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This article is from WeChat public account: Neural reality (ID: neureality), guest speaker: Zhu Rui (specialized professor of philosophy at Shenzhen University),

Organization: Rick, Editor: Spring, Little Sunflower, EON, Poster & Illustrator: Left, original title: “Why does art look like? Like art? Neurosynthesis Mind + Speech, titled from: Visual China

How do you look at art from the perspective of the human brain, especially modern art?

Hello everyone, very fortunate and very grateful to Neuro Reality for inviting me to do this public interest lecture. Today I want to discuss with you a relatively new topic, how to look at art from the perspective of the human brain, especially modern art. More specifically, it is how to examine the proposition of “parallelism between human brain and art” in modern neuroscience.

First of all, what I want to discuss is why we should observe the parallelism between human brain and art from the perspective of neuroscience. A key reason is that neuroscience not only provides a new perspective for art, but also provides new interpretations and interpretations of the original art phenomena; more importantly, neuroscience opens a new window for art. We are beginning to realize that perhaps neuroscience can provide a new methodology for various humanities, social and social phenomena, including art.

So from this perspective, the meaning of neuroscience is twofold: on the one hand, it is the rationality and value of itself as a science; on the other hand, I personally think that more importantly, It brings a breakthrough in methodology. So even though many people (including me) may disagree with certain propositions or conclusions of neuroscience, this should not be damaged or Endangering the significance of neuroscience to the humanities and social science methodology.

Jacques-Louis David “The Death of Socrates”, Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Nietzsche said a word, our pursuit of knowledge is like digging a tunnel and attacking a castle. Different professions and different disciplines are digging different tunnels. Which tunnel is dug, everyone will concentrate on dig that tunnel. I think neuroscience is, in a sense, a very important tunnel in modern science (including social sciences), everyone is still digging (The team of neuro-reality is also digging). We want to know how we should use this new scientific window to test traditional philosophical and artistic problems.

My speech today is introductory. If you have a professional problem, you can continue to discuss it with me after the speech.

I divide the speech into four parts, the first part is the basic visual principle; the second part is the introduction of neuro-aesthetics; the third part is the four propositions of parallelism, then talk about brain damage and The relationship between artistic creation; in the end I will introduce the cubism, supremacism and the Fauvism of modern art.

Jean Auguste Dominique Angel “Homer’s Praise”, photo source: Musée du Louvre

Basic principles of vision

First, let’s take a look at some of the basic principles of vision. Some basic principles of visual theory can be summarized as follows:

Vision happens in the brain. We should not think of vision as a sensory experience that occurs at the edge of an organism, but rather as an experience of brain and sensory cooperation (recognized serial vision), that is, it is not only a treatment of the image of the retina, but also a complex process of calculating the retinal imaging by the cerebral cortex. So, we have to overcome the simple impression of the past about vision, that is, opening the eyes and seeing the world.

The process of visual and brain neural operations has similarities and commonalities. In fact, this commonality has been reflected in the early days of art history. Art is the information of the two-dimensional world. It uses a piece of paper to construct and interpret the information of the three-dimensional world. For example, the perspective of the Renaissance era is to use the information of the two-dimensional world to interpret and express the intention of the three-dimensional world (image) . This is a basic task of art.

The development of modern science has made us clearly aware that the basic tasks of the human brain are also true. Because the visual image on the retina is also a two-dimensional image, and it is an inverted two-dimensional image. In other words, the retina has to transform the two-dimensional image we see into a three-dimensional world, the world we see. The process of artistic creation is also a process from two to three. This is also a factual basis that parallelism is important.

Secondly, the visual experience, from the perspective of modern neuropsychology and vision, is not just the sensory experience of traditional philosophy, but perception. Traditional philosophy emphasizes the distinction between ideas and rationality, ideas and feelings. The current visual model theory denies this simple dualism. On the contrary, we open our eyes and see the world outside, with the participation of ideas. In the words of psychology or neuroscience, not only the bottom-up information transmission process (top-down). Secondly, the visual process is a separate and combined, hierarchical, continuous information processing process , also a kind Parallel processing.

These sound very abstract, and in fact they have a profound impact on the artist’s creation and on the world we see.

The visual process is not only a bottom-up process, but also a top-down process. This premise and structure show that when we look at objects, there is a deep layer, including Memory, concepts, and even cultural aspects. For example, Foucault has an important concept, the concept of epistemology, called “knowledge type.” Every era, every society has its own specific knowledge type (episteme, Greek). People use the concept of knowledge to look at a world, so sometimes, in a proper environment, we can immediately see the knowledge type of the object—the knowledge behind art or other representations.

Third, the basic mechanism of vision is a projection of consciousness or subjective expectation (expectation), not simple Accept the outside world information. The basic task of vision, similar to the basic task of art, is how to establish the amount of information that must be relied upon to understand the world from the complex and varied information flow. This is called neurological science, or epistemologically called “constantness problem” 1, separation and combination

All students who study visual neurology, probably the first time they will see a picture, are called “visual pathways” (transverse section of the brain ).

Here’s a brief introduction to this path: Light enters from the eye and then arrives in this area(section) – primary vision zone (primary visual cortex). Each eye has an independent field of view. The field of view can be divided into two parts, one is the medial side, the other is the lateral side, the inner side is called the nasal side, the nasal side is (nasal side/ nasal section of the retinal section) Span> is the inner side or the nasal side of the retina. The information it receives is information from the outside of the field of view or the side of the temple.

