"The neurological basis of artistic universals"

I heard V.S. S. Ramachandran discuss this on UCTV and thought it was interesting. Essentially - many of the compositional techniques artists use are described as having evolutionary/neurological reasons/effects.

A clip:

There are hundreds of types of art; Classical Greek art, Tibetan art, Khmer art, Chola bronzes, Renaissance art, impressionism, expressionism, cubism, fauvism, abstract art; the list is endless. But despite this staggering diversity of styles, are there some general principles or "artistic universals" that cut across cultural boundaries? Can we come up with a "science of Art"? Science and art seem like such fundamentally antithetical pursuits; one is a quest for general principles whereas the other is a celebration of human individuality — so that the very notion of a "science of art" seems like an oxymoron. Yet that’s what I will suggest in this chapter — that our knowledge of human vision and of the brain is now sophisticated enough that we can speculate intelligently on the neural basis of art and maybe begin to construct a scientific theory of artistic experience. Saying this, as we shall see, does not in any way detract from the originality of the individual artist, for the manner in which she deploys these universal principles is entirely up to her. (After all, knowing the rules of grammar does not diminish our appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius!)

There are other problems too. What, if any, is the key difference between "kitsch" art and the real thing? Some would argue that what’s kitsch for one person might be high art for another — that the judgment is entirely subjective. objectively distinguish the kitsch from the real, how complete is that theory and in what sense can we claim to have really understood the meaning of art? One reason for thinking that there’s a genuine difference is that one can "mature" into liking real art after having once enjoyed kitsch, but it’s virtually impossible to slide back into kitsch from having once known the delights of high art. Yet the difference between the two remains tantalizingly elusive. I speculate here on the possibility that real art involves the "proper" and effective deployment of certain artistic universals, whereas kitsch merely goes through the motions — as if to make a mockery of the principles without a genuine gut-level understanding of them....

To assert that there might be universals in art does not in any way diminish the important role of culture in the creation and appreciation of art. Indeed if this weren’t true there wouldn’t be different styles of art - Renaissance, impressionism, cubism, Indian art, etc. As a scientist, though, my interest is not in the differences between different artistic styles but in principles that cut across cultural barriers.

Here is a tentative list of my ten laws of art:

1) Peak shift
2) Grouping
3) Contrast
4) Isolation
5) Perceptual problem solving
6) Symmetry
7) Abhorrence of coincidences/generic viewpoint
8) Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
9) Balance
10) Metaphor

But it isn’t enough to just list these laws or describe them in detail; we need a coherent biological perspective for thinking about them. In particular, when exploring any universal human trait such as humor, music, art, 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)? Second, why does the particular trait have the logical structure it does? What is the biological function it evolved for? Third, how is the trait or law mediated by the neural machinery in the brain?

Let me illustrate with a concrete example — the law of "grouping" discovered by the Gestalt psychologists around the turn of the century. Figure 4 shows a striking example of this. All you see at first is a set of random splotches, but after several seconds you start grouping some of the splotches together and start seeing a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground. The brain "glues" the dog-splotches together to form a single object and you get an internal "Aha!" sensation as if you have just solved a problem. In short, the grouping feels good.

.........For a detailed analysis, I refer you to my forthcoming book The Artful Brain. This text is an edited extract of Chapter 4.

(A previous essay about the Eight Laws was published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, 1999: Art and the Brain, ed. J. Goguen.)