Consider the flightless fluffs of brown otherwise known as herring gull chicks. Since they're entirely dependent on their mothers for food, they're born with a powerful instinct. Whenever they see a bird beak, they frantically peck at it, begging for their favorite food: a regurgitated meal.
But this reflex can be manipulated. Expose the chicks to a fake beak—say, a wooden stick with a red dot that looks like the one on the end of an adult herring gull's beak—and they peck vigorously at that, too. Should the chicks see a wood stick with three red dots, they peck even faster. Abstracting and exaggerating the salient characteristics of a mother gull's beak strengthens the response. The phenomenon is known as the "peak-shift effect," since a peak pecking response comes from a shifted stimulus. In it lies one of the core principles of visual art.
The Truth in the Lie
In 1906, Pablo Picasso was determined to reinvent the portrait and push the boundaries of realism, and one of his early subjects was Gertrude Stein. After months in his Paris studio, carefully reworking the paint on the canvas, Picasso still wasn't satisfied. He didn't finish the painting until after a trip to Spain.
What Picasso saw there that affected him so deeply has been debated—the ancient Iberian art, the weathered faces of Spanish peasants—but his style changed forever. When he returned to Paris, he gave Stein the head of a primitive mask. The perspective was flattened and her face became a series of dramatic angles. Picasso had intentionally misrepresented various aspects of her appearance, turning the portrait into an early work of cubist caricature.
Despite the artistic license, the painting is still recognizable as Stein. Picasso took her most distinctive features—those heavy, lidded eyes and long, aquiline nose—and exaggerated them. Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."
What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. 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 sly connection between the instincts of baby gulls and abstract art is the work of V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. Ramachandran believes the peak-shift effect explains a wide variety of art, from abstract expressionist paintings to ancient religious sculptures like a 12th-century Indian sculpture of the goddess Parvathi with exaggerated feminine features. These creations are all examples of the "deliberate hyperbole" that defines the artistic process, says Ramachandran.
In this sense, the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain. As Ramachandran puts it, "If herring gulls had an art gallery, 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 they are mesmerized by it. That's all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks."
Ramachandran is a leader in neuroaesthetics, a new scientific field that uses the tools of modern neuroscience, like brain imaging, to unravel the mysteries of art. While much of this research focuses on modern art—it's easier to study visual "hyperbole" in a Picasso than a Vermeer—the scientists believe their findings apply to all artists, even so-called realists. "A Martian who came to earth would be very curious about why all these people go to museums and look at 2D representations," Ramachandran says. "Why does art work? That's the question we're trying to answer."
Reverse-Engineering the Mind
At first glance, the premise of neuroaesthetics seems bizarre: Scientists are using artists to learn about the mind. They're looking for objective facts in the most subjective of places, using paintings and sculptures as sources of experimental data. Sometimes, it seems as if the scientists are simply trying to catch up with insights long ago "discovered" by artists.
"The artist is, in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools," observes Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London and director of the Institute of Neuroesthetics. Picasso had an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of vision—which he expressed in his paintings. Likewise, the power of a Rembrandt self-portrait is not an accident: The Old Masters knew how to captivate the eye and the mind, which is why we still gaze at their canvases in museums. Scientists can learn about the mind by reverse-engineering art.
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