Your brain loves art

Morgan Meis reviews V.S. Ramachandran’s new book The Tell-Talle Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human, which attempts to explain art and aesthetics in terms of neuroscience. Meis points out that theories of art have existed as long as philosophy has existed, but now, according to Ramachandran, we know enough about the brain to speculate in more concrete ways. He begins by identifying nice “laws” of aesthetics. Meis summarizes number two:

Peak Shift refers to a generally elevated response to exaggerated stimuli among many animals. Ramachandran refers to a study in which seagull chicks were made to beg for food (just as they do from their mothers) simply by waving a beak-like stick in front of their nests. Later, the researchers pared down even further, simply waving a yellow strip of cardboard with a red dot on the end…They got the same response. More interesting, and crucially for Ramachandran's law of Peak Shift, is that the gull chicks become super excited if you put three red dots on the cardboard strip. Something in the mental hardwiring of the chicks says, "red outline on lighter background means food." The wiring does not normally need to be more specific than that. It is enough for survival. So, the chick brains make the leap to interpreting the advent of several red outlines as being several times better. They go nuts.

Apparently Ramachandran takes this as evidence for the natural appeal of abstract art. Sure, it completely ignores art history and the contexts in which art might be experienced, but hey! Not to mention the problem of debates and disagreements about aesthetics, which Ramachandran handles in a surprising, if strange way:

This raises the question, however, of disagreement in the appreciation of art. If we are analogous to chick gulls in our gut reaction to certain abstract forms, mustn't it then be the case that everyone actually likes, in some deep way, the sculptures of (for instance) Henry Moore? Ramachandran goes for the surprising answer here. He supposes that maybe everyone does. They just don’t know it, or they suppress that root "liking" with their higher cognitive functions, adjusting what they "like" to specific cultural mores or other similar considerations.