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.”

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?

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.  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.

Sweet – usually indicates energy rich nutrients

Umami – the taste of amino acids (e.g. meat broth or aged cheese)

Salty – allows modulating diet for electrolyte balance

Sour – typically the taste of acids

Bitter – allows sensing of diverse natural toxins

What if the complex likes and dislikes of things we ingest could be correlated with taste in art?

I’m thiiiiiinking.  Stay tuned.

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).

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?

45 foot piece from cut cardboard on 3 walls of the Yaddo studio, March 2010

Detail of corner where pieces start to fall apart

Detail, made from cut up cardboard boxes from the kitchen recycling

Detail of the cut pieces from cardboard boxes

Detail, where pieces are falling and poking out

Detail, pieces fall apart and get organized

Detail across back wall and out the door, snowy outside Yaddo studio

Walking thru the studio at Yaddo, cardboard piece is 9 ft x 45 ft

Jaime Gomez and Sarah Belden — “Mapping new Neural Pathways”

ESF exploratory workshop, Milan Sept09

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:

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).”