The Tell-Tale Brain

nature.

Picasso’s Cubist pictures were anything but realistic. His women—with two eyes on one side of the face, hunchbacks, misplaced limbs, and so on—were considerably more distorted than any Chola bronze or Mogul miniature. Yet the Western response to Picasso was that he was a genius who liberated us from the tyranny of realism by showing us that art doesn’t have to even try to be realistic. I do not mean to detract from Picasso’s brilliance, but he was doing what Indian artists had done a millennium earlier. Even his trick of depicting multiple views of an object in a single plane was used by Mogul artists. (I might add that I am not a great fan of Picasso’s art.)

Thus the metaphorical nuances of Indian art were lost on Western art historians. One eminent bard, the nineteenth-century naturalist and writer Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood, considered Indian art to be mere “crafts” and was repulsed by the fact that many of the gods had multiple arms (often allegorically signifying their many divine attributes). He referred to Indian art’s greatest icon, The Dancing Shiva, or Nataraja, which appears in the next chapter, as a multiarmed monstrosity. Oddly enough, he didn’t have the same opinion of angels depicted in Renaissance art—human children with wings sprouting on their scapulae—which were probably just as monstrous to some Indian eyes. As a medical man, I might add that multiple arms in humans do occasionally crop up—a staple of freak shows in the old days— but a human being sprouting wings is impossible. (However, a recent survey revealed that about one-third of all Americans claim they have seen angels, a frequency that’s higher than even Elvis sightings!)

So works of art are not photocopies; they involve deliberate hyperbole and distortion of reality. But you can’t just randomly distort an image and call it art (although, here in La Jolla, many do). The question is, what types of distortion are effective? Are there any rules that the artist deploys, either consciously or unconsciously, to change the image in a systematic way? And if so, how universal are these rules?

While I was struggling with this question and poring over ancient Indian manuals on art and aesthetics, I often noticed the word rasa. This Sanskrit word is difficult to translate, but roughly it means “capturing the very essence, the very spirit of something, in order to evoke a specific mood or emotion in the viewer’s brain.” I realized that, if you want to understand art, you have to understand rasa and how it is represented in the neural circuitry in the brain. One afternoon, in a whimsical mood, I sat at the entrance of the temple and jotted down what I thought might be the “eight universal laws of aesthetics,” analogous to the Buddha’s eightfold path to wisdom and enlightenment. (I later came up with an additional ninth law—so there, Buddha!) These are rules of thumb that the artist or even fashion designer deploys to create visually pleasing images that more optimally titillate the visual areas in the brain compared with what he could accomplish using realistic images or real objects.

In the pages that follow I will elaborate on these laws. Some I believe are genuinely new, or at least haven’t been stated explicitly in the context of visual art. Others are well known to artists, art historians, and philosophers. My goal is not to provide a complete account of the neurology of aesthetics (even assuming such a thing were possible) but to tie strands together from many different disciplines and to provide a coherent framework. Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at the University College of London, has embarked on a similar venture which he calls “neuroesthetics.” Please be assured that this type of analysis doesn’t in any way detract from the more lofty spiritual dimensions of art any more than describing the physiology of sexuality in the brain detracts from the magic of romantic love. We are dealing with different levels of descriptions that complement rather than contradict each other. (No one would deny that sexuality is a strong component of romantic love.)

In addition to identifying and cataloging these laws, we also need to understand what their function might be, if any, and why they evolved. This is an important difference between the laws of biology and the laws of physics. The latter exist simply because they exist, even though the physicist may wonder why they always seem so simple and elegant to the human mind. Biological laws, on the other hand, must have evolved because they helped the organism deal with the world reliably, enabling it to survive and transmit its genes more efficiently. (This isn’t always true, but it’s true often enough to make it worthwhile for a biologist to constantly keep it in mind.) So the quest for biological laws shouldn’t be driven by a quest for simplicity or elegance. No woman who has been through labor would say that it’s an elegant solution to giving birth to a baby.

Moreover, to assert there might be universal laws of aesthetics and art does not in any way diminish the important role of culture in the creation and appreciation of art. Without cultures, there wouldn’t be distinct styles of art such as Indian and Western. My interest is not in the differences between various artistic styles but in principles that cut across cultural barriers, even if those principles account for only, say 20 percent of the variance seen in art. Of course, cultural variations in art are fascinating, but I would argue that certain systematic principles lie behind these variations.

Here are the names of my nine laws of aesthetics:

Grouping

Peak shift

Contrast

Isolation

Peekaboo, or perceptual problem solving

Abhorrence of coincidences

Orderliness

Symmetry

Metaphor

It isn’t enough to just list these laws and describe them; we need a coherent biological perspective. In particular, when exploring any universal human trait such as humor, music, art, or language, we need to keep in mind three basic questions: roughly speaking, What? Why? and How? First, what is the internal logical structure of the particular trait you are looking at (corresponding roughly to what I call laws)? For example, the law of grouping simply means that the visual system tends to group similar elements or features in the image into clusters. Second, why does the particular trait have the logical structure that it does? In other words, what is the biological function it evolved for? And third, how is the trait or law mediated by the neural machinery in the brain?¹ All three of these questions need to be answered before we can genuinely claim to have understood any aspect of human nature.

In my view, most older approaches to aesthetics have either failed or remained frustratingly incomplete with regard to these questions. For example, the Gestalt psychologists were good at pointing out laws of perception but didn’t correctly answer why such laws may have evolved or how they came to be enshrined in the neural architecture of the brain. (Gestalt psychologists regarded the laws as byproducts of some undiscovered physical principles such as electrical fields in the brain.) Evolutionary psychologists are often good at pointing out what function a law might serve but are typically not concerned with specifying in clear logical terms what the law