Visual Pathway, Image Source: Guest Offers

In the distribution of visual field information, there is a feature called “distribution of parallax”. The visual information of the lateral field of view will cross the middle of the intersection, and then pass to the contralateral brain structure, and then pass through the chin of the thalamus. (lateral geniculate nucleus), further differentiate into the upper and lower structures, which will pass to the primary visual cortex (primary visual cortex) The lower part of the cortex, then the upper part becomes the lower part. This model shows that the process we see the world is a separation and combination.

The visual process begins with separation, first dividing the information of each eye into two: inside and outside, the information outside the field of view is transmitted to the opposite side of the brain, which is the left brain. The information will be transmitted to the right brain, and the information of the right brain will be transmitted to the left brain. This is the first time.

The second score is the upper and lower points. At the chin, the upper field of view information is transmitted to the lower cortex of the primary visual cortex, and the information of the lower field of view is transmitted to the distance. The cortex in the upper part of the sulcus. After the primary threshold processing, information is continuously transmitted to various visual areas of Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, or Level 6. Finally, they are combined into one image.

This process is very complicated, but we don’t have to take care of these details too much. The key we have to remember is that the vision is first divided and then reconciled. This process has the feature of processing the information outside the field of view through the cortex on the opposite side of the brain.

Why does the brain do this? There is no definitive explanation in science. You can explore it yourself: Is it genetic or evolutionary?

2, expectation and “knowledge type”

Maybe this is a more critical point. When the Lateral geniculate nucleus(LGN, lateral geniculate) processes visual information, the external visual information transmitted from the retina only accounts for the thalamus 5% of the input, 40% of the thalamic input is actually from the cortex of the brain.

This shows that when people look at things, the input of outside information is only a small part, most of them.The information comes from the recipient of the information, which is the final destination – the new cortex, which is the new cortex that tells the outer geniculate area first. It should go to see what it is, what it should look forward to, and look forward to The final visual image. This is the recent confirmation of neuroscience, which in some sense confirms the two points I mentioned earlier:

First, the distinction between perception and concept in traditional philosophy is at least not supported by neuroscience. Because the human brain is looking at things, 40% of the information comes from the cortex.

The second point, people’s expectations, decide what they will see, and ignore what, and the source of this expectation is not only personal memory and life experience, but also cultural value and culture. A variety of psychological constructions of people – that is, Foucault’s “knowledge type” that I mentioned earlier.

Foco once analyzed the structure of the painting “The Palace” by the first chapter of the book “Words and Things”. Through the structure of this painting, he expressed the latter neuroscience. This “knowledge-based” concept of “expecting to determine visual outcomes or visual experiences” is confirmed.

Vlasquez “The Palace”, Image: Museo Nacional del Prado

Therefore, in the cognitive process of “seeing”, we should pay attention to: First of all, the content to be read depends to a large extent on people’s memory, expectations, and cultural ideas. Secondly, what we call “seeing” is not a real “seeing” – it is not “squinting” in the sense of our usual sense or common sense. “Looking” is actually a “confirmation of , not cognition but re-cognition. When we look at things, it is not a simple, cognitive process from scratch.

“Looking” is actually a kind of “recognition”. If you don’t recognize it, you will be ignored. Therefore, this has created a visual experience, that is, information about a large number of unfamiliar worlds, which we simply cannot see and ignore.

The main, conscious, or unconscious effort of modern art emphasizes that we really “see” the world, and that it is “seeing” or “naked” from “recognition”. Or “unbiased” and “without seeing the ground”. Phenomenology, and later various philosophical theories, emphasize how to overcome this expectation and see a glamorous world. Many modern art schools have shown this reconstruction of vision.

This reconstruction of vision can also be seen as a specific construction and reconstruction of a certain type of human knowledge. And this “look”, seeing a lively and fresh world, seeing a world outside of our expectation, this “look” is considered by many artists to be a real look.

Our usual look is unreal, this is an artistic concept. Of course, how does this artistic concept come from the perspective of neuroscience? This is another question, and we have a chance to explore it in the future.

Taiwan transit photo taken by Professor Tian Xiaotong, photo source: Guest provided

Now, let me give you an example. The picture above is a photo of my friend and Professor Tian Xiaotong from Suzhou University in a circle of friends. One day, after the typhoon passed through the Suzhou area, she took this photo. When I saw it at first sight, I felt like an abstract painting. At first glance, you don’t know what this photo is, but its color, light, light and dark make up a living world, many of us will not notice them, most people will say they are meaningless.

We get rid of the value judgment we see before, to see a living world, which in a sense is an artistic visual experience. In other words, when watching abstract art, don’t think of themIt’s weird, don’t think that they are the product of the artist’s hustle and bustle – they just capture the intuitive visual experience we often overlook.

This is also the sentence that the Russian abstraction master Kandinsky said, “The more abstract, the more direct.” The “direct” he said is not only the direct meaning of the literal, but also the “real”, the more abstract and more real. Therefore, abstract paintings should not be regarded as a kind of abstraction of concepts. It is to present the original experience of vision in front of us.

And we feel unfamiliar, weird, largely because of our knowledge–our culture has created a kind of foresight, even prejudice.

In other words, modern art and ancient art (we don’t emphasize that there is a watershed between modern art and ancient art), has been teaching people How to see the world, has been refactoring, and is training people’s daily visual experience. It is only in this respect that modern art is a more conscious, more enthusiastic visual movement in a certain sense.

