blog
Do we crave the staccato beat of the internet?
July 23, 2010
For a long time I’ve thought certain visual patterns talk to our brain in a way that is comforting, reassuring and familiar.
By adult-hood our mind has spent some twenty million minutes visually taking-in, resorting, recalling, recollecting, dreaming and making up images. Somehow those images all have a distinctive underlying abstract pattern and visual rhythm — best comparison would be the cadence of a paragraph of prose or the underlying beat of a melody.
Gamma brain oscillations
Well past puberty, the brain is learning and developing procedural and semantic memory. Muscle memory, the 10,000 hours rule, all the studies that explain the plasticity of the brain point to the idea that we wire our brain through repetition.
So what does the thousands of hours and millions of minutes of digital media mean to our brain, do we now crave the staccato beat of the internet? Do we get a dose of serotonin when the visual rhythm matches the pattern we’ve grown to love and anticipate?
After searching online this morning for neurotransmitters and visual pattern, I found….
A research team from the Cardiff Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC) put subjects into an MRI scanner and recorded their brain activity using MRI and MEG technologies while showing them different visual patterns. They discovered that a person’s brain produces a unique electrical oscillation at a particular frequency when a person looks at specific visual patterns. This oscillation frequency is mainly determined by the concentration of the neurotransmitter GABA in the visual cortex of the person’s brain. The more GABA was found to be present, the higher the frequency of the oscillations.
Leading the research was Professor Krish Singh from the Cardiff School of Psychology, who said – “Using sophisticated MEG and MRI brain imaging equipment, we’ve found that when a person looks at a visual pattern their brain produces an electrical signal, known as a gamma oscillation, at a set frequency.
“In effect, each person’s brain ‘sings’ at a different note in the range 40-70 Hz. This is similar to the notes in the lowest octaves of a standard piano keyboard or the lower notes on a bass guitar. Importantly, we also found that this frequency appears to be controlled by how much of an essential neurotransmitter, GABA, is present in a person’s visual cortex.”
Serotonin and the sense of well-being from art objects
July 22, 2010
A depiction of the organization of the serotonin transporter showing the 5HTTLPR region
Mostly we ignore ourselves, I read recently that people who get cochlear implants as adults (to enable hearing), have enormous difficulty tuning out the deafening sound of their own heartbeat. We’ve trained our brain to ignore it.
Do we pay attention to our mood and odd factors that affect our appetite, ability to sleep, memory and general sense of well-being? Serotonin is at the root of this, we all know anti-depressants are ‘serotonin reuptake inhibitors’ – meaning they slow the rate of deterioration and keep serotonin in the system longer. Although there is more doubt that these actually work outside severely depressed individuals. Nonetheless, we’ve heard of Serotonin.
Interestingly Serotonin is mostly found in our gut. While Serotonin is a neuro-transmitter it’s not in our brain, 80% is in our gastro-intestinal tract. The production of Serotonin is shockingly complex – connected to not just body chemistry, but food intake, with an inverse relationship to other neurotransmitters, like Dopamine. But the release of Serotonin seems to be triggered by positive events, such as finding food and eating it. I’m hunting for the connection of Serotonin to art, and the biological urge to find comfort in visual objects. Is Serotonin released when we find art objects or ideas we like?
Imagining a predictive model of aesthetics
June 18, 2010
Within my lifetime, I think science will understand why your brain likes what it likes. Not only neuroscientists, but marketers, advertisers, and designers will all employ brain scans to anticipate preferences, catch our attention, design packaging and pattern our surroundings. It’s already happening, but the precision and accuracy targeted at every individual is going to be amazing.
I’ve developed a hypothesis — I think beauty or the sense of great comfort from art is related to the viewer’s early experience and the desire to recover something recognizable. Not at the literal or narrative level of memory, but where pattern operates like music, and provides a rhythm that feels like a familiar recollection at the level just below consciousness. I think science will find attraction and desire are based on brain fluency, which is wired from the cumulative stimulus of individual life experience. By extension, I believe each of us has something like a ‘genome of sensory preference’, which could be mapped. And eventually it’s possible a predictive model of aesthetics could be built for each of us.
