Art, Neuroaesthetics & Semir Zeki

The father of “neuroaesthetics” (a phrase he coined), Semir Zeki is a scientist who studies how the brain is affected by our perception of art. In 2007 he was granted 1 million pounds (approx. $1,358,331.95 USD) to explore the ways in which art and beauty are functions of the physiology of the brain.

You can look at it as a scientific view of how our brains perceive art on the cellular level. It’s a fascinating subject, one which Mr. Zeki explains in a very interesting interview on ARTINFO.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

It’s not often you get to sound like Aristotle, but here I am asking Professor Semir Zeki, a compact, animated man, if there is such a thing as universal beauty, and if so where exactly is it located?

“Quite possibly there is such a thing,” he says. “And in a year’s time I might be able to tell you it exists for sure and it lies in the activation of these areas,” he points to his own forehead, the top of his balding skull, and a place near his temple, “but we are not there yet…”

Zeki is the world’s first professor of neuroaesthetics, a word he coined. In 2007 he was granted over a million pounds by the Wellcome Trust in London to explore the ways in which beauty and art are functions of the physiology of the brain. In some ways, Zeki sees his work as a way of bridging that stubborn interdisciplinary gap between art and science, finally closing the divide between C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.”

Zeki pioneered, as long ago as the ’70s, the understanding of how the brain projects its concepts of color on to the world. He has advanced that knowledge to apparently more subjective areas such as aesthetic taste. “Perceiving something as ugly or beautiful involves activation of the medial orbito-frontal cortex,” he explains. “The [electrical] activity measured in these areas through scanning is much more pronounced when pictures considered to be beautiful are perceived.” Furthermore, the activity is proportional to the declared sense of that beauty; in other words, Zeki believes that beauty is measurable by degrees.

All great artists, Zeki believes, are instinctive neuroscientists; they have an innate understanding of how the brain “sees” the world, and they are fated by this knowledge to constantly try to find a visual language for those concepts. For Zeki, seeing is not a passive process.

When we look at a painting, as MRI scanning proves, different bits of information are immediately separated and sent to discrete anatomical corners of our brains for processing. Our brains respond to this compartmentalized information at different rates; color is processed before form, for example, and form before motion. Different sites also respond to portraits, or to landscapes,or to still lifes (though abstract paintings tend to blur these distinctions). Having been taken apart, as it were, the painting is never put back together again in our heads; rather it “exists” dynamically in the various responses of different parts of the brain. That combination of responses creates our “emotion” toward the image.

Artists can play with this process. A Monet floods the color centers of the brain, and the areas that process illumination, with all sorts of conflicting stimulation, before form ever gets a look in; Cézanne finds away to make the brain perceive form in unfinished texture rather than in perspective.

If an artist discovers such a language, the receptors in the brains of his or her viewers can’t get enough of it. “The brain demands knowledge,” Zeki says. It is constantly on the lookout for organizing concepts. Art directly feeds that demand with new ways of looking that exploit the brain’s established neuro-pathways.

It is either thrilling or reductive, depending on your point of view, to hear Zeki describe some of this. He has a nice offhand way with profundity. “Love and beauty and desire are linked,” he will say. “But desire and beauty give you strong activation of the orbito-frontal cortex, and love does not. We need to find out why, but the orbito-frontal cortex is not easy to image, because it is just above the nose.”

Some people, Zeki concedes, don’t like to hear their most profound feelings deconstructed in this way. They dislike the implication that fundamental emotions can be plotted on charts and correlated with the particular organization of groups of neurons in the brain. And they aren’t necessarily fond of the idea that beauty exists not in the world but in the excitable processing centers of different cell types. This group of people includes art critics, some of whom have been hostile to Zeki’s work.

Read the rest of the article here: ARTINFO

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Tagged as: Art critic, Brain, Magnetic resonance imaging, neuroaesthetics, Neuroesthetics, Orbitofrontal cortex, semir zeki, Visual Arts, Wellcome Trust