3, the element of art

The basic principles of this vision make the elements of art can be divided into these categories: first is space, second is line, third is color, fourth is motion, and fifth is illumination, Six is ​​the shape, and the seventh is the form.

What is to be explained here is the difference between shape and form. When talking about “shapes” in an artist or art commentary, it usually refers to lines and structures in a two-dimensional plane (shape), and “Form” refers to the form of a three-dimensional world object, that is, a person looks like a human, and a leopard looks like a leopard. As I mentioned before, art has to reveal three-dimensional forms from two-dimensional shapes.

The first semester of the Psychology Psychology program will be in contact with the picture above – “Duck Rabbit Illusion Diagram”. This picture illustrates how our visual experience is constructed from the top down.

The key to this picture is the line of the rabbit’s lips: If we think the picture is a rabbit, the line of the rabbit’s lips is very important. In other words, the rabbit form determines the visual meaning of the shape of the rabbit’s lips in the Gestalt.

In contrast, if you look at the animals in the picture as ducks, this line is an accidental, meaningless line. Although we think that lines tend to play a decisive role in the world of human cognition, we should also know , The meaning of lines is determined by the overall visual experience and even the concept.

The above is another example that everyone might know, called “Beauty and Daddy”. In this picture, we should pay attention to the lines of the necklace. If you think that the picture is an old man, this line is the mouth of the old lady; if you think that the picture is a young beauty, this line is really a necklace. Whether it is a necklace or a mouth, it depends on your concept.

The next one is a shocking example, called the Kanisa Triangle (Kanizsa Triangle), this triangle does not exist, but We not onlyI saw a triangle and felt it was brighter than the surrounding things.

This is an illusion, the brightness of the whole picture is exactly the same. That is to say, the human brain is constructed by the Gestalt, not only to see the existence of the triangle, but also to construct the difference between the background and the foreground. This triangle seems to be convex. “Bulging out” means that the human brain constantly constructs and reconstructs the vision.

These basic visual principles are universal in many senses. This universality is the universality of a structure, that is, the human brain constructs our world experience in this way.

Therefore, the principles of neuro-aesthetics should apply to all art. Western art and Oriental art follow the same rules. Although, in terms of specific details, such as style and artistic expression, and Foucault’s so-called “knowledge type”, there will be great differences, resulting in different visual experiences with cultural characteristics.

4, the difference between paintings: a small experiment

Now, I want to introduce a small experiment that I designed myself: let’s take a look at the differences between the two paintings below. In fact, the two paintings are the same place, the famous national park in the UK, called Derwent National Park (Derwent Water) . These two paintings are probably the same paintings at the same time, but I believe that everyone here and the audience watching the live broadcast can see at a glance which paintings were made by the Chinese. Yes, this one is on the left.

Two paintings depicting Derwent National Park at the same time, source: Guest offers

Do you know who painted it? This painter is not particularly famous in China, but he holds in the history of Western art.A unique, even arguably important position, because he first allowed Western artists and art critics to systematically recognize the way Chinese people see the world.

His name may not be known, but you should know one thing he does. He translated the name of a product into Chinese and was recognized as the best-selling product name. One. Yes, it is “Coca-Cola”, the translator’s name is Jiang Wei, a tenured professor of art at Columbia University. His writings, including his paintings, have an important place in the history of modern Western art because they have made Westerners aware of Chinese visual language.

We will take a closer look at the differences between the two paintings. I want you to briefly study the visual experience represented by the two paintings. What is the difference between them? One is Jiang Yi’s paintings, and the other is a local painting. You can see the similarities between them. Trees, cows, and valleys.

The painter only recorded what he saw, but at a glance we can see that this is the “seeing” of the Chinese, and that is the “seeing” of the Westerners. So where is the key distinction? Outline and shape? – It makes sense. For example, Western art critics believe that Chinese painting is to shape its shape (volume), but not to draw its weight (mass). The painting with weight is reflected in the depth of the color. But the Chinese mountains are very ethereal. But this mountain (refers to the second painting) not only has volume but also weight. This is a painting by a Westerner. The Chinese paintings are more about an image, but there is no texture.

We compare the cows. When the Westerners paint cows, we know that they have prototypes. The painter is painting a specific cow. When Mr. Jiang painted the cow, even if it has a prototype, we More should think that he paintedIt is not the specific cow, but the concept of the cow, but the image of the cow.

It is also a tree. In a certain sense, Mr. Jiang’s paintings focus on the tree. And the English painting, the tree can be said to be not so important, what is the difference between the two? In Foucault’s language, this is the knowledge of the tree. Who are these trees? These trees are Jiang Yan himself – you can guess this way, he is not painting trees, he is painting the soul of the tree. There is a saying in China that painting mountains and paintings is more of a soul, as is the painting of trees.

When the oriental poet or painter looks at the landscape, he sees a projection of his own soul. The external image is only an expression and expression of inner emotion. And the landscape trees of Westerners express a different kind of image and concept – maybe someone disagrees, but we can discuss it – this mountain is a kind of sustenance of Mr. Jiang. His mountain is an empty mountain that blends with water. The mountain in the Western painting is a mountain, which is obviously different from water.

There is a detail. It may not be known to everyone. When the oriental paintings are in phase, especially when the mountains are surrounded by water, they do not draw shadows. In the paintings of Westerners, the mountains have shadows, and Mr. Jiang’s mountains have no shadows. There is a neuro-artist in the United States called Patrick Cavanagh. He once wrote an article published in Nature. According to his research, the time of his publication is the boundary. In the art history of oriental painting, except for one painting. Other than ever, the shadow (shadow) has never been drawn.