Brain scans for configurable art
June 05, 2010
I’ve been struggling with what is within my reach financially and technologically to use new brain scan technology to begin to test and build configurable art.
Brain scans for configurable art. That’s the idea.
But, it’s not that simple, I think a direct measure of aesthetic preference needs to be built from underlying components of desire. At this stage, neuroscience is struggling and debating how to actually measure preference. Neural activity in some part of the brain means — what?
Functional- MRI’s are more expensive and measure blood-flow deep in the brain, and can pinpoint actual location of the brain’s response to any activity you can do while lying in a little tube with a massive magnet spinning around you. EEG’s are external measures of electrical output, and capture brain waves, namely alpha, beta, theta, …..indicators of attention and relaxation. EEG’s are old, low-tech and now shockingly cheap, single sensors are in toys (yes, Mattel has a toy) but, it’s not clear that they can actually measure much.
I’m hunting for any slim possibility to find relative ways to measure individual response to sensory stimulus. Found an article about using EEG’s to measure Emotion. It was ‘thin’, but gave me a glimmer of hope.
Stay tuned, I’m working on the sensory stimulus….I think it’s connected to taste-buds, tactile response, auditory preference….namely other senses. It’s possible all your sensory inputs are related and somehow build your unique, complex equation of aesthetic preference. Look at my post and related article on neural fluency, your preferences probably all relate to how easily your brain processes them. Stay tuned.
Taste buds = aesthetic taste?
April 27, 2010
What if the taste buds on our tongue were indicators of aesthetic tastes? All taste resides in the brain.
What if the complex likes and dislikes of things we ingest could be correlated with taste in art?
I’m thiiiiiinking. Stay tuned.
Randomness and the brain’s search for patterns
March 23, 2010
“The world is a confusing place. Correlation looks like causation; the signal sounds like the noise; randomness is everywhere. This raises the obvious question: How does the human brain cope with such an epistemic mess? How do we deal with the helter-skelter of reality? One approach would be to ground all of our beliefs in modesty and uncertainty, to recognize that we know so little and understand even less.
Needless to say, that’s not what we do. Instead of grappling with the problem of induction, we believe in God. Instead of applying Bayesian logic, we slip into rigid ideologies, which lead us to neglect all sorts of salient facts.
A new paper by psychologists at the University of Waterloo explores the connection between the presence of randomness and our belief in the supernatural.” Jonah Lehrer writes in his blogpost last week, (love him).
The brain is mainly an image processing system
March 09, 2010
The more I think about it, I believe the brain is primarily an image processing system….that is built on pattern recognition. Even when it’s processing abstract symbols (read more from Gilberto de Paiva on this) it organizes around semantic patterns, visual patterns, logical patterns. Even emotional and behavioral patterns enable us to read and interpret a situation.
Pattern recognition is what enables us to ignore or summarize most of the daily visual stimulation.
While spending 5 weeks in the trees at the Yaddo artist colony in January and February this year — it was interesting to note the absence of signage and logos ever present in urban spaces. I got to thinking about little language, images, symbols were present even 150 years ago. Unlikely the human brain has evolved much in just a half dozen generations….so how are we managing to process everything on our laptops, shopping trips and daily commute?
More on neuroaesthetics
January 21, 2010
Art and mathematics are fundamentally concerned with the representation of the surrounding world. They struggle to express by abstraction the general behind the specific….and establish what’s essential and relevant. Human minds satisfy the basic human urge to find patterns….at all levels, from molecular to societal.
Jaime Gomez and Sarah Belden — “Mapping new Neural Pathways”
ESF exploratory workshop, Milan Sept09
Why do you like what you like
January 16, 2010
I’ve been rolling around this notion in my mind, that beauty is connected to the familiar in your brain. There is a complex set of connections formed early and build through a lifetime. I hypothesize that you can trigger neurons in a sequence that feel familiar and are also unconsciously comforting…..and thus pleasing. Maybe the connection in the brain is about ‘fluency’. This makes total sense to me.
