Lone Gunman

Jonah Lehrer, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist and writer I’ve men­tioned many times, has a won­der­ful arti­cle in Psy­chol­ogy Today that looks at the field of neu­roaes­thet­ics and how the brain inter­prets art.

All the adjec­tives we use to describe art-vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”-should, in the­ory, have neural cor­re­lates. Accord­ing to these sci­en­tists, there is noth­ing inher­ently mys­te­ri­ous about art. Its visual tricks can be decoded. Neu­roaes­theti­cians hope to reveal “the uni­ver­sal laws” of paint­ing and sculp­ture, to find the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples shared by every great work of visual art.

In the arti­cle Lehrer pro­poses The 10 Great Prin­ci­ples of Great Art and in the accom­pa­ny­ing inter­view he chal­lenges the sup­po­si­tion that neu­roaes­thet­ics will “unweave the rain­bow” of great art.

Related: Dr Shock takes a brief look at the rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and neu­ro­science.

via Mind Hacks

It’s no sur­prise that per­ceived con­text is impor­tant in influ­enc­ing people’s deci­sions. A recent exper­i­ment has shown that peo­ple rate pic­tures as more aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing (and actu­ally expe­ri­ence more plea­sure while view­ing them) if they believe they come from art gal­leries.

Aes­thetic judg­ments, like most judg­ments, depend on con­text. Whether an object or image is seen in daily life or in an art gallery can sig­nif­i­cantly mod­u­late the aes­thetic value humans attach to it. We inves­ti­gated the neural sys­tem sup­port­ing this mod­u­la­tion by pre­sent­ing human sub­jects with art­works under dif­fer­ent con­texts whilst acquir­ing fMRI data. Using the same data­base of art­works, we ran­domly labelled images as being either sourced from a gallery or com­puter gen­er­ated. Sub­jects’ aes­thetic rat­ings were sig­nif­i­cantly higher for stim­uli viewed in the ‘gallery’ than ‘com­puter’ contexts.

via @vaughanbell

Remem­ber how the Mona Lisa’s famous smile was painted in low spa­tial fre­quen­cies, hence why we inter­pret the face dif­fer­ently depend­ing on where we look?

Now, Mo of Neu­rophi­los­o­phy takes an in-depth look at how our brains inter­pret hybrid images and com­plex visual scenes, shed­ding more light on this effec­tive imag­ing tech­nique. He also links to the hybrid images sec­tion of MIT’s Com­pu­ta­tional Visual Cog­ni­tion Lab which con­tains a fairly mind-boggling gallery of hybrid images.

Forever’s Not So Long is a touch­ing short film (13 mins.) chronicling how two peo­ple decide to see out the end of their lives.

via Link Banana

Human rea­son and abstract thought are pre­req­ui­sites for the appre­ci­a­tion of beauty, argues Roger Scru­ton in his lat­est book, Beauty. How­ever in his review of Beauty, Sebas­t­ian Smee—art critic of the Boston Globe—finds him­self dis­agree­ing with the sentiment.

[Scru­ton] is swayed by Plato’s idea that beauty is not just an invi­ta­tion to desire, but a call to renounce it. The idea sounds coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but it chimes with the feel­ing we often have that the most beau­ti­ful things are some­how invi­o­late. Scru­ton argues that our inabil­ity to main­tain the nec­es­sary dis­tance and our fail­ure to respect the sov­er­eignty of the objects we con­sider beau­ti­ful have helped to bring about what he calls a “flight from beauty.” The phrase is res­o­nant. Few who have reg­is­tered devel­op­ments in art, archi­tec­ture and other aspects of life over the past 50 to 100 years could have failed to notice that beauty has suf­fered a demo­tion. From its posi­tion as a fun­da­men­tal value in art, it has been reduced to a friv­o­lous side issue or, worse, a car­rier of tainted ide­olo­gies and clichés.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily