The Tell-Tale Brain

cosmos. The artist depicts this sensation through the skillful use of many devices. For example, the centrifugal motion of Shiva’s arms and legs flailing in different directions and the wavy tresses flying off his head symbolize the agitation and frenzy of the cosmos. Yet right in the midst of all this turbulence—this fitful fever of life—is the calm spirit of Shiva himself. He gazes at his own creation with supreme tranquility and poise. How skillfully the artist has combined these seemingly antithetical elements of movement and energy, on the one hand, and eternal peace and stability on the other. This sense of something eternal and stable (God, if you like) is conveyed partly by Shiva’s slightly bent left leg, which gives him balance and poise even in the midst of his frenzy, and partly by his serene, tranquil expression, which conveys a sense of timelessness. In some Nataraja sculptures this peaceful expression is replaced by an enigmatic half-smile, as though the great god were laughing at life and death alike.

FIGURE 8.5 Nataraja depicting the cosmic dance of Shiva. Southern India, Chola period, twelfth century.

This sculpture has many layers of meaning, and indologists like Heinrich Zimmer and Ananda Coomaraswamy wax lyrically about them. While most Western sculptors try to capture a moment or snapshot in time, the Indian artist tries to convey the very nature of time itself. The ring of fire symbolizes the eternal cyclical nature of creation and destruction of the Universe, a common theme in Eastern philosophy, which is also occasionally hit upon by thinkers in the West. (I am reminded in particular of Fred Hoyle’s theory of the oscillating universe.) One of Shiva’s right hands holds a tambour, which beats the Universe into creation and also represents perhaps the pulse beat of animate matter. But one of his left hands holds the fire that not only heats up and energizes the universe but also consumes it, allowing destruction to perfectly balance out creation in the eternal cycle. And so it is that the Nataraja conveys the abstract, paradoxical nature of time, all devouring yet ever creative.

Below Shiva’s right foot is a hideous demonic creature called Apasmara, or “the illusion of ignorance,” which Shiva is crushing. What is this illusion? It’s the illusion that all of us scientific types suffer from, that there is nothing more to the Universe than the mindless gyrations of atoms and molecules, that there is no deeper reality behind appearances. It is also the delusion of some religions that each of us has a private soul who is watching the phenomena of life from his or her own special vantage point. It is the logical delusion that after death there is nothing but a timeless void. Shiva is telling us that if you destroy this illusion and seek solace under his raised left foot (which he points to with one of his left hands), you will realize that behind external appearances (Maya), there is a deeper truth. And once you realize this, you see that, far from being an aloof spectator, here to briefly watch the show until you die, you are in fact part of the ebb and flow of the cosmos—part of the cosmic dance of Shiva himself. And with this realization comes immortality, or moksha: liberation from the spell of illusion and union with the supreme truth of Shiva himself. There is, in my mind, no greater instantiation of the abstract idea of god—as opposed to a personal God—than the Shiva/Nataraja. As the art critic Coomaraswamy says, “This is poetry, but it is science nonetheless.”

I am afraid I have strayed too far afield. This is a book about neurology, not Indian art. I showed you the Shiva/Nataraja only to underscore that the reductionist approach to aesthetics presented in this chapter is in no way meant to diminish great works of art. On the contrary, it may actually enhance our appreciation of their intrinsic value.

I OFFER THESE nine laws as a way to explain why artists create art and why people enjoy viewing it.³ Just as we consume gourmet food to generate complex, multidimensional taste and texture experiences that titillate our palate, we appreciate art as gourmet food for the visual centers in the brain (as opposed to junk food, which is analogous to kitsch). Even though the rules that artists exploit originally evolved because of their survival value, the production of art itself doesn’t have survival value. We do it because it’s fun and that’s all the justification it needs.

But is that the whole story? Apart from its role in pure enjoyment, I wonder if there might be other, less obvious reasons why humans engage in art so passionately. I can think of four candidate theories. They are about the value of art itself, not merely of aesthetic enjoyment.

First, there is the very clever, if somewhat cheeky and cynical, suggestion favored by Steven Pinker that acquiring or owning unique, one-of-a-kind works may have been a status symbol to advertise superior access to resources (a psychological rule of thumb evolved for assessing superior genes). This is especially true today as the increasing availability of mass copying methods places an ever higher premium (from the art buyer’s perspective) on owning an original—or at least (from the art seller’s perspective) on fooling the buyer into the mock status conferred by purchasing limited-edition prints. No one who has been to an art show cocktail reception in Boston or La Jolla can fail to see that there is some truth to this view.

Second, an ingenious idea has been proposed by Geoffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, and by others that art evolved to advertise to potential mates the artist’s manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination. This was promptly dubbed the “come up and see my etchings” theory of art. Like the male bowerbird, the male artist is in effect telling his muse, “Look at my pictures. They show I have excellent hand-eye coordination and a complex, well-integrated brain—genes I’ll pass on to your babies.” There is an irritating grain of truth to Miller’s idea, but personally I don’t find it very convincing. The main problem is that it doesn’t explain why the advertisement should take the form of art. It seems like overkill. Why not directly advertise this ability to potential mates by showing off your skills in archery or athletic prowess in soccer? If Miller is right, women should find the ability to knit and embroider to be very attractive in potential husbands, given that it requires superb manual dexterity—even though most women, not even feminists, don’t value such skills in a man. Miller might argue that women value not the dexterity and skill per se but the creativity that underlies the finished product. But despite its supreme cultural importance to humans, the biological survival value of art as an index of creativity is dubious given that it doesn’t necessarily spill over into other domains. (Just look at the number of starving artists!)

Notice that Pinker’s theory predicts that the women should hover around the buyers, whereas Miller’s theory predicts they should hover around the starving artists themselves.

To these ideas I’ll add two more. To understand them you need to consider thirty-thousand-year-old cave art from Lascaux, France. These cave-wall images are hauntingly beautiful even to the modern eye. To achieve them, the artists must have used some of the same aesthetic laws used by modern artists. For example, the bisons are mostly depicted as outline drawings (isolation), and bison-like characteristics such as small head and large hump are grossly exaggerated. Basically, it’s a caricature (peak shift) of a bison created by unconsciously subtracting the average generic hoofed quadruped from a bison and amplifying the differences. But apart from just saying, “They made these images just to enjoy them,” can we say anything more?

Humans excel at visual imagery. Our brains evolved this ability to create an internal mental picture or model of the world in which we can rehearse forthcoming actions, without the risks or the penalties of doing them in the real world. There are even hints from brain-imaging studies by Harvard University psychologist Steve Kosslyn showing that your brain uses the same regions to imagine a scene as when you actually view one.

But evolution has seen to it that such internally generated representations are never as authentic as the real thing. This is a wise bit of self-restraint on your genes’ part. If your internal model of the world were a perfect substitute, then anytime you felt hungry you could simply imagine yourself at a banquet, consuming a feast. You would have no incentive to find real food and would soon starve to death. As the Bard said, “You cannot cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.”