Get the picture? Art in the brain of the beholder

• 17 July 2012 by Kat Austen
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"My child could have done that!" Wrong – neuroaesthetics is starting to show us why abstract art can be so beguiling

STANDING in front of Jackson Pollock's Summertime: Number 9A one day, I was struck by an unfamiliar feeling. What I once considered an ugly collection of random paint splatters now spoke to me as a joyous celebration of movement and energy, the bright yellow and blue bringing to mind a carefree laugh.

It was my road-to-Damascus moment - the first time a piece of abstract art had stirred my emotions. Like many people, I used to dismiss these works as a waste of time and energy. How could anyone find meaning in what looked like a collection of colourful splodges thrown haphazardly on a 5.5-metre-wide canvas? Yet here I was, in London's Tate Modern gallery, moved by a Pollock.

Since then, I have come to appreciate the work of many more modern artists, who express varying levels of abstraction in their work, in particular the great Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Even so, when I tried to explain my taste, I found myself lost for words. Why are we attracted to paintings and sculptures that seem to bear no relation to the physical world?

Little did I know that researchers have already started to address this question. By studying the brain's responses to different paintings, they have been examining the way the mind perceives art. Although their work cannot yet explain the nuances of our tastes, it has highlighted some of the unique ways in which these masterpieces hijack the brain's visual system.

The studies are part of an emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics, founded just over 10 years ago by Semir Zeki of University College London. The idea was to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art, in an attempt to find neurological bases for the techniques that artists have perfected over the years. It has already offered insights into many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to tickle the brain's amygdala, for instance, which is geared towards detecting threats in the fuzzy rings of our peripheral vision. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings and emotions, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces so moving.

Could the same approach tell us anything about the controversial pieces that began to emerge from the tail end of Impressionism more than 100 years ago? Whether it is Mondrian's rigorously geometrical, primary-coloured compositions, or Pollock's controversial technique of dripping paint onto the canvas in seemingly haphazard patterns, the defining characteristic of modern art has been to remove almost everything that could be literally interpreted.

Although these works often sell for whopping sums of money - Pollock's No. 5 fetched $140 million in 2006 - they have attracted many sceptics, who claim that modern artists lack the skill or competence of the masters before them. Instead, they see the newer works as a serious case of the emperor's new clothes, believing that people might claim to like them simply because they are in fashion. In the scathing words of the American satirist Al Capp, they are the "product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered".

Chimp or Rothko?

We certainly do have a strong tendency to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching up a shape with its rotated image, for instance, people will often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that the herd mentality would have an even greater impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

Angelina Hawley-Dolan of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by designing a fun experiment that played with her volunteers' expectations of the pieces they were seeing. Their task was simple. The volunteers viewed pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous abstract artists or the doodles of amateurs, infants, chimps and elephants. Then they had to judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while the rest were labelled. The twist was that sometimes the labels were mixed up, so that the volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an expressionist piece by Mark Rothko. Some sceptics might argue that it is impossible to tell the difference - but in each set of trials, the volunteers generally preferred the work of the well-accepted human artists, even when they believed it was by an animal or a child (Psychological Science, vol 22, p 435). Somehow, it seems that the viewer can sense the artist's vision in these paintings, even if they can't explain why.

With this in mind, I recently wandered down to an art exhibition at University College London's Grant Museum, where chimp and elephant art is exhibited alongside artworks by abstract artist Katharine Simpson, whose blocky pieces are reminiscent of Rothko's, but on a smaller scale and with more variety of colour. Challenging myself to guess the professional work, I wandered the gallery looking at the paintings before reading the captions. I managed to get it right every time.

So a liking for abstract art can't be explained by peer pressure. Yet Hawley-Dolan's experiment didn't explain how we detect the hand of the human artist, nor the reason why the paintings appeal to us. With a realistic picture, we might relate to the expression on a person's face, or we might find symbolism in a still life. But how does the artist hold our attention with an image that bears no likeness to anything in the real world?

Of course, each artist's unique style will speak to us in a different way, so there can be no single answer. Nevertheless, a few studies have tackled the issue from various angles. Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, UK, for instance, has worked with Alumit Ishai of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, to understand the way we process ambiguous figures. They may look familiar, but "don't add up to something immediately recognisable", Pepperell says. Like the work of Wassily Kandinsky or certain pieces by Gerhard Richter, Pepperell's paintings, which sometimes take the composition of older masterpieces (see images here and here), are not entirely abstract but neither can they be readily interpreted like a representational painting.

Mind games

In one study, Pepperell and Ishai asked volunteers to decide whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. In a quarter of the cases they claimed to recognise something real, even when there was nothing definite to pick out. They also had to judge how "powerful" they considered the artwork to be. It turned out that the longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny. And this delay seems to be filled with widespread neural activity, as revealed by later fMRI scans. From these results, you could conclude that the brain sees these images as a puzzle - it struggles to "solve" the image, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding we find that moment of recognition (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol 5, p 1).

