But I was slightly surprised that the effect of seeing indeterminate images on recordable brain activation was less pronounced than I had expected. In my naivety about the way the brain works, and what the scanning process is able to detect, I had anticipated a far stronger degree of differential activation during the exposure to indeterminate images as compared to recognizable ones than was found.
But the study did confirm one of my other intuitively held beliefs about the way we perceive the visual world. Part of my anxiety, or unease, during the moment of indeterminate perception in the Cabinet of Dr Caligari sequence arose from the sense of compulsion I felt to make sense of what was in front of me. I have felt the same many times since when unexpectedly confronted with an indeterminate scene. The fact, confirmed in this study, that subjects reported seeing objects in images that did not contain them, even more so than in the one cited previously, is evidence of the involuntary impulse we have to turn the rich and complex visual data around us into meaningful things.
It therefore seems that the primate brain is a compulsory object viewer, namely that it automatically segments indeterminate visual input into coherent images.
Separate studies conducted by Wallraven et al. The purpose was to look at the ways subjects would react to indeterminate stimuli, and also to see if there were any empirical grounds for verifying my own intentions in making my art.
Having worked so long to make successfully indeterminate paintings on the basis of intuition, guesswork, and the informally acquired reports of others, it was again fascinating for me as an artist to see what more rigorous and objective measures might reveal about, quite literally, how people looked at the work. Again the scientific details can be consulted in the relevant papers, but two outcomes were of particular interest to me as the originator of the indeterminate stimuli.
First, the analysis of the data produced by the experiments seemed to verify my intentions in making the indeterminate images. Wallraven et al. Indeterminate images occupy the area between representational and abstract and between unique and ambiguous parameters, but tending toward the ambiguous end of the axis.
On could imagine, for example, using it to visualize the whole history of recognizability visual art, and thereby track the shifting patterns of taste across the centuries. When this same parameterization was applied to my own paintings by the team it was expected that in order to fulfill my ambition to make works that were neither fully recognizable nor fully abstract they would need to be assessed as being located roughly in the center—right of the graph, that is, avoiding the extremes of each parameter, but tending toward ambiguity.
For the experimenters, this data offered a perceptual validation of the artistic program behind the work. The other interesting finding from these experiments from my perspective concerned the differences in eye movements the participants displayed when engaged in the person finding task as compared with the genre categorization task.
What surprised me was the extent to which the fixation maps varied between the two tasks, even though subjects were looking at the same images.
As has been known since the time of the early eye-tracking experiments by Yarbus how one looks at a image is critically dependent on what is being looked for.
While this is clearly well known to scientists it is not, as far as I am aware, something generally known to artists. Yet is clearly a fundamental aspect of the way we apprehend the world, which presumably reflects the way expectation and meaning are mediated by the visual system in general and the brain in particular. It is interesting to consider, therefore, how directive clues in art, such as titles or hanging context, might affect the way audiences look at works of art.
The question of how titles affect the interpretations of paintings stimulated the final art—science collaborative study I wish to mention Wiesmann and Ishai, Cubist paintings of this period are characterized as being highly indeterminate in so far as they are directly observed depictions of everyday objects — tables, fruit, newspapers, glasses, etc. But those without this expertise tend to see only patterns, lines, and textures rather than distinct objects of any kind Golding, The study gathered both behavioral and fMRI data, and again the scientific methods and results are available in the published paper.
Despite the fact that the subjects were not art experts and received only a relatively brief training sessions 30 min they were significantly better than the control group in recognizing familiar objects.
The study also found that the role of the descriptive titles, which effectively declared what the paintings depicted, has little effect on the control group but a marked effect in helping the trained group to find more familiar objects. The study also showed enhanced activation in the parahippocampal cortex of the trained subjects, the amplitude of which increased as a function of the number of objects recognized.
This suggested that the subjects had used broader contextual associations to identify the objects in the paintings rather than the cognitive resources normally linked more specifically to object recognition. It is also tempting to wonder whether subjects thus trained in recognizing objects in Cubist paintings are also then better at other object recognition tasks, and indeed whether learning to understand Cubist art can actually improve cognitive performance in other areas; it would certainly be good news for art lovers if that were the case.
