We don't know exactly why, but obviously there are neural circuits in the visual pathways of the chick's brain that are specialized for detecting beaks as soon as the chick hatches. They fire when seeing the beak. Perhaps because of the way they are wired up, they may actually respond more powerfully to the stick with the three stripes than to a real beak. Maybe the neurons' receptive field embodies a rule such as "The more red contour the better," and it's more effective in driving the neuron, even though the stick doesn't look like a beak to you and me - or maybe even to the chick. And a message from this beak-detecting neuron now goes to the emotional limbic centres in the chick's brain giving it a big jolt and saying: "Wow, what a super beak!" and the chick is absolutely mesmerized.
Well now what's this got to do with art, you're wondering?
Well this brings me to my punch line of about art. What I'm suggesting is if those seagulls had an art gallery, they would hang this long stick with the three red stripes on the wall, they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why - why am I mesmerized by this damn thing even though it doesn't resemble anything? That's what all of you are doing when you are buying contemporary art. You are behaving exactly like those gull chicks.
In other words human artists through trial and error, through intuition, through genius have discovered the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar. They are tapping into these and creating for your brain the equivalent of the long stick with the three stripes for the chick's brain. And what you end up with is a Henry Moore or a Picasso.
The advantage of these ideas is you can test them experimentally. You can actually record from cells in the brain which sort of fire when you show it a face in the fusiform gyrus. Now some of them will fire only to a particular view of a face. But higher up you've got neurons which respond to any view of a given face. And I'm predicting that if you present a Cubist portrait of a monkey face - where you present two views of a monkey's face in the same place - that cell will be hyper-activated. Just as the long stick with the three red stripes hyper-activates the beak-detecting neurons in the chick's brain, this Cubist portrait of a monkey face will hyper-activate these face-detecting neurons in the monkey brain - and the monkey says: "Wow! What a face". So what you have here is in fact a neural explanation for Picasso, for Cubism.
I've told you about one law so far - peak shift and the idea of ultra-normal stimuli. We have borrowed insights from ethology, neurophysiology, rat psychology to account for why people like non-realistic art.
The second law is more familiar to all of you. It's called Grouping.
Many of you may have seen those famous puzzle pictures, like Richard Gregory's Dalmatian dog. You just see a bunch of splotches when you first look at it but you sense you visual brain trying to solve a perceptual problem, trying to make sense of this chaos. And then after a few seconds, or maybe actually several seconds - 30 or 40 seconds - suddenly everything clicks in place and you group all the correct fragments together, and lo and behold you see a Dalmatian dog.
Richard Gregory's Dalmatian
Richard Gregory's Dalmatian
You can almost sense your brain groping for a solution to the perceptual riddle and as soon as you successfully group the correct fragments together to see the dog, what I suggest is a message gets sent from the visual centres of the brain to the limbic-emotional brain centres of the brain giving it a jolt and saying: "AHA, there is a dog" or "AHA, there is a face".
The Dalmatian dog example is very important because it reminds us that vision is an extraordinarily complex and sophisticated process. And even looking at a simple scene involves a complex hierarchy, a stage by stage processing. At each stage in the hierarchy of processing, when a partial solution is achieved - "Hey it looks a bit dog-like right here" - there is a reward signal "AHA", a partial "AHA", and a small bias is sent back to earlier stages to facilitate the further binding of the features of the dog. And through such progressive bootstrapping the final dog clicks in place to create the final big "AHA!" Vision has much more in common with problem solving - more like a twenty questions game - than we usually realize.
The grouping principle is widely used in both Indian and in Western art - and even in fashion design. For example you go to Harrods, and you pick out a scarf with red splotches on it. Then you often match it with a skirt which has got some red splotches on it. Now what's this all about? Is it just hype, is it just marketing? Or is it telling you something very deep about how the brain is organized? I'm going to argue it is telling you something very deep, something to do with the way the brain evolved.
Vision evolved mainly to discover objects and to defeat camouflage. You don't realize this when you look around you and you see clearly defined objects.
But imagine your primate ancestors scurrying up in the treetops trying to detect a lion seen behind fluttering green foliage. What you get inside the eyeball on the retina is just a bunch of yellow lion fragments obscured by all the leaves. But the brain says - so to speak - "What's the likelihood that all these different yellow fragments are exactly the same yellow simply by chance? Zero. They must all belong to one object, so let me link them together, glue them together. Oh my God, it's a lion - let me out of here!" And as soon as you glue them together, a signal gets sent to the limbic system saying: "AHA, there's something object-like, pay attention here".
So there's an arousal, and an attention which then titillates the limbic system, and you pay attention and you dodge the lion.
And such "AHAs" are created, I maintain, at every stage in the visual hierarchy as partial object-like entities are discovered that draw your interest and attention. What the artist tries to do is to generate as many of these "AHA" signals in as many visual areas as possible by more optimally exciting these areas with his paintings or sculptures than you could achieve with natural visual scenes or realistic images. Not a bad definition of art if you think about it.
That takes me to the third law - the law of perceptual problem solving or visual peekaboo. Now what do I mean by that?
As anyone knows a nude seen behind a diaphanous veil is much more alluring and tantalizing than a full-colour Playboy photo or a Chippendale pinup - or a Page Three girl, is that what you call it? Why?
As I said our brains evolved in highly camouflaged environments. Imagine you are chasing your mate through dense fog. Then you want every stage in the process - every partial glimpse of her - to be pleasing enough to prompt further visual search - so you don't give up the search prematurely in frustration. In other words, the wiring of your visual centres to your emotional centres ensures that the very act of searching for the solution is pleasing, just as struggling with a jigsaw puzzle is pleasing long before the final "AHA". Once again it's about generating as many "AHAs" as possible in your brain.
The fourth law is the law of isolation or understatement.
You all know that a simple outline doodle by Picasso or a nude by Rodin or Klimt can be much more evocative than a full colour photo of a woman. Similarly the cartoon-like outline drawings of bulls in the Lascaux Caves are much more powerful and evocative of the animal than a National Geographic photograph of a bull. Hence the famous aphorism in art: "Less is more".
But why should this be so? Isn't it the exact opposite of the first law, the idea of hyperbole, of trying to excite as many "AHAs" as possible? A pinup or a Page Three girl after all has much more information. It's going to excite many more areas in your brain, many more neurons, so why isn't it more beautiful?