In Western paintings, shadows are very important. What is the difference between them?

The nature of the West, the idea since the Middle Ages, is the creation of God. He wants to reveal the objective and geometric characteristics of the world. Therefore, this far-and-close contrast expresses a gratitude to the Creator. So in Western painting, the vision is often very important.

Raphael Sansie “Athens Academy”, photo source: The Vatican Museum

This kind of near-reaching realm, like Raphael’s “Athens Academy”, is a geometric pattern from the square of the front, through a variety of circles, step by step from the Roman dome Going to heaven. He also expressed the idea of ​​Platonism, that is, stepping into the world of truth or the world of heaven from the current material world. So nature represents the highest will, and the geometric and physical nature of the world.

The effect of the mountains, water and trees of the Orientals is totally different. This is the kind of visual experience I mentioned earlier. How does it show through art and culture? The difference in details. We can talk about an example. Another important difference between the two paintings is the difference in space. The space here mainly refers to the left and right space. This kind of left and right is a very important feature of ancient Chinese literati painting. Chinese paintings often draw a corner. Mr. Jiang’s painting is called “Ma Yijiao”, the corner of Ma Yuan. This is a picture of painting, where there is a painting, and the left is right, it is a typical Chinese painting structure. And this painting by Mr. Jiang Wei has a feature that makes me more unexpected. He painted the right real left, how to explain this reversal? I leave this question to everyone.

At the end, let’s take a look at the difference between the left and the right. I ask everyone a simple question. The above two pictures are the 19th century famous landscape painter John Constance “Span class=”text-remarks” label=”Remarks”> (John Constable) “hay cart” (The Haywain). Guess, which painting is his original painting?

The first picture is his original painting. Why is he painting like this? Does this have anything to do with the structure of the human brain? Everyone knows that the brain is actually divided into the left and right brains, which are independent of each other. One patient is called a brain splitting patient

This is a more famous painting, which everyone knows, is called “Kanagawa Surfing”. An anti-traditionalist in Chicago, he imitated this painting to the anti-traditional feeling. Because the traditional concept that the right side should be relatively large, he thinks that the left side is relatively large, so it has caused this feeling to everyone.

What is neurological aesthetics

Next, let’s talk about the second part, what is neurological aesthetics?

Neurological aesthetics as a discipline, its establishment is very close, strictly speaking 1999. This year, the famous British visual neurologist Samir Zech (Samir Zeki) published two books, one is “Art And the brain, another book called “Inner Vision – Exploration of Art and Brain.” The publication of these two works is recognized by contemporary neuroscience as a milestone in the history of neuro-aesthetics. So Mr. Zeqi is recognized as the founder of neuro-aesthetics.

From ZechiFrom a gentleman’s point of view, he believes that the aesthetics of neuroscientists highlight the similarities between artistic attributes and the principles of brain organization. This should be attributed to Zech’s introduction of neuro-aesthetics into scientific discourse. He believes that the goals of the nervous system and the artist are similar, and both try to understand the basic visual attributes of the world.

What is neurological aesthetics? What is the difference between it and traditional aesthetics? First of all, traditional aesthetics focuses on the beauty of ideas and pleasures, emphasizing the beauty of emotions and experiences; while neuro-aesthetics emphasizes that beauty is first and foremost a sensory experience, especially visual experience. It treats art as a visual experience rather than focusing on abstract philosophy—the beauty emphasized in traditional philosophy.

The visual laws, elements, and grammar revealed by neuroscience are used to explain and explain the principles and laws behind art appreciation and artistic creation, especially how artists use (Of course, often unconsciously) Some cognitive mechanisms of the human brain to create and achieve powerful works of art.

In other words, when neuro-aesthetics regards art as a visual experience, he focuses on both artistic appreciation and artistic creation. It includes some rules and experiences of our general public appreciation process, as well as some elements and language formulas used by artists to create a certain degree of parallelism with the brain’s mechanism.

1, Mona Lisa’s smile is not laughing

For example, “Mona Lisa’s Smile”, this is an art image that everyone is familiar with. She smiles like a smile, and laughs for a while. I used to think that this is mysterious, but now neuroscience can basically Explanation: Why is the laughter of Mona Lisa so mysterious? Where is the distinction between laughing and not laughing? It’s all because of human vision.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa’s Smile”, photo source: Musée du Louvre

The human retina has two blocks, one of which is called the macular area (macula), and the outside of the macula is the sub-concave. In the middle of the macula is the fovea Centre in the macular area and the sub-concave around it, picture Source: Guest offers

What does this have to do with the laughter of Mona Lisa? Brain scientists have discovered that when you pay attention to Mona Lisa’s eyes, the lines of her mouth are in the center of the sub-concave in your eyes – the area with lower sensitivity, at this time sheThe lines of the mouth, under the shadow of her face, will make you feel that she is laughing.

However, when your eyes are focused on her mouth, her mouth lines will be concentrated in the area of ​​your fovea: the central area of ​​the macula. Her smile disappeared because of her high resolution and resolution.

2, Dali’s creation

In 1973, American neuroscientist Leon Harmon published an article in Scientific American that talked about the difference in information processing between fovea and fovea. Salvador Dali, a surrealist painter, consciously created a famous painting when he read this article. The name of this famous painting is very long, called “Gala’s meditation on the Mediterranean, but at 18 meters. It became a portrait of Lincoln, in honor of the famous American color painter Roscoe.