The various investigations I have undertaken with neuroscientists and psychophysicists have proved illuminating and rewarding from my artistic perspective. I initially set out to discover what science might be able to tell me about the specific issue of visual indeterminacy, and how people respond to my paintings.
In doing so I have gained an enormous amount of insight into the way the visual system operates, how the brain functions, and indeed how science itself operates when investigating these phenomena. I have become aware of the great potential of the scientific method to elucidate processes that artists often work with intuitively but rarely grasp in any systematic way. But I have also seen at first hand the limitations of the scientific method when studying the experience of art, and have been reminded of the very different cultures that exist between art and science that make meaningful collaboration a sometimes demanding process.
In the final section of this paper I want to briefly reflect on these issues and how future joint research between artists and scientists might benefit from these experiences. It often goes unremarked, for example, that most if not all lab-based studies of audience responses to art will use reproductions instead of real works of art. Reproductions are not always of the highest quality, and cannot be shown in a way that properly reflects the physical properties of the work itself.
When preparing the images for the Cubism study, for instance, it was necessary to conform all the images to the same scale and format due to the demands of the experimental procedure.
This meant a lot of cropping and resizing, which resulted in the loss of size discrimination between large and small paintings. And there is the broader question of how valid it is to measure the effects artworks on the basis of reproductions at all.
Some empirical esthetics studies have shown significant differences in the judged hedonic or pleasure value of original artworks compared to reproductions Locher et al.
Certainly any serious scholar of art would make a point of examining the real work before arriving at any definitive evaluation of its esthetic impact. Many qualities inherent in a work of art simply do not covert into photographic media, including scale, degree of surface gloss, texture of brushwork, or the way that certain colors can change depending on the angle of viewing as is the case, for example, in many paintings by the abstract artist Ad Reinhardt.
All these are crucial esthetic properties that artists work hard to control, and their absence or impoverishment in conventional photographic reproductions restricts what many lab-based studies can tell us about the experience of looking at them. Then, of course, there are all the well-known problems associated with subjects being placed in fMRI scanners, with the distracting noise and discomfort they create Cooke et al.
Something similar, but less intrusive, is true of eye-tracking devices that require the head to be locked in a stable position — something that clearly would not happen in a natural gallery setting. While these limitations do not, in my view, diminish the value of such studies they should perhaps be more frequently acknowledged when discussing the implications of the results. The neurobiologist and pioneer of the neuroesthetic approach to art—science integration, Zeki , p.
Allied to this is the fact that many artists and art theorists, when discussing the matter, seem to intuitively support the idea that mental properties and esthetic experiences extend beyond the head and into the world Pepperell, The purpose of raising this issue here is to point out that certain basic assumptions about how esthetic experiences might be constituted can differ fundamentally between those making the art and those studying its biological effects.
In order to achieve a fuller understanding of what the brain contributes to esthetic experience as a whole we will need to reconcile these divergent approaches. This leads to the final point, which concerns the need to recognize how great the disciplinary gulf still is between art and science, despite all the work done in recent times to bridge it.
I have been attending science conferences now for over 10 years, and working closely with scientists on and off for about five. In that time I have rarely found members of the scientific community to be anything other than generous with their time and ideas, politely inquisitive about my proposals, and forgiving of my own naivety about their specialisms. Even so, I am also constantly reminded of how different the basic conceptual categories can be between the arts and sciences, a cultural divide of the kind famously identified by Snow in the middle of the last century and still largely in force today.
The difference is in part, I believe, born from the need for scientists to be explicit, analytical, and logical in their working and reporting processes. Quite often for artists the opposite is the case, their training and traditions having implanted in them a proclivity toward vagueness, synthesis, and irrationality.
