the volant idea

youmightfindyourself:

Making art and appreciating art seems to be universal in the human species. From prehistoric cave paintings to modern conceptualism, where you find human beings you also find art. At the same time, no one has ever been able to give a very good definition of art, to explain in any rigorous and satisfying way what it is that human beings are up to when they make art and when they like art. It is a subject that touches on the strangeness of consciousness, the felt sense of being human that all of us experience every day but that is so resistant to explanation or analysis. Art is thus a kind of Holy Grail to those who seek to explain the murkiest aspects of human consciousness. But it is this very fact — the experiential and intangible nature of art — that would seem to preclude the possibility that science can intrude into the domain of art. As Ramachandran himself admits, “One is a quest for general principles and tidy explanations while the other is a celebration of the individual imagination and spirit, so that the very notion of a science of art seems like an oxymoron.”

That is, indeed, more or less the problem. Theories of art have proliferated for as long as we’ve had philosophy and theory. All of them have tried, in one way or another, to elucidate general principles. The problem, as Ramachandran understands it, is that we simply haven’t known enough about how the brain operates. Now, he says, that situation has finally changed. He claims specifically 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.”

Speculate he does. Ramachandran identifies what he calls nine laws of aesthetics. Let’s look at one of them — law number two, which he calls Peak Shift — to get a sense of what neuroscience brings to aesthetics. Peak Shift refers to a generally elevated response to exaggerated stimuli among many animals. Ramachandran refers to a study in which seagull chicks were made to beg for food (just as they do from their mothers) simply by waving a beak-like stick in front of their nests. Later, the researchers pared down even further, simply waving a yellow strip of cardboard with a red dot on the end (adult gulls have a red dot at the end of their beaks). They got the same response. More interesting, and crucially for Ramachandran’s law of Peak Shift, is that the gull chicks become super excited if you put three red dots on the cardboard strip. Something in the mental hardwiring of the chicks says, “red outline on lighter background means food.” The wiring does not normally need to be more specific than that. It is enough for survival. So, the chick brains make the leap to interpreting the advent of several red outlines as being several times better. They go nuts.

This fact, Ramachandran thinks, can give us some real, neurologically based insights into the appeal for abstract art. Ramachandran supposes that with abstract art, human beings have learned to tap into their own gull chick response mechanisms. Abstract artists are thus “tapping into the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar and creating ultranormal stimuli that more powerfully excite certain visual neurons in our brains as opposed to realistic-looking images.”

There is something creepy about the idea that we are forced, in some sense, to admit a liking for Henry Moore that we would otherwise deny. But I propose that we take it seriously for a moment. If, in rigorous test after rigorous test, neuroscientists such as Ramachandran can begin to establish many of these universal laws and fine tune the analysis of how they operate, is it possible that this would have no effect on how we then continue to appreciate and even to produce art? Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the Shakespeare analogy holds. Maybe there is something so solid, so intransigent to our humanness and to the way that we experience the world no amount of such knowledge can shake it apart.

I suspect, though, that we have no idea what the implications of discovering the laws of aesthetics would be. Ramchandran basically agrees. The final sentence in the last chapter of his book explicitly says it. He is speaking more broadly about the project of explaining human consciousness in total, but the thought applies to the specific realm of art. “We don’t know,” he writes, “what the ultimate outcome of such a journey will be, but surely it is the greatest adventure humankind has ever embarked on.” Probably he is correct about this. To understand our own origins and to understand exactly how we got to be the kinds of creatures we are — this is the ultimate quest. It is also appropriate that such enthusiasm, such optimism guide the adventure.

Finally, Ramachandran breaks away from his reverie. He apologizes for straying too far afield. He assures us, once again, that his non-reductionist approach to neuroscience will in no way diminish great works of art. He wants it to be the case, and you can feel the desire in the passage, that the insights gained from neuroscience and his interpretations of the power of the Nataraja are deeply compatible. Maybe so, maybe so. Maybe the insights of neuroscience will “actually enhance our appreciation of [art’s] intrinsic value.” But the insistence strikes me as conveying a lingering sadness that Ramachandran never acknowledges. The sadness lingers in the between-spaces of his sentences, in the silent moments that fill up the pauses as he moves from one argument to another. He doesn’t know, he can’t know, what we will lose or what we will gain. And he is aware, as we are all aware in our heart’s heart, that we aren’t going to stop doing this anyway. We are going to go forward into the unknown in the quest to make art fully knowable and we’ll deal with the consequences when we’ve arrived, joyful in our accomplishments and sad, too, at the inevitable loss of all that has been left behind.

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human