Imagining a predictive model of aesthetics

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

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?

What if the taste buds on our tongue were indicators of aesthetic tastes?  All taste resides in the brain.

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.

Randomness and the brain's search for patterns

"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

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

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