Look at this picture, you should be able to explain it yourself. Why is it a naked girl when I look at it, but it becomes Lincoln when I look far. Because of the distance, the spatial resolution became lower, and when I entered the painting, the color blocks were changed from naked women to Lincoln.

This example can be said to be a very powerful revelation of Foucault’s “knowledge type”. It is an art means to express what is color and what is the world. This world depends on how you look at it. Closer look, the painting is a naked woman. From a distance, it is a moral world, and it is Lincoln.

Why did Dali use this painting to commemorate Roscoe? Because Roscoe is a master of color in modern art, all his works are full of colors, and what is the meaning of color? Using the difference in visual mechanisms between the fovea and the fovea reveals the so-called color and even reveals the structure of culture in our visual experience. This is typical. The artist himself uses the principles of neuroscience to create a famous painting.

four propositions of parallelism

We will talk about the main content of this lecture, the four propositions of parallelism. From the perspective of neuro-aesthetics, if we analyze art only from the perspective of philosophy and traditional art, then we will lose an important aspect of art, which is the visual experience represented by art.

In other words, aesthetics is incomplete without an understanding of the neural base. Art does create a beautiful experience, but in addition to beauty, what is more important is the experience itself. The experience itself must be explained by neuro-perception and neuro-visual theory. In terms of etymology, this is consistent with the concept of ancient Greece. We say the aesthetic (Aesthetics), from the Greek “perception”, so the Greek meaning of “aesthetics” is “perceived research”, Rather than studying the beauty itself. This is the first proposition.

Proposition 2, precisely because art contains an important visual aspect, we can say that art is art because it can accept direct visual confirmation. This is called “direct sensory confirmation theory.” This is a proposition: What is art? It seems that art is often art. It doesn’t look like art. It is not art.

In other words, when you look at art, in a sense, you have the right to speak. You can judge whether the painting is right or not by the authority of your brain. Because of the similarities between the attributes of art and the organizational principles of the brain, art looks like art. The artistic features can be directly confirmed by the human brain. This is the second point.

Proposition 3, the artist and the human brain are trying to capture the basic essential attributes of the world, the essential attributes(this is the word used by Zech), that is, the concept of Plato, or the form of 曰.

Art and human brain are “Platonics” who try to find a stable visual constant in the complicated and uncertain external information. And this visual constant, Zechi believes, is the concept, or form, that Plato said.

We can simply trace back Plato’s description of the relationship between philosophy and art. Plato wants to drive artists and poets out of the ideal country. He criticizes art because art is a reality, a “shadow world”, and the real world is a world of ideas.

But in history, the most faithful Platonist in history is precisely the art of the East and the West. Because Neo-Platonicism believes that since art should not imitate the shadow world around us, art should directly depict Plato’s world of ideas.

With this form of philosophy, this pursuit of the essential forms of the world has always been the mainstream in art history. Therefore, we can simply divide the so-called Plato’s ideas into three kinds, one is the medieval religious painting, the so-called typical often refers to the face of the characters, God, Christ, childhood Christ and the Virgin, etc. When these religions are typical, the attitude they hold is the truth they express and the Platonic truth.

The second is the Renaissance. Although the style of painting has changed from the religious background, the concept of art in this period is still the pursuit of Platonic and American standards. Therefore, the paintings of the Renaissance are particularly beautiful, because they represent the essence of beauty. The artist expresses an ideal person or world through various symmetrical compositions.

Modern art, although it seems completely different from the Renaissance and early religious paintings, in fact, their pursuit is still the same, from the perspective of neuro-aesthetics, it is the same. It is only the emphasis of modern art that has changed the understanding of Plato’s philosophy. The concept of modern art is an element, an element of the construction of the world, and an atomic concept.

We briefly reviewed the changes in Plato’s philosophy in the history of Western painting. The picture above is Venus, which is not a simple human body, but a beauty.

The later “Olympia” by Manet is no longer a kind of beauty, and even in a sense it can be said that it is not beautiful, but it represents the modern understanding of women. It can be said that “Olympia” is a real person, no longer the goddess of heaven. The attitude she expressed and the position of her hand are all about modern society’s understanding of the question of “what is a woman.”

In other words, when Manet was painting this painting, he began to explore and study what women are, what social status is, and various social relationships.

Finally, external information is constantly changing, the brain must find some kind of perceptual constancy, and stability itself comes only from the brain, so the brain must ignore most of the externally shaped information.

Therefore, a major feature of modern art is the study of a single artistic element, such as the space of cubism, the lines of supremacism and the color of the Fauvism, through modular cognition.

Modernism more consciously recognizes this consciousness: the constructiveness of visual experience, and the construction of visual experience itself depends on some basic elements that are independent, such as color independence,The lines are independent, and what they reveal is a more original, more primitive Platonic idea.

Art seeks the continuous essential features of the stability of objects, faces, situations, etc. to gain knowledge about the world.

According to the theory of Indian neurology professor Pennji (Chatterjee), the nervous system divides visual information into color and brightness. Like the attributes of sports, many artists have isolated and enhanced different visual attributes in the last century. For example, Matisse emphasizes color, Calder emphasizes movement, and Zeki believes that artists have been trying to reveal basic visual elements. The distinction between the two, as well as the visual modules that can be separated from each other in the function and anatomy of the brain.

