Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth
Pablo Picasso

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.

I am reminded of patients with right hemisphere stroke who, when asked to draw an object (say, a horse) will create a reasonable likeness, often containing all the required details. But what’s missing is the essence of the horse; the drawing seems almost too detailed but lifeless. This suggests that what we call "the artistic sense" is normally in the right hemisphere — which is damaged in these patients — and the left hemisphere doesn’t quite "get it" even when it tries hard. It leads me to wonder whether "kitsch" is really a feeble, ineffective attempt by the left hemisphere to usurp the intuitive artistic sense of the right. In trying to paint or sculpt, perhaps the left hemisphere tries to "translate" the visual code of the right hemisphere into its own language of logical propositions or explicit rules and, of course, fails to do so – resulting in what we call kitsch. This explanation has a pop–psychology "ring" to it but it may not be too wide off the mark!

Chennai (Madras), the city in Southern India where I was born, dates back to the first millennium B.C. I often return to it as a visiting professor at the Institute of Neurology to work on patients with stroke, with phantom limbs following amputation, or a sensory loss caused by leprosy. During one three-month visit, we were going through a dry spell; there weren’t many patients to see. This gave me time for leisurely walks through the Shiva temple in my neighbourhood in Mylapore to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and to relive childhood memories. I have fond memories of my mother taking me there every Friday to pray while she explained the symbolism of the different Gods and Goddesses and a thousand myths and legends they evoked. This particular temple has an inscription near the entrance saying that the foundations were laid during the 2nd or 3rd century B.C. (The word Mylapore is mentioned by Ptolemy, the Greek, in his writings.) Inside the temple, near one of the inner shrines, a Brahmin priest was chanting the Vedas in Sanskrit to a group of young disciples — even as his ancestors might have done four thousand years ago. This is one of the most striking things about India; there is a genuine sense of timelessness. It has been said that it is the oldest living culture in the world. Shiva, who has been found depicted on five thousand year-old steatite seals in northern India, is still worshipped today and celebrated in myth, legend, and art (Greece too, has a rich mythology but no one there worships Zeus anymore).

A strange thought occurred to me as I looked at the stone and bronze sculptures (or "idols", as the English used to call them) in the temple. In the West these are now found mostly in museums and galleries and referred to as "Indian art". Yet I grew up praying to these as a child and I never thought of them as art. They are so well integrated into the daily worship, the music, dance and into the very fabric of life in India, that it’s hard to know where art ends and where life begins; they are not separate strands of existence, the way they are here in the West.

Thanks to my Western education, until that particular visit to Chennai, I had a rather "colonial" view of Indian sculptures. I thought of them largely as religious iconography or mythology, rather than fine art. Yet on this particular visit, these images had a profound impact on me and started haunting me even in my dreams. One day, when I woke up, I had an epiphany of sorts and I began to see the sculptures as indescribably beautiful works of art, not as religion. Thus began a love affair with art that has continued unabated for the last five years.

As a scientist I wanted to know why? Why were these images, and other great works of art, so beautiful? How does the brain respond to beauty? What did Keats mean when he said "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty"? I started reading voraciously about the history of ideas on art in general and Indian art in particular.

When the English arrived in India during Victorian times, they regarded the study of Indian art mainly as "ethnography" and "anthropology". (This would be equivalent to putting Picasso in the anthropology section of the national museum in Delhi.) They were appalled by the nudity they encountered and often referred to the sculptures as "primitive" or "not realistic". For example the bronze sculpture of Parvati (figure 1), which dates back to the zenith of South Indian art, during the Chola period (12th century A.D.), is regarded in India as the very epitome of feminine sensuality, grace, poise, dignity and charm. Indeed of all that is feminine. Yet when the Englishmen looked at this and other similar sculptures (figure 2), they complained that it wasn’t art because it wasn’t realistic - the sculptures didn’t resemble any real woman. The breasts and hips were too big and the waist too narrow. Similarly, they pointed out that the "miniature" paintings of the Mogul or Rajastani School often lacked perspective — they were primitive because they were not realistic enough.

The metaphorical nuances of Indian art were also completely lost on Western art historians. One eminent bard, Lord Birdwood, considered Indian art to be mere "crafts" and was repulsed by the fact that many of the gods had multiple arms (often allegorically signifying their many divine attributes). He referred to Indian art’s greatest icon, the dancing Shiva or Nataraja, as a "multiarmed monstrosity". Oddly enough he didn’t have the same opinion of angels depicted in Renaissance art — human children with wings sprouting on their scapulae, which were probably just as monstrous to the Indian eye.

It should be clear from these examples that art is not about realism; on the contrary, it’s about deliberate exaggeration and distortion of reality. Yet obviously you can’t just randomly distort an image and call it art. The question, therefore, is what types of distortion are effective? Are there any "rules" that the artist deploys, either consciously or unconsciously, to change the image in a systematic way? And if so how universal are these rules? Most of the examples I will use to illustrate these rules are from Indian art, because that’s what I am most familiar with. But I strongly believe that the same principles apply to any artistic style, be it impressionism, Henry Moore, Chinese art or cubism.

While I was struggling with this question and poring over ancient Indian manuals on art and aesthetics, I often noticed the word rasa. This Sanskrit word is difficult to translate but it roughly means "Capturing the very essence, the very spirit of something, in order to evoke a specific mood or emotion in the viewer’s brain". That entire phrase is encapsulated in the word rasa.

