In the Eye of the Beholder -- Beauty and the Brain

It's a question that artists and poets have contemplated for centuries -- why our eye is drawn more to one thing than another. More recently, scientists have tried to decipher the origin from which people determine what is most pleasing to the eye using high tech machines, pictures and babies.

A new exhibit at the Walters Art Museum, "Beauty and the Brain," a first of its kind collaboration between the museum and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at the Johns Hopkins University.Both an experiment and an exhibition, it seeks to answer if and why some shapes appeal to our "visual brain" more strongly than others.

When great minds come together

The idea for the exhibit began in two different places - one on the artistic side and the other one the scientific side, explains Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum.

"On the Walters side of the equation, I've had an interest now for four years at least in exploring the nature of the art experience through new techniques, and specifically an interest in how those aethestics might work out within a museum context, giving us a better understanding of what happens between art and people."

A student of Aethestics during his university days, Vikan says he'd become advocationally interested in neuroscience and what was going on. Seeing that the two areas -- aethestics and neuroscience -- had begun to intersect was very interesting.

A meeting in late 2007 with neuroscientists, aestheticians, artists and people in other related fields held at the Walters began to explore aesthetics, art and museums. A subsequent conference at Hopkins Medical School where scientists were looking at art led to a fortuitous meeting with Dr. Ed Connor.

Connor, a researcher at Hopkins, has spent many years studing how the brain sees objects. "It's one of the truly amazing abilities of the brain, something people haven't even been able to start to achieve with computers. It's a great mystery how the brain let's us recognize millions of objects so quickly, understand them and remember them," he says.

"I've always been interested not only in how that works but with how that creates your experience of the visual world. We live in world of objects, so object vision is the major basis for us percieving the world and that's a big part of our experience. And in really important ways, the way the brain processes information about objects really determines what our experience of the visual world is," Connor adds.

For Connor, that's what the exhibit grew out of, wanting to discover how what happens in the brain relates to our subjective experience of the visual world. Aesthetics is one aspect of the visual experience that people think about alot and find very powerful. "So, it's interesting to know how that experience of visual pleasure depends on general brain mechanisms and vision."

At their first meeting, "it was clear that his interests and my interests were overlapping. That his experiment at Hopkins with people looking at shapes and deciding which were beautiful and which were the least beautiful to them could be complemented by and exhbition here asking a bunch of people to make similar choices," says Vikan.

Pointy or Curvey

What we find aesthetically pleasing has to do with both our evolution and also our environment. "Evolution has perfected our vision, but its in our environment that we learn to see," Connor says.

In his 2008 paper, Connor and his fellow researchers found that the brain has an extremely strong representation for sharp surface curvature -- sharp points, sharp ridges, particularly sharp convex or protruding curvature. "Lots of neurons are responsive to sharp curvatures. That's one of the things we might expect to influnce aesthetic responses. Some people might find it a pleasurable thing because it's a very strong stimulant. Other people might find it unpleasurable because it's too strong a response. It's like a really bright light or really loud noises are unpleasant for some."

From an evolutionary perspective, sharp curvatures are very important in our world. They are dangerous, they tend to be the functional parts of objects. They also tend to be the parts of objects that provide us the most information about the identity of an object.

"People have done experiments where they've removed all the smooth stuff leaving the sharp edges and corners, and people are still able to recognize the object. But, if you take out all the sharp corners and just leave the flat parts, it's very hard to recognize," explains Connor.

For art and science

The exhibit invites visitors to choose between digitally morphed versions of 3-D shapes, some of which are based on computer scans of original works by the German-French abstractionist Jean Arp (1886�1966) -- one of whose sculptures is on display nearby. Their responses will be used to analyze how 3-dimensional shape characteristics affect aesthetic preferences.

The project explores the notion that artists are "intuitive neuroscientists," searching for ways to stimulate perceptual mechanisms in the brain. "They're playing around with visual stimulii. Testing them on themselves, testing them on other people until they find one that provokes a pleasurable or surprise response," Connor explains.

"In a sense we're engaged in the same project that artists are. They're exploring what kinds of pictures and sculptures invoke  a strong response in the brain and we're trying to understand why those responses are strong. The results could be of interest to artists," he continues.

A future phase of the experiment could be for artists to engage the public putting multiple versions of a single work before the public and get their reactions and have a conversation about what makes the work so responsive, says Connor. 

Connor notes that it is possible to use the results to extrapolate an individuals response to other aesthetic experiences. "There are many kinds of aesthetic experiences. Here with the laboratory experience we're looking what people find beautiful about pure object shape without anything else attached. That was the reason for a really abstract sculpter like Arp. His sculputures obviously don't refer to anything in the world, or at least its not hugely obvious. There isn't a lot of texture or things like that. It's sort of an exploration of pure shape."

The results of this project will form the basis for future experiments funded by the Hopkins Brain Science Institute, in which neural responses to aesthetic objects will be measured using the technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which enables researchers to localize brain activity by revealing elevated blood flow. This will allow us to see "the brain on art."


Walaika Haskins is managing editor of Bmore Media.



Captions:
1. Patrons experience the Beauty and the Brain exhibit and science experiment at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore City.
2. Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum.
3. Ed Connor, director of the Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore City.
4. The plaster sculpture, "The Woman of Delos" (1959), by Jean Hans Arp, German-French, 1886-1966
5. Patrons experience the Beauty and the Brain exhibit and science experiment at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore City.
6. Patrons experience the Beauty and the Brain exhibit and science experiment at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore City.
7. A Patrons experience the Beauty and the Brain exhibit and science experiment at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore City.
Photos by Arianne Teeple