Finding common ground between two such distinct traditions is not always straightforward. It was somewhat sobering for me to discover that the constraints on the experimental equipment used in the collaborative fMRI study cited above required the subjects to express their esthetic appreciation for the artworks on a scale between 1 and 4. For those schooled in the infinite subtleties of artistic expression the idea that the merits of a great Turner or Rubens painting could be judged on such a crude scale and in as brief a moment as 3 or 4 s would border on the absurd.
Yet if we are to make any progress at all in understanding art using the empirical methods of scientific enquiry these are exactly the kinds of procedures we will have to adopt, at least until more sensitive techniques of investigation become available. Just as I have had to modify my expectations about what empirical techniques are able to measure so I have been fortunate to find scientific collaborators willing to adjust their disciplinary spectacles in order to appreciate the relatively chaotic point of view of an artist.
The result has been, from my point of view, a deeper understanding of what science can tell us about art, and what art can tell us about science. Art—science collaborations work best when each discipline is enriched through the process, rather than one being parasitic on the other.
There is always a risk that the compromises necessary to make progress are made at the expense of the essential values and outlooks of both approaches, which can only result in bad art and bad science.
The challenge is how best to reconcile these distinct traditions without sacrificing the integrity of either. Only by meeting this challenge will we be able to create a truly interdisciplinary approach to the study of problems as complex as the way we make and appreciate art. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Bell, C. London: Chatto and Windus. Braque, G. Notebooks New York: Dover. Butlin, M. London: Yale University Press. Cavanagh, P. The artist as neuroscientist. Nature , — Clark, A. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooke, R. Dallenbach, K. A puzzle picture with a new principle of concealment. Elger, D. Gerhard Richter: Text. London: Thames and Hudson. Fairhall, S. Neural correlates of object indeterminacy in art compositions. Farah, M. Visual Agnosia. Freedberg, D. Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience. Musicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound.
After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, Kraus said. It's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art, you know a whole lot about the brain. Search Search. You are here Home News.
Author Kat Zambon. There are ways to communicate through art that transcend barriers and limitations and go straight to the heart of the matter.
You can read more about my experience in this article. On this website you will find more articles related to the links between of the Arts and our well-being. She is founder and director of Manhattan Arts International www. I have a granddaughter who is pursuing an education in the arts.
I am sharing this wonderful and inspiring article to her. It offers wonderful ideas about the enhancements of all kinds of art and the broadening aspects to include artists if all ages.
Thank you. Doris, Thank you for your comment and for sharing this article with your granddaughter. Wishing you many hours of creative bliss! Shall I repost with your name on our art selling website? We are delighted to know you enjoyed reading the article. Thank you for understanding. Very interesting article. I have worked in the police for 20 years very toxic time.
This led me to a lot of mental, emotional and physical problems including high BP, anxiety and unexplainable pains, twitches. After always believing I had no creative side when I started drawing, I started using a book which explored starting to draw upside down to connect left and right brain functions.
I found myself absorbed in drawing. After a week or so I woke up and felt some fundamental shift had occurred in my brain. I could see outside the narrow mental box I had created for myself, my BP was well under normal and I was sleeping better than ever.
I also realised if I left the police I could have a different and much better life. BTW Some B12 and magnesium seems to have helped to. Hi Peter, We are very happy for you that you found a way to retrain your brain and use art as a form of healing. Take good care! Hi Mrs. One of the requirements is to conduct a interview and i would love to ask you some questions.
Hi Adrian, Thank you for your comment. My assistant sent you a detailed email. Unfortunately, we never received a response from you so I hope you received it. Art historian Gregory Minissale explains that people can view conceptual art as a puzzle. Experiencing this kind of art is like working through mathematical proof.
As he writes:. There are many works of art that use puns and word games to present the viewer with visual paradoxes. For another example, paintings by Seurat or Mondrian stimulate an area of the brain that also derives joy from solving puzzles for pleasure.
Zeki holds the unusual view that artists are doing the work of neurologists in the way they play with their art and interpretation of objects. In a painting, the brain searches for order and objects.
Even when an artist is painting, the brain aims to represent or paint objects as the painter sees them.
0コメント