The famous sculpture on the central square of the Federal Government of Chicago is the flamingo of Calder. It looks like it is not like a flamingo – like a god; it is not because it is not a bird, that is, Calder has restored the flamingo into a basic visual elemental language. .

Picasso studied the bull all his life, because he thought he was both a bullfighter and the bull himself to be killed by the bullfighter, so when he was studying the bull, he was also analyzing himself in a sense. . But when studying the bull, he no longer studied the bull as a bull, but studied the nature of the bull. It is this essence, the essence of this element, in Picasso’s view, he can own.

This means that the nature of the bull is not necessarily only for the bulls, but also for the nature of the bulls. So many of Picasso’s self-portraits, the geometry and lines, show an intrinsic “bull sex.” Finally, Picasso restored the bull to this simple line, which is a process in which Picasso restored the bull to the “bull form” or the “bull Plato concept.”

In Matisse’s view, color is no longer the color of something, and color is a form and concept of constructing the visual world itself. So when we look at Matisse’s paintings, you can’t simply say that he paints a woman because it can be any object. This woman may even be a natural object. In many of Matisse’s and Picasso’s paintings, women look like stones because they are not women’s bodies, but they express a kind of meditation on color.

This is the color gamut of Roscoe I mentioned earlier.Why is it a gamut instead of a color block? Because when you say “color block” you define the color, materialize the color, and the color of the “gamut” has no spatial position.

And sports, the painter began to study the movement itself. This is Manet’s “horse racing”. It does not represent the process of horse racing, but the visual sporting attributes expressed by the events of horse racing.

Turner is certainly not a modern painter in a strict sense, but his philosophy is very similar to modern art. This is his famous “Snowstorm”, please pay attention to the steamboat outside the port. Is he going to show this steamboat? No. He is showing the tempest of snowstorms.

I can briefly introduce: You can “read” the painting from the difference between the fovea and the sub-concave I mentioned earlier. If you put the line of sight on the outer line, it will weaken this picture. The power of painting. Instead, you should putThe line of sight is concentrated on the mast. When you focus your eyes on the mast, the movements in the fovea and the sub-central area are more intense. So how to look at modern art is also very particular. You don’t have to look at each line carefully. Seeing often changes or even reduces the artistic effect.

Therefore, abstract art is not a strictly logical, philosophical so-called logical abstraction, not a conceptual abstraction, but an element that constitutes the world, separated from the concrete image of the object, and the abstract art can be said. It is the embodiment of the art element and its individuality.

When an abstract artist draws a color, he is painting the color, not the color of an object. When he draws sports, he is drawing sports, not painting your movements or his movements. Because of these elementalism, it is also a Platonic effort and attempt since the history of art.

Everyone knows the geometry of Euclid. In fact, the Greek original text of Euclidean “geometry” is directly translated into Chinese as “element.” When Euclidean said “geometry is an element”, what does he mean? He wants to express that when I say triangles, when I say the relationship between lines and lines, I am not saying that they are a form of things, but that they are the original ones of the construction of things. Elements, like the elements on the Periodic Table of the Elements.

In Platonism, lines are not the lines of things, and things are things used to represent lines, just as physicists say mathematics—not mathematics to represent the world, but the world to represent mathematics. This is also a very important parallelism proposition.

From a neuroscience perspective, artists are often born natural neurologists. The reason they differ from ordinary people is that they often have a natural, intuitive understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain.

Art creation and appreciation should conform to the principles of neural organization, and the attributes of art and the skill strategies of artists and the way the nervous system organizes the visual world often have the same effect. In other words, the artist has an intuitive understanding of the brain’s mechanics. This is a very crucial point.

Secondly, painters, especially modern painters, have realized that the human visual process—when the human brain looks at things—is not a physical law of the outside world, but an It’s its own rules.

Modern art also abandons the laws of physics and follows a world law of the so-called brain that is different from the laws of physics.

This is exactly what Cavanagh said: the images in painting often violate the physical characteristics of shadows, reflections, colors, and outlines. The painter does not follow the physical properties of the world, but captures the sensual cleansing that reflects the human mind. When artists try different forms of painting, they have already discovered the perceptual principles of the human brain recognized by psychologists and neuroscientists.

So why is the artist creative? – Because he has deliberately violated the laws of the physical world, find a new cognitive law that is defaulted to the human brain.

A famous example is Cézanne’s “Apple.” When Cézanne painted “Apple”, he deliberately violated many physical laws. For example, the table in the painting is not flat, and the right side is higher than the left side. So the apple seems to be looking up, and it seems to be looking flat, and it seems to be overlooking.

Most people don’t notice these details, but the painting looks good. Apple is very personal and seems to be moving. The reason for this effect is precisely because the painter intentionally violated the physical laws that the human brain could not notice.

A more famous example is Monet’s Sunrise. The color of Monet’s painting is flickering, and the flicker represents the separability between the shape and position of the object, which is in line with the dual emphasis flow theory in neuroscience.

Image Source: Leon Chew

The sparkle of water we see in some Impressionist paintings or the radiance of the sun is produced by equal bright objects, which is actually using the backside flow (Location Flow) and Ventral Flow (Concept Flow) of.

The human visual cortex is divided into two large areas. A ventral flow, which focuses on the concept of things and the form of things themselves. The other area – the back side flow is noticed by the relative spatial position of the movement. The ventral flow processes are in the form of bright objects, but because the backside flow cannot determine motion or spatial position information, the lighter forms appear unstable and flicker.

