They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But British neurobiologist Dr Semir Zeki begs to differ. According to him, beauty is in the brain. That too in a specific part called field A1 of medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), just behind the eyes. As a renowned brain scientist who ventured into the realm of aesthetics and how our brain perceives art, found that the experience of beauty, whether derived from visual art, music, or mathematics, is activated in the same region of the brain. His findings--through cutting-edge brain scans and other neurological studies-- raise important questions about the role and uses of beauty not only in our daily experience but also in our efforts to understand the structure of the Universe in which our brains have evolved.
As a pioneer of a new branch of study called neuroaesthetics--a scientific approach to aesthetic perceptions in our brain--has drawn fire from a large section of art critics, art historians and philosophers. However, the real practitioners in the field--artists and musicians--have been more receptive to his bold new ideas.
Dr Zeki is in Calcutta to deliver a couple of lectures on 'Organisations of the Visual Brain' at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) and Presidency University, tomorrow and day after. This is part of a public lecture series organised by British Council, India, and IISER Pune. From his professional post at UCL, Dr Zeki interacted with KnowHow in an email interview. Excerpts:
Q: Ever since this new scientific discipline neuroaesthetics got formally defined in 2002 philosophers and art historians are annoyed. Many mainstream art writers and critics counter that our artistic experience and understanding cannot ever be understood in terms of neurophysiological structure and mechanism of brain. What's your response to this?
A: It has indeed annoyed some art historians and some philosophers, but there are others whom it has pleased; it has above all fascinated artists. But things are changing as people become aware of the aims of neuroaesthetics and the general interest that brain studies have for understanding much of human activity.
Some experts, however, still stigmatize neuroesthetics because they believe science cannot address what beauty is or explain the nature of art. These criticisms are hardly worth answering because they constitute straw men, in the sense that it has never been the aim of neuroesthetics to explain the nature of art and explain beauty. Neuroesthetics is a neurobiological discipline; it is interested instead in studying the neural mechanisms that are engaged when humans experience beauty and related states such as love and desire. These are legitimate scientific questions, as legitimate as studying the neural mechanisms that are engaged when we experience colours or when we recognize faces. And we have the technology [such as, sophisticated scanners] today to address these questions in the human brain. Hence the results of experiments conducted in the domain of neuroaesthetics have something to say about brain organization but almost nothing really useful to say about the nature of art or of beauty. I think that this is a lesson that some art historians and philosophers have taken a long time to learn and some are still digesting its implications.
Q: What is it that find hard to digest? The latest results vindicate many of your early ideas.
A: Some recent results show that the experience of beauty derived from different sources - musical, visual, moral and mathematical - correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain, the medial orbito-frontal cortex is an interesting fact, not any more or any less interesting neurobiologically than the fact that the experience of colour correlates with activity in specific areas of the visual brain, distinct from the areas of the visual brain that are engaged when we experience visual motion. It should interest even those in the humanities who dislike neuroaesthetics. It was, after all, an art critic, Clive Bell, who asked as long ago as 1914 what objects as diverse as Santa Sophia in Istanbul, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Mexican sculptures, Persian bowls and the masterpeieces of Poussin, Pierrodella Francesca and Cezanne have in common. Neuroesthetics can provide an answer to that, though only in terms of the brain - since the experience of beauty derived from all these diverse sources does have a common neural feature, namely that they all correlate with activity in medial orbito-frontal cortex, part of the emotional brain's pleasure and reward system.
Q: Also these results have raised wider interest as they explain the basic perception of beauty and its uses from the perspective of biology and even mathematics.
A: Yes these results indeed raise issues of broader interest, about the uses of beauty. Charles Darwin thought that a primary biological reason for beauty is sexual selection. While this is true, the fact that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates with activity in the same part of the brain as the experience of beauty derived from sensory sources raises the question of whether beauty is related in some way to fundamental truths not only about us but also about the Universe which we inhabit. It is certain that Einstein's theory of relativity, published in 1915, was widely accepted because of the beauty of the mathematical formulations. In 1933, Paul Dirac wrote that the theory of relativity had imported beauty into mathematics to an unprecedented extent and that henceforth the veracity of a mathematical formulation must be judged by its beauty rather than by its simplicity, as in the past, a proposition that many mathematicians would agree with.
But what is it that constitutes mathematical beauty? Immanuel Kant thought that it a mathematical formulation is beautiful because it "makes sense". I would go beyond and say that it makes sense to the logical, deductive system of the brain. And this explains an interesting paradox. The experience of mathematical beauty is perhