The emergence of aesthetics and the artful brain

Ramachandran's Theory of Neuroaesthetics: A Reaction

In his book the Tell-Tale Brain, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran makes many assertions about how the brain handles those distinctive attributes of human existence that many say "make us human." However, he is not too proud to also extend his explanations outside of H. sapiens when appropriate. As a reader, I was surprised to find that he did so in his chapter on the brain's response to art. However, the purpose and mechanisms that he posits for a human artistic sense force him to admit that what makes humans produce art might apply also to nonhuman "artists" like the bower bird (Ramachandran, 2011: 196). Below, I will describe Ramachandran's theory of aesthetics, the neural mechanisms he believes are responsible, and the evidence he cites in support of his theory.

Ramachandran's theory is comprehensive, and attempts to provide "universal laws" for how art works. Philosophical theories of aesthetics have also tried to refine what it is about art that is broadly appealing. I am surprised that Ramachandran does not cite more art historians and philosophers; some of them made the same claims that he does in eras long before neuroscience was even possible. Aristotle, for example, touches on ideas of repetition, rhythm, and orderliness that were first formalized by Pythagoras (Heath, 1996). He seems proud that social scientists have been called upon to reinvent this particular wheel -- they have undoubtedly done so in a way that is more satisfying to our modern sensibilities about evidence and intuitions, but aside from some clever formulations, the nascent field of neuroaesthetics does not seem to be giving us radically new discoveries about what art is.

The ten Universal Laws of Art according to Ramachandran are: (1) Peak shift, (2) Grouping, (3) Contrast, (4) Isolation, (5) Perceptual problem solving, (6) Symmetry, (7) Repetition, rhythm, and orderliness, (9) Balance, and (10) Metaphor. Some of these laws seem to overlap; for example, what is the distinction between Grouping and Rhythm, or between Symmetry and Balance? Groupings must of necessity be repetitive to some extent, otherwise there would be no category similarity on which to base the grouping. Interestingly, Peak shift seems to be a more cognitively specified version of some combination of the Metaphor and Contrast laws. The Peak shift aspect of art is, in short, that artistic representations shift away from the mean and towards more extreme examples of the thing being represented -- think of Constructivist sculptures of inhumanly square-shouldered socialist workers like those in Figure 1, whose proportions stray at times into the uncanny. In this way, it appears that Peak shift is really Contrast with (specifically) the norm of an object's appearance. Peak shift also involves Metaphor -- something representing something else. In Ramachandran's exemplar case for many of his laws, the Chola bronze sculpture of Parvathi is a metaphor for live, human women. She represents the appearance and virtues that mortal women may have, by virtue of her appearance being shifted away from that of the average woman; her appearance is a metaphor for her divine perfection.

The scientific basis for Ramachandran's claims comes from behavioral studies of rats and herring-gull chicks, and from neural recordings of monkeys. In the case of herring-gull chicks, his description of the connection between peak shift in newborn herring-gulls towards an extreme visual exemplar of their food source and the aesthetic response to representational peak shifts in human art is a bit lacking. Gulls, he claims, have "hard-wired" neural circuitry that predisposes them to peck at elongated yellow objects with focal red spots when they are young. Presumably, this circuitry does not decay when gulls reach adulthood, although the pecking response can clearly be inhibited. Another major source of data that the author refers to is neural recordings from the fusiform gyrus (FFG) which has become known as the "face and place processing" area of the brain (Zeki, 1999). One of Ramachandran's more controversial assertions, in my opinion, is that the brief success of cubism is due to its ability to multiply activation of neurons in the FFG. Ramachandran leaps to the conclusion that this constitutes a "neural explanation for Picasso" (p. 177) but it strikes me as premature. Even Picasso was not always a cubist, and while the fractured portraits produced during the cubist movement were certainly sensational in their day, and still have the power to surprise us, I have not seen direct evidence that they produce stronger activation in the FFG than any other variety of portraiture. Of all the points in this book where I thought "someone should do that study!" this was the most obvious.