wonder whether Pollock's works feel so dynamic because the brain reconstructs
the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be down to our brain's 'mirror
neurons', which are known to mimic others' actions. The hypothesis will need to be
thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case that we could use neuroaesthetic
studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork. While the fashions of the
time might shape what is currently popular, works that are best adapted to our visual
system may be the most likely to linger once the trends of previous generations have been
forgotten.
It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably only a
taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art appreciation to a set
of scientific laws. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of the style of a particular
artist, their place in history and the artistic environment of their time. Abstract art offers
both a challenge and the freedom to play with different interpretations. In some ways, it's
not so different to science, where we are constantly looking for systems and decoding
meaning so that we can view and appreciate the world in a new way.