Monet by lighting this design, in a certainIn this sense, the backside flow information that determines the relative position of the object is “off”. The result is that the human brain can only rely on the ventral side, that is, the color is used to determine the spatial position of the object. The result is uncertain and the location is uncertain. Therefore, this painting produces a flickering effect, so the color is out of the inherent form of the object itself. This is why when you see this picture, you have a particularly pleasant beauty.

Brain damage and artistic creation

Another neuro-important topic is brain pathology, pathology neurology and artistic creation.

Before speaking this question, I want to briefly introduce a very important general principle. When we use neuroscience to explain art, we should not simply think that it is to use science to help art. On the contrary, in the history of neuroscience, scientists use art to help study the human brain.

Art is a well-established, more orthodox way of studying, just as medieval scientists such as Newton studied nature. Because God cannot be directly studied, Newton studies God by studying physical nature—naturally created by God.

The same is true, when neuroscientists cannot directly study the brain because of various factors and technical limitations including ethics Studying why art looks like art, reveals some of the neural principles of the brain. This is because art is the concentrated expression and typical of brain creativity. In this respect, neuropathology and art are closely related.

A human brain is damaged by a certain pathological cause, which will change the visual experience of the person. In some specific situations, the changed visual experience, after artistic treatment, will create a particularly powerfulArtistic effect.

I will talk about this issue in two aspects today. One aspect is that brain damage can give patients a passion or behavioral tendency to create art. On the other hand, brain damage can enhance artistic expression in a specific situation.

1, artistic passion given by brain damage

Katherine Sherwood, a professor of art at the University of California at Berkeley, described how cerebral hemorrhage changed her art in a self-biological journal in the Journal of Neuroscience.

In the article, she described herself as a left brain stroke caused by cerebral hemorrhage (CVA), which enabled the brain’s perception system to be obtained from the conceptual system. Learn to put it. As mentioned earlier, the left brain is the conceptual brain, the right brain is the artistic brain or the image brain, and Professor Katherine is suffering from a stroke in the left brain.

As a result, her art has made a leap. Because her art was completely liberated from the conceptual system, it led to a style of art that was free and full of original smashing.

This is something that comes from her article:

A large area of ​​stroke affected my art world, and the ensuing embarrassment forced me to change hands and become a left-handed painter. Some neuroscientists assumed that the ‘translator’ in my mind was during my stroke. Seriously damaged, this profoundly liberated my work. Before the stroke, my work lacked nature and had a tendency to be overly rational. The art after the stroke was less self-conscious, and the work had more urgency and expressiveness. The theme of both periods is exactly the brain (she is a brain artist who originally liked to paint the brain). For an artist, my stroke is both a challenge and an opportunity, not just a simple loss.

She herself revealed the contrast before and after the stroke in the article. She had a stroke in 1997. The painting below is a painting she created in 1990, called “fun puddle”. The other is her painting after the stroke, and everyone can see the difference in style.

The next two are her paintings in 2006 and 2010.

The second example is the frontal dementia (frontotemporal dementia). People with frontal dementia often lead to obsessive-compulsive disorder, which can make people fascinated by details and may stimulate their artistic expression.

The reason is very simple. Anyone familiar with language neurology knows that the brain area of ​​the frontal area is a conceptual area. When the patient in the conceptual area is injured, he sees an apple. You ask him what it is. He can’t say it, but he can draw apples and paint very well. In other words, he can see Apple. However, because the language area and the concept area were damaged, he could not say “this is an apple.” Such patients often have a strong desire for artistic expression – “Although I can’t tell what it is, I can draw it out.”

There are many examples of acquired artistic talents in patients with frontal dementia (FTD). FTD can cause profound personality changes, and people with FTD may behave arrogantly in life, and have problems in language, concentration, and decision-making ability. But the study found that some FTD patients tend to like art, their art is often realism, not abstract or symbolic, and its art is usually visual art, and very detailed. Artists with FTDs are very focused on their art, which suggests that their obsessive-compulsive disorder contributes to this artistic bias.

Some people with autism often have language skills or social abilities, but they can draw things with a lot of detail. A well-known example is the black youth of the United Kingdom, called Steven Boucher.

Oliver Sacks, the famous American neurologist, tells the story of an Italian painter in San Francisco who called Magnani and painted hundreds of pos.The realistic scene of ntito – pontito is Magnani’s hometown of Italy. Magnani was originally a wage earner who opened a restaurant, but after suffering from FTD, he began to paint his hometown in memory. This is magnani’s pontito, this is his self-portrait. He didn’t have much artistic literacy.

2, brain damage enhances artistic expression

Brain damage can also lead to spatial neglect, and this spatial neglect can create unique artistic effects. There is a famous example: Germany has a very important artist called Lovis Corinth. He suffered a stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain in 1911 and resumed painting after he recovered. He was already a very famous painter.

However, during the recovery period after the stroke and after the recovery, his self-portrait and the portraits painted for his wife changed significantly in style: the details on the left were sometimes missed and integrated into the background. Many art critics believe that his right stroke has brought him to the ranks of first-class artists.

This is a painting after Lovis Corinth’s stroke, with a clear contrast of spatial neglect.

This is a painting before his stroke. He was realism before the stroke, and the style of painting after the stroke has changed significantly.

The picture above is also the picture after his stroke. We can see that due to brain damage, the lines he draws are all tilted to the left. This straight line tilted to the left creates a unique artistic effect.