Traditionally there are supposed to be nine rasas (such as Shringara, or amorous love; Hasya, or comical; Raudra, or valour; Adbhuta, or astonishment; etc.). But the term is sometimes used loosely to denote any mood, emotion or sentiment that is conveyed successfully by the artist - and that is the sense in which I will use it here, as a launching-off point for speculating about the neurology of art.

So rasa holds the key. I realized that if you want to understand art you have to understand what rasa is and how it is extracted by the neural circuitry in the brain. One afternoon, in a whimsical mood, I sat at the entrance of the temple and jotted down what I thought might be the "eight universal laws of Art", analogous to the Buddha’s eightfold path to wisdom and enlightenment. (I later came up with two additional laws; the exact number is somewhat arbitrary.) These are rules of thumb that the artist deploys to create visually pleasing images that more optimally titillate the visual areas in the brain (no pun intended!) than he could using "realistic" images or real objects.

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.

Grouping is a well-known law frequently used by both artists and fashion designers. If you look at the classical Renaissance painting in figure 5, you will notice how the same azure blue color repeats all over the canvas — the sky, the robes, and the water. And the same tint of brown is used for clothes, skin, soil, etc. The artist uses a limited set of colors rather than an enormous range of colors. Again the brain enjoys grouping similar-colored splotches; it "feels good", just as it felt good to group the dog splotches, and the artist exploits this. It is unlikely that the artist repeated the same blue for different parts of the picture simply because he was being stingy or had only one blue on his palette.

The same holds for fashion. When you go to Nordstrom’s to buy a red skirt the salesgirl will advise you to buy a red scarf and a red belt to go with it. Or if you are a guy buying a blue suit, she may recommend a tie with some identical blue flecks to go with the suit. But what’s all this really about? Is there a logical reason for doing this? Is it just marketing and hype, or is it telling you something fundamental about the brain? This is the why question.

The surprising answer is that vision evolved mainly to defeat camouflage and to detect objects in cluttered scenes. This seems counterintuitive, because when you look around you objects are clearly visible — certainly not "camouflaged". In a modern urban environment, objects are so commonplace that we don’t realize that vision is mainly about detecting objects so that you can avoid them, dodge them, chase them, eat them, or mate with them. We take the familiar for granted; but just think of one of your arboreal ancestors trying to spot a lion hidden behind a screen of green splotches (a tree branch in front of it). What’s visible is only several yellow splotches — lion fragments. But the brain "says" (in effect): "What’s the likelihood that all these fragments are exactly the same color by coincidence? Zero. So they probably belong to one object. So let me glue them together to see what it is. Oops! It’s a lion — let me run!" This seemingly esoteric ability to group splotches may have made all the difference between life and death.

Little does the salesgirl at Nordstrom realize that when she picks the "matching" red scarf for your red skirt, she is tapping into a deep principle underlying brain organization, and that she’s taking advantage of the fact that your brain evolved to detect lions seen behind foliage — so grouping "feels good". Of course the red scarf and red skirt are not one object, so logically they shouldn’t be grouped, but that doesn’t stop her from exploiting the "grouping law" anyway, to create an attractive combination. The same holds for paintings and mattes, or even blobs of similar color on different objects within a painting. The point is the rule was statistically valid in the treetops in which our brains evolved. It was valid often enough that incorporating it into the visual brain centers as a law helped your ancestors leave more babies behind and that’s all that matters in evolution; the fact that an artist can misapply the rule in an individual painting, making you group splotches from different objects, is irrelevant, because the brain is "fooled" and it enjoys the grouping anyway.

And now we need to answer the how question. When you look at a large lion seen through foliage, the different yellow lion fragments occupy widely separated regions of the visual field — yet your brain glues them together. How? Each fragment excites a separate cell (or small cluster of cells) in widely separated portions of the visual cortex and of the color areas of the brain. Each cell signals the presence of the feature by means of a volley of nerve impulses — a train of what are called "spikes". The exact sequence is random; if you show the same feature to the same cell it will fire again just as vigorously but there’s a new random sequence that isn’t identical to the first. What seems to matter for recognition is not what the exact pattern of nerve impulses is, but which neurons fire and how much they fire; a principle known as "Muller’s law".

That’s the standard story, but an astonishing new discovery by Wolf Singer and Charles Gray adds a novel twist to it. They found that if a monkey looks at a big object (say a lion) of which only fragments are visible, then many cells fire in parallel — to signal the different fragments; and that’s what you would expect. But surprisingly, as soon as the features were grouped into a whole object (in this case, a lion) all the spike trains became perfectly synchronized. We don’t yet know how this occurs, but Singer and Gray suggest that it is this syncrony that tells whatever is "reading" these signals higher up in the brain that the fragments belong to a single object. I would take this argument a step further and suggest that this synchrony allows the spike trains to be encoded in such a way that a coherent output emerges which is relayed to the emotional ("limbic") core of the brain, creating an "Aha! Look here — it’s an object!" jolt in you. This jolt "arouses" you and makes you swivel your eyeballs and head towards the object. So you can pay attention to it, identify it, and take action. It's this aha signal that the artist exploits when he uses grouping in his paintings.

Can we attempt a similar analysis for our other laws?

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.)