Article written in 2004 by Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwartz, and Piotr Winkielman entitled “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” — they write that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the viewers brain processing…. “the more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response.”
Steve Genco (love him) boils this down in a post and writes….
“The idea of processing fluency is deceptively simple. Things that are easier to process cognitively are perceived as more aesthetically pleasing than things that are harder to process.
Unexpected fluency tends to produce more subjective experience than expected fluency:
According to the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis (Whittlesea & Williams, 1998, 2000), fluency associated with processing a certain event is more likely to elicit a subjective experience (pleasure, familiarity, etc.) if the fluency is unexpected in light of the person’s processing expectations, which constitute a “norm” for the event (Kahneman & Miller, 1986).
With low levels of complexity, the source of fluency is very salient. As complexity increases, the salience of the source of perceptual fluency decreases, enhancing the misattribution of fluency to beauty. However, further increases in complexity will eventually reduce processing fluency, leading to a decrease in perceived beauty. These mechanisms would combine to form a U-shaped relation between complexity and beauty, as predicted and found by Berlyne (1971).”
Art that targets the inner mind
December 29, 2009
What does art look like that targets the inner mind….not the flat, literal renderings of physical brains…but work that tries to feel what is inside your head….look like? A show at the Drawing Center in 2005 of Agnes Martin, Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint is the best example of work that uses abstraction as a means to connect cognitive powers, the process of life and visual art.
Emma Kunz envisioned art as healing — which is a powerful idea. That something visual could trigger your brain chemistry to affect your body…..like a drug. What if she’s not wrong? (Emma Kunz n.d. approx 1930)
Jerry Saltz wrote a beautiful review of the show, about Martin he wrote….”To look at her work is to know what meditation feels like. Many of her early paintings and drawings come on like thunderstorms from across transcendental valleys. The sereneThis Rain (1960) looks like a Buddhist test pattern from the planet Rothko.” (Agnes Martin 1963)
Evidence of non-conscious processing
November 19, 2009
Non-conscious processing exists.
Watch the video — stay til the end. Click here… Derren Brown — Subliminal Advertising with explanation There is another video with different people, slightly different campaign, but the explanation is not quite as clear, I liked this one better.
Subliminal messages hit your brain and are processed when you need them. Crazy, huh?
If you consider the amount of words and images you encounter in a day, ad guys say it’s over 5000 ad messages, and pile on all the other stuff you drive by, walk by, and surf by…it’s positively bombarding that ‘hunter-gatherer human brain’ of yours. 150 years ago you would have seen a few signs in shop windows, maybe pick up a book, read a newspaper….don’t you wonder where it’s all going? How much can you absorb in a day?
Your brain doesn’t have arms, legs and toes
September 23, 2009
With all the flurry of articles about brain-scans – fMRIs, there’s a great article about the fallacy of overintrepreting the lit areas of a scan. Your brain isn’t made up of nodes or specific locations for specific activities. It’s not like your brain has a spot for looking at a painting, or making a deodorant buying decision…even though research is testing those things, and looking for what ‘lights-up’ when you engage in such an activity.
Scientific American – Five ways brains scans mislead us
(you can read the whole article here, sorry Scientific American, you charge $7.95 to get the full article and I found a pdf for free for you…it’s worth a look)
I contend it’s still very early days, and the fascination of fMRI testing is in full force. My favorite analogy of all I’ve read is that memory is more the bits in a blender — the picture of that is so compelling and vivid. In this article Michael Shermer he makes a clear case for why the brain is more akin to a network, and offers good skepticism about applying too much pop-science to brain scans.
This is your brain on Picasso
August 25, 2009
Good article in “Psychology Today”, July 1, 2009 Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind
Just a bit of it grabbed here….the 10 rules are scary.