Another example is the well-known Monet’s Water Lilies. The reason why this painting has such a strong artistic effect is actually related to Monet’s cataract because he can’t see clearly. This is a famous public case in the history of art.

Therefore, brain damage can cause certain obstacles in the visual process, and in certain situations, it can create unique artistic effects.

Cubism, supremacism and Fauvism

Now, let’s talk about the last thing, the so-called cubism, supremacism and the Fauvism.

1, Cubism

Vision occurs in the brain and is divided into multiple steps. The basic task is to find visual constants. The visual process has both vertical and horizontal parallel processing, while the visual phase can be divided into early and middle stages. Therefore, neuro-aesthetics believes that we can use different classification structures to analyze different artistic styles.

For example, to achieve stability, V1 (primary visual area) parallelizes information, causing activities including color cells and moving cells And connect to V4 or V5 cells, respectively. In general, each visual area focuses on a particular visual attribute, such as the color of V4, the shape of V2, and the motion of V5.

And Cubism seeks to remove the effects of perspective, illumination, and depth from visual perception. It can be said that Cubism seeks a planar effect.

However, from a neurological point of view – at least this is Zech’s own point of view – it does not provide the stability that vision requires, that is, Zech believes that Cubism is a kind of (from his perspective) A failed visual attempt.

2, supremacist

Secondly, neuroscientists found that about one-third of V2 cells showed differential responses to various complex shape features, and that there were some directional cells in V2 cells, that is, some cells only responded to certain Lines in a particular direction, but not in lines in other directionsshould.

The cells in the direction of the line, from the perspective of neuro-aesthetics, also constitute the principle of “the supremacist” of Malevich, because Malevic believes that art does not need to depict the objective world, or even the objective world. Any relationship.

In the book “Supremacy” published in 1927, he clearly stated the core concept of “supremacy.” He said: “Under supremacism, I only pay attention to the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. For supremacists, the visual phenomenon of the objective world itself is meaningless.” Therefore, what is important in art is feeling. It has nothing to do with its environmental sources. He created the supremacist grammar according to the basic geometric form, and this supremacist grammar is simple lines and geometric figures. So we can look at supremacism in this way: it actually represents a kind of “line Platonism.” Lines are not used to represent objects. Instead, objects are used to represent lines. This is in line with the neurological findings of the Nobel laureate, the famous visual neurologists David Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, the line is the form and cornerstone of perception.

Someone may know Pete Mondrian’s study of lines. In his view, lines are art; the relationship between lines is the truth of art.

How do you feel when you see these lines? As another example, Japanese restaurants have a special feature: they give a particularly good visual experience, but when you look closely, they are very simple. They rely on Mondrian-style lines to construct the space into a very beautiful and very simple visual enjoyment. Another example is the Chinese screen, a variety of simple line layouts, why is it aesthetically pleasing? Is this a certain relationship with the line cells in the human brain?

3, Fauvism

Another example is the Fauvism. The so-called Fauvism, not the line, nor the flat, multi-dimensional, visual cubist experience, but the color.

An important artistic feature of the Fauvism is to separate colors from the form of objects. The Fauvist painters Matisse, Derain, Jean Metzinger, and Georges Braque all emphasized the liberation of color from shapes and objects, leading to the so-called “error.”The color of the Fauvism. That is to say, the Fauvism is the representative of the wrong color. The reason why they emphasize the error is to emphasize that the color can be separated from the nature of the object. They represent the color itself rather than the object.

The picture above is Jean Metzinger’s famous “Bathing Girl on the Beach”, similar to Georges Braque’s “Olive Tree Beside Estak”.

The color of the tree in the painting is wrong. Note that he is not painting trees, he is painting colors.

The bridge between science and art

To sum up, the parallelism of neuro-aesthetics is that most artists are also genius neurologists who have a fairly direct feel of the visual mechanisms and grammatical rules of the human brain.

The key to artistic creation is not to restore the visual products of the terminal, but to study the elements of color lines and movements that the human brain relies on when creating visual products, and the process by which the human brain changes and combines these elements.

In other words, the visual process of the human brain and the process of artistic creation have similarities, and art appreciation depends more or less on the parallel of this brain and art. Revealing this parallelism has become a major issue in neuro-aesthetics. Brain damage and some pathological phenomena can liberate and even enhance people’s artistic talent.

In addition, modern art, including many modern art genres, Cubism, supremacism, Fauvism, etc., experiment and explore various visual grammar and elements. Brain damage creates different artistic genres, and artistic achievements can be analyzed and criticized according to the principles of parallelism.

However, neuro-aesthetics is only a branch of aesthetics, which reveals one aspect of beauty. Neuro-aesthetics is an empirical science. At present, it is not a substitute for traditional aesthetics. It has not yet been able to philosophically explain the essence of beauty and the pleasure of beauty.

So we should not exaggerate the meaning of neuro-aesthetics, thinking that with neuro-aesthetics, we can explain all the artistic phenomena. Art is a world of greatness. We also have art sociology, art politics, and art market… But neuro-aesthetics reveals the perception of art and the feeling of art.

Although neuroimmunology has inherent limitations, its significance is undeniable. On the one hand, it establishes a new aesthetic direction with intrinsic meaning and value; on the other hand, it also creates and appreciates art. The demystification has made a positive contribution and can explain some phenomena that could not be explained before.

Nerve aesthetics also has its trap, this trap is reductionism. Many of the works published in the West today have a tendency to simplify and mechanize art. We should pay attention to the complexity of beauty and the experimental qualities of neuro-aesthetics.