Science, Trying to Pick Our Brains About Art

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
BERKELEY, Calif.

Does a Rembrandt portrait or a van Gogh still life press some special buttons in every human being's brain? Will a red painting speak to us in ways a blue one never could? Are we wired in ways that make every one of us enjoy a smiling bust and shiver at a frowning one?

And if our brains determine how art works on us, what does that tell us about art, or us -- could studying the way we're wired determine crisply that the "Mona Lisa" is truly great, or do we need some history to tell us how a complex painting speaks, or not, to all its different viewers?

The Third International Conference on Neuroesthetics, subtitled "Emotions in Art and the Brain," was held earlier this month at the Berkeley Art Museum and tried to get a start at least on answering such questions. It was a showcase for the progress that's been made in figuring out what goes on in the brain when art is seen or made. The fundamental premise of the field, stated by several of the invited speakers, is that every time something out there in the world makes us feel a certain way, it's because some particular bits of our brains are being tickled by it. A close look at a brain (the "neuro" part of the discipline) as it gets lit up by art (the "aesthetics" part) should give us insight into the links that exist between the two.

For instance, if you stick people into a machine that does functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI -- a brain scan, in layman's terms) and then show them paintings they find beautiful, you can see certain characteristic bits of their brains going wild with delight -- or so suggests the recent research of Semir Zeki, an eminent neuroscientist at University College London who's recently also become a leader in neuroaesthetics. The brain shows a slightly different response to ugliness, including stirring up motor centers that also buzz when someone's angry.

Neuroaestheticians such as Zeki imagine that, over time, these kinds of studies will become more and more precise: They hope to get ever-finer detail about what happens in the brain in an ever-growing range of aesthetic situations.

Ray Dolan, another well-known brain scientist from University College London, wants neuroscience to shed light on how emotion works. And since art has been defined as the "creation of forms that represent feelings," he believes that understanding how the brain constructs our feelings should shed new light on aesthetics, too.

Dolan's research indicates, for instance, that whenever we see a picture of an expressive face -- which he describes as the "royal road to understanding emotion" -- particular emotion centers in our brain light up. And this happens even when we see a face so briefly, or in such an offhand way, that we don't pay attention to the expression that it shows, or even know we've taken it in at all.

It's no wonder that expressive portraits have worked so well as art: They get our brains going whether we want them to or not. You can pretend to care only about the lighting or the brushwork in a striking face by Rembrandt, say, but your attention to the picture, even your memory of it, is probably being tweaked by the thrill it's sending through the parts of your brain that register feelings.

Dolan's work suggests that emotion affects other brain processes, such as memory and attention, that we rely on when we think we're being rational. He gives people a trivial task, such as matching pairs of photos, and at the same time lets them barely glimpse a picture of a face out of the corner of an eye. And he finds that their matching slows down more if the face shows strong expression than if it's bland -- even though his subjects hardly know they've seen it. Emotion, that is, is so important to us that it gets in the way even when it barely registers.

But if brain damage shuts down someone's amygdala, where scans show some of this unconscious emotional activity getting sorted out, Dolan doesn't find this kind of slowing. How and how well our brains work, that is, subtly affects the way we function in the world -- including, presumably, the way we come to grips with pictures. (Berkeley psychologist Arthur Shimamura presented cases of brain damage that changed people's attitudes to making art.)

Or give people a list of banal words in which a single one sparks unconscious emotion, and Dolan has found that they remember that word better than the others -- and tend to forget the one that comes immediately before it. The increased attention that emotional events command comes at the cost, says Dolan, of a kind of amnesia for less-striking events that float around them. (Damage the amygdala, however, and once again the effect recedes.)

You could imagine that a great portraitist's attempt to balance and direct our attention around the surface of a picture might take such phenomena into account, at least intuitively: Incidental stuff in the background that the artist wants us to notice and remember might have to be especially pumped up, if it's to compete with the attention-getting, amnesia-causing effects of an emoting sitter's face.