“The interesting thing about kitsch is that it often looks like art,” explains Ramachandran. “But it’s not art, because it doesn’t trigger the same intensity of feeling.” He suggests that while kitsch often relies on the same tricks as great art—universal principles such as the peak-shift effect and the peekaboo principle—these tricks aren’t as well executed. “Anybody can learn these visual rules,” he says. “But you still need talent and training in order to turn them into fine art.”
Attempts to define art are nothing new. But Ramachandran is seeking to define it from the perspective of the brain, and he’s in the midst of a brain-imaging experiment he believes will help. Subjects lie in an fMRI machine and view examples of kitsch—art objects ridiculed for their shallowness or sentimentality—as well as fine art, like the canvases that hang in museums. A Christmas lawn ornament of Santa Claus might be juxtaposed with a Michelangelo sculpture; an image from a Hallmark card might be compared to a Rembrandt painting. By measuring brain activity, Ramachandran hopes to find out why visual stimuli that seem so superficially similar can generate such different aesthetic reactions.
This is Your Brain on Picasso 10 Perceptual Principles of Great Art
PEAK SHIFT: We find deliberate distortions of a stimulus even more exciting than the stimulus itself—which is why cartoon caricatures grab our attention.
GROUPING: It feels nice when the distinct parts of a picture can be grouped into a pattern or form. The brain likes to find the signal amid the noise.
BALANCE: Successful art makes use of its entire representational space, and spreads its information across the entire canvas.
CONTRAST: Because of how the visual cortex works, it’s particularly pleasing for the brain to gaze at images rich in contrast, like thick black outlines or sharp angles—or, as in the geometric art of Mondrian, both at once.
ISOLATION: Sometimes less is more. By reducing reality to its most essential features—think a Matisse that’s all bright color and sharp silhouettes—artists amplify the sensory signals we normally have to search for.
PERCEPTUAL PROBLEM SOLVING: Just as we love solving crossword puzzles, we love to “solve” abstract paintings such as cubist still lifes or Cézanne landscapes.
SYMMETRY: Symmetrical things, from human faces to Roman arches, are more attractive than asymmetrical ones.
REPETITION, RHYTHM, ORDERLINESS: Beauty is inseparable from the appearance of order. Consider the garden paintings of Monet. Pictures filled with patterns, be it subtle color repetitions or formal rhythms, appear more elegant and composed.
GENERIC PERSPECTIVE: We prefer things that can be observed from multiple viewpoints, such as still lifes and pastoral landscapes, to the fragmentary perspective of a single person. They contain more information, making it easier for the brain to deduce what’s going on.
METAPHOR: Metaphor encourages us to see the world in a new way: Two unrelated objects are directly compared, giving birth to a new idea. Picasso did this all the time—he portrayed the bombing of Guernica, for example, with the imagery of a bull, a horse, and a lightbulb.
The familiar and the novel….and the tension between the two
August 24, 2009
Steve Genco writes a genuinely insightful blog post
“One of the unsolved mysteries of the brain is why it is attracted to both the familiar and the novel, and how these two predispositions duke it out in bringing objects to our conscious attention. On the one hand, we find the familiar comforting, and often ascribe positive emotional valence to objects just because we have seen them before. On the other hand, we are attracted to novelty and originality, precisely because it is not familiar. Aesthetics, I think, is about this attraction to the novel and original, and neuroaesthetics is about what happens in our brains when this attention and attraction occur.”
I totally agree, I believe making work that touches the familiar is a powerful way to use visual language to reach out and grab someone.
How much organization is enough?
July 28, 2009
Have been considering the human desire for organization. Isn’t that why early northern civilizations survived cold/long winters. Those folks planned enough food for the winter, and prepped early enough to get all done before deep snow, the desire to have all in it’s exact place must be buried in the dna.
There is something incredibly soothing about the checked-off todo list, the clean counter and scads of old saved ‘might possibly use them in the future’ art supplies all put away in clear boxes. How much organization does the brain need to feel calm, and how much sends it over the ‘I’m totally bored’ edge.
I did read that the brain recognizes verticals and horizontals, is that why organization is about stacking and lining things up? Books on a shelf, stacks of paper, cabinets full of drawers, ….rather than piles.