This doesn't necessarily tell us much about the more abstract work of Rothko, Pollock or Mondrian, since these artists do not offer even the merest glimpse of a recognisable object for the brain to latch on to. But they may instead catch our attention through particularly well-balanced compositions that appeal to the brain's visual system.

Consider the art of Mondrian, whose work consists exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour. (His conviction in this principle was so strong that fellow artist Theo van Doesburg's decision to use diagonal lines ended their friendship.) Mondrian's art is deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that the patterns are meticulously composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. In the originals, the volunteers' eyes tended to linger for longer on certain places in the image, but in the rotated versions they would flit across the piece more rapidly. As a result, they considered the altered images less pleasurable when they later rated the work (Journal of Vision, vol 7, p 1445). Changing Mondrian's colours has a similar effect: in one example, a large square of red in one corner is offset by a small dark blue square on the opposite side, which contrasts more strongly with the surrounding white. When the researchers swapped these colours, it threw off the balance, leading the volunteers to take less enjoyable journeys around the piece (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol 5, p 98).

The same is probably true of many other works. Oshin Vartanian at the University of Toronto, Canada, for example, recently asked volunteers to compare a series of original paintings to a set in which the composition had been altered by moving objects around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a still-life painting by Vincent van Gogh or Joan Miró's abstract Bleu I.

What's more, Vartanian found that manipulating the objects reduced activation in areas of the brain linked with meaning and interpretation (NeuroReport, vol 15, p 893). The results suggest that our mind notes the careful arrangements and senses the intention behind the paintings, even if we are not consciously aware of the fact. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the chimps or children would ever hit upon such carefully considered structures. That may explain why the volunteers in Hawley-Dolan's study tended to prefer the work of the experienced artists.

Besides the balance of the composition, we may also be drawn in by pieces that hit a sweet spot in the brain's ability to process complex scenes, says Alex Forsythe, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, UK. She used a compression algorithm to judge the visual complexity of different pieces of art. The program tries to find shortcuts to store an image in the smallest number of bits - the more complex the piece, the longer the string of digits used to store the painting on the hard drive, offering a more objective measure that human judgement. The results suggested that many artists - from Edouard Manet to Pollock - used a certain level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but "too much complexity results in a kind of perceptual overload", says Forsythe.

Art imitating life

What's more, many pieces showed signs of fractal patterns - repeating motifs that reoccur at different scales, whether you zoom in or zoom out of a canvas (British Journal of Psychology, vol 102, p 49). Fractals are common throughout nature - you can see them in the jagged peaks of a mountain or the unfurling fronds of the fern. It is possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier to process these kinds of scenes. The case for this theory is not watertight, though, since the fractal content in the paintings was considerably higher than you would normally find in natural scenes - to the point that, in other circumstances, it would be considered too busy to be pleasant. Forsythe thinks that the artists may choose their colours to "soothe a negative experience we would normally have when encountering too high a fractal content".

It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably only a taste of what is to come. It is intriguing, for example, that some scans have registered the brain processing movement when we see a handwritten letter. It is as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation in our brain. That may be down to our mirror neurons, which are known to mimic others' actions. The results have led some to ponder whether the work of Pollock might feel so dynamic because the brain reconstructs the energetic movements the artist used as he painted. This hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, though (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 11, p 197). Others have speculated that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular, works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten (Spatial Vision, vol 21, p 347).

It would be foolish to try to reduce art appreciation to a set of scientific laws, of course. While the research helps us to understand the way the technique used to create an artwork may appeal to the brain's visual system, an artist's ingenuity also depends on their ability to develop or confront the ideas of those before them. Benno Belke, a German sound artist and cognitive scientist, points out that we shouldn't underestimate the importance of recognising the style of a particular artist and understanding their place in art history or the culture of their time, for instance. This is where expertise comes in to help you appreciate works you would have never enjoyed before, he argues. Pepperell agrees. "Art is about heightened sensitivity and awareness," he says. "If you're a connoisseur, you'll be looking for subtleties."

Science can offer another stopping point on this journey of understanding. "Art gives us knowledge about the world. Some is emotional knowledge, some is the knowledge held by the creator and for the neurobiologist it gives us a means of understanding how the brain is organised," says Zeki.

Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with different interpretations. In some ways, it's not so different to science, where we are constantly looking for patterns and decoding meaning so that we can view and appreciate the world in a new way.

The duchamp Code

How do we decode images to give them meaning? Context is crucial, particularly when viewing postmodern, ready-made art like Marcel Duchamp's famous installation, Fountain, which placed a urinal in an exhibition - much to the dismay of the artistic establishment.
Kristian Tylén at Aarhus University in Denmark recently looked at the way the setting of an object can alter our perception of its message. He found that an understanding of intent activates areas in the right hemisphere of the brain that are traditionally associated with linguistic understanding. This holds whether that intent is conveyed through unusual incongruities in the image, like seeing a urinal in a gallery, or through use of accepted symbols such as a bunch of flowers by a doorway. It is almost as if we "read" the unusual arrangements in the same way that we read meaning in the arbitrary signs of a language.

Kat Austen is a CultureLab editor at New Scientist