Other neuroaestheticians, such as Rosa-Aurora Chavez of Mexico's Ramon de la Fuente National Institute of Psychiatry, are looking at the creative act from the point of view of those who participate in it. Her team combined brain scans with survey-style tests that are sometimes used to measure human creativity and found that the creative types who did well on the tests also had trademark patterns of brain activity. In the vocabulary of neuroaesthetics, they had "significantly higher activation in right and left cerebellum and in right and left frontal and temporal lobes, confirming inter-hemispheric interactions during the performance of creative tasks."

Chavez then went on to do genetic testing on these same people, focusing on the areas in the human genome that code for such mood-altering brain chemicals as serotonin and dopamine, which seem likely to affect creative skills. She discovered that her creative, high-scoring testees had genetic kinks in common in just these areas. Chavez may not have quite uncovered a gene that codes for artistic genius, let alone for the whole of creativity, but her work at least hints that even something as obviously culture-bound as art might not be all nurture and no nature.

Admittedly, some of the take-home messages of neuroaesthetics are hardly headline news. It doesn't take a brain scan to discover that expressive faces mean a lot to us and that artists often take advantage of that fact in subtle ways. Or that emotion can be a serious distraction that is out of our control. And most people might imagine that there's an evident genetic root to creativity -- just look at the 80 or so musicians turned out by the Bach family over the course of a few generations. But it doesn't hurt to have some scientific evidence to back up our common-sense intuitions, given how often they turn out to be wrong. In the Bach case, for instance, there could be culture involved, too. After all, of the throng of grandkids who got J.S. Bach's genes, only one was notably musical.

Neuroaestheticians would also argue that the field is only in its infancy. The fact that they've made such a suggestive start points toward a bright future where they'll really start to pin the details down. With luck, neuroaestheticians may be able to figure out the "palette" of neural effects that all artists have at their disposal, to use or not as they see fit.

But neuroaestheticians may face a more profound problem than they think: There may be much more on that palette than the emotions and sensations that neuroscience seems set to track. There may be so much on it, in fact, that the signals art sends running through the brain may prove too complex to explain much of anything.

The most striking thing about the Berkeley conference was that most of the artistic ideas in play wouldn't mean that much to many people who look hard at art. The old notion that art is centrally about making an "aesthetic" object whose "beauty" is supposed to strike a chord in us has started to look pretty thin, as we've begun to think about how a broad spread of human beings respond and have responded to a vast range of art objects. The "aesthetics" that cause "neuro" stuff to happen may be only a tiny subset of art.

Take the game-playing work by Marcel Duchamp titled "Fountain" -- an upside-down urinal he displayed in an exhibition in 1917 -- which was one of the 20th century's most famous and influential pieces. You have to wonder how neuroaesthetics, with its focus on ideas of beauty, sensation and emotion -- on "the systematic analysis of the pleasures of the senses," in Dolan's words -- would ever come to grips with that. Work like Duchamp's -- as well as the high percentage of modern art that follows from it -- depends on complex ideas bouncing from one art work to another, rather than on a simple cause-and-effect relationship between an object and its viewers' brains. In fact, artistic content and subject matter, and the contexts in which they're taken in, must have always had as much effect on us as any kick an art work gives our brains.

Even all the millions who love the nostalgic townscapes of Thomas Kinkade must buy them partly for the thoughts they trigger about an America that no longer is, as well as for any heartwarming feelings they cause.

And how about the fact that a single African mask from 1845 satisfied its maker as a ritual object, horrified some European gawkers at a world's fair five years later, and went on in 60 years to inspire Picasso and a bunch of Franco-Spanish modern artists to revolutionize their picturemaking. Could those varied responses to an identical object really boil down to a series of comprehensible brain states, even in theory? It seems likely that they'll light up so much of the brain that its scan becomes as complex as the art itself. We may need to talk about a hugely various "artistic response," which is not at all the same as the "aesthetic response" that for so long seemed at the heart of art, and still seems close to the heart of many neuroaestheticians.

The problem is that neuroaesthetics doesn't seem set up to explain many of the things we most want to see explained about an art object and our reactions to it.

If, like most art historians, you believe that art is not only the "creation of forms that represent feelings" but also the production of ideas that trigger thoughts, then neuroaesthetics may not have that much to say to you -- until the day it can explain what makes "King Lear" mean more to us than "The Importance of Being Earnest."

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