Thinking of those verticals and horizontals — looked again at several Mondrian paintings at San Francisco MOMA last week, and I do believe he was totally right. It must be vertical and horizontal.
Old posts
July 21, 2009
Jun 26, 2009: Stravinsky knew the brain craved organization, “He realized that the engine of music is conflict, not consonance. The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt.”, by withholding and consenting the patten that we crave, it pulls you in. Reread Proust was a Neuroscientist, better the 2nd read.
Jun 3, 2009: Wouldn’t it be nice if you could slightly reorganize a big lumpy collage painting….and put the marks exactly where you want them? No, really — what if you could adjust the piece made by someone else….just the way you wanted it.
May 28, 2009: Been to the Dollar store in Chinatown (multiple trips), Flushing and 7th Ave in the Fashion District. I’m interested in the idea of the lumpy collage. How much does your mind see in 3D?
May 19, 2008: Back to work. Can other materials ping the same brain pattern as a collage of cut paper? Been to the Dollar store, and have a pile of new stuff.
May 13, 2009: Still hanging the show, I think people imagine it more glamorous than it actually is. BAM party was packed last Saturday, Arthouse Texas has 5×7 show this Fri night. Go look, totally great.
May 10, 2009: OK to experiment for decades, I think a combination of intense problem solving with building brain myelin can produce work that goes to a new place.
May 2, 2009: What you can actually remember is triggered by the emotion accompanying the event, how many times you reconsider it, and the oddness or novelty of it. One researcher wrote that during sleep, the brain gathers those things that have been considered, reconsidered and helps cement them into more lucid and clear memory.
April 25, 2009: “Gabriel returned every few weeks to add to his growing arsenal of body art. Resurrection was a slow process. He had the old piano he’d given her for her birthday tattooed on his right leg, the image of one of her mix-tapes on his ass, a pair of cut-offs she’d left at the house on his forearm. Then, he moved on to her favorite foods: beets, Brussels sprouts, mangos, milkshakes. Gabriel filled up his skin until every inch of epidermis looked brand new; overlapping images, memories that he would no longer have to remember. After all, they were right there, writ literal on his body.” — Mary Helen Specht. Read the triptych here Collaborative show Apr 2009.
April 19, 2009: Proportion and relationships of patterns are hugely responsible for what is considered beautiful. Fibonacci sequences, golden sections, and geometric relationships are massively studied in art as a means to deliver a positive experience to the brain. I think it’s about mirroring back an organic experience that is innately familiar yet perfectly proportioned. I think the brain see’s something of itself and likes what it sees.
April 6, 2009: “Artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists sent men to the moon and spacecraft to Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats, the human mind, remained almost entirely dark, a vast and mostly uncharted universe as mysterious as the New World was to explorers of the past.”
Brain Power article in April 5, NYTimes — “What could that engram actually be? The answer, previous research suggests, is that brain cells activated by an experience keep one another on biological speed-dial, like a group of people joined in common witness of some striking event. Call on one and word quickly goes out to the larger network of cells, each apparently adding some detail, sight, sound, smell. The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells.”
April 5, 2009: “Collage engages us with an immediacy that is distinct from other mediums. The artist confronts us with a vision of the world that is literally constructed from the physical context of his/her own experience. Found images and objects function as signifiers of both individual and collective experience. By incorporating materials that are inextricably linked to the realities of daily life, the artist establishes an immediate identification, both real and imagined, between the viewer and the work of art. The simplicity of the collage process adds to the sense of immediacy and spontaneity. Collage allows the artist to explore simultaneously the mysterious spaces between high art and popular culture, text and image, figuration and abstraction, past and present, two and three-dimensional space.” — Pavel Zoubok
April 4, 2009: I contend that memory is complex and multi-layered. It’s true that immediate vision of real-time events is actually little pieces of visual memory stitched together (you only see a tiny spot – so a panoramic view is really little pieces stitched together via memory). Super-short term working memory is somehow different than an experience you recall from long term memory of an earlier time. My view is that recalling an event from long-term memory is complex and fires multiple neurons in multiple places, it’s something like a symphony or a jazz sextet going full steam in your brain. A painting that similarly fires multiple parts of your brain from words, fonts, color, pattern, rhythm, proportion, perspective and shapes can begin to deliver a similar experience. That’s my belief.
March 30, 2009: Neuroscientists even today, don’t understand how memory works — really. People always refer to memory like storage files or computers disc drives, couldn’t be more wrong. The best description I’ve read is that memory operates more like a blender on high speed, and all the little bits get chopped and diced and chemically wired to different places. Because when they test memory of those with damage or malfunction, scientists can watch what is broken, and realize that one piece will work fine, and another can be totally absent. Like the woman who could use and write consonants, but not vowels. But more interestingly, what’s cool about researching memory is that you can try things out on yourself, and experience how your own memory works.
March 23, 2009: “… the artist is in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach. The first step is to understand better the common organization of our visual and emotional brains, before we can even proceed to enquire into the determinants of neural variability. But there is little reason to doubt that a study of variability, of how a common visual activation can arouse disparate emotional states, will constitute the next giant step in experimental studies of the visual brain.” –Semir Zeki — Saw Prof Zeki and Peter Sellars talk over the weekend. www.neuroaesthetics.org
March 5, 2009: Favorite neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin talk last night at Brainwave – multiple neurons are firing, competing for attention, the loudest make it above consciousness. Creativity is a reach for the quieter transmissions. When you do a brainscan of auditory memory, the same neurons fire as when the music was originally played. Familiarity and prediction is important to the listener, there needs to be a feeling of connection with the artist…with the ability to anticipate without boredom. Can a composer take you on a journey and then deliver a payoff.
Mar 3, 2009: Chaos. Is not actually chaotic, but has patterns that repeat. The random is not random. Patterns repeat, but are not repetitive.
Feb 24, 2009: The power of a piece of art may rest in its ability to trigger the brain in a way that is reminiscent of a personal memory….meaning it fires similar neurons in a sequence that feels like bits of time you’ve already experienced.
Jan 31, 2009: One of the brain books explains the purpose for memory is more about anticipating the future rather than remembering the past. Human memory and the ability to recognize patterns of danger helps us survive. Memory is all about anticipation and predicting.
Dec 5, 2008: Been working on aluminum panels.. Weird combo of tech – modern with paper pieces from another time. Totally makes sense to me. And — yes we can! Election euphoria still in the air. Thank god, there’s hope. Meanwhile financial turmoil and tough decisions pushing the collage work to a slightly different frenetic feel.Am struggling to make the words both important and unimportant.
Oct 26, 2008: Posted several new works on the site this morning. What strange times we live in, there’s anxiety in the air. But am excited by the upcoming election.
Oct 8, 2008: Who are these people who update blogs everyday? Shocked that it’s been a couple months. I’ve been working on several new large pieces, have been experimenting…some are total duds, and others — especially the work directly with paper on aluminum panels feels good. Has a high-tech, handmade quality that feels like the times. Still reading about memory, interworkings of the brain and putting the pieces together in my head.
July 9, 2008: Just returned from Venice, Siena and Rome, Italy….after just over a month. Aaaaaaah. I think I have enough drawings, and memory of color to work for a year. Rome is so orange, and Venice is so blue. Everything inside the buildings in Venice is gold, not like gold, real gold. Unreal.
June 24, 2008: Greetings from Rome. Took a bit to understand what’s, what here, and what shape the work will take.. Am in Italy for a month, most of that time at the American Academy in Rome as a visiting artist. All the 30+ Rome Prize winners are here, very cool to meet/talk with them. Seriously high-octane. Drawing from archaeological sites that you can see in Central Rome, they’re recessed and filled with all these organized and disorganized bits. But really, the rhythm, the proportions are all original Roman. And pretty perfect. Can imagine the birds-eye view, and from above they could be a lumpy-collage.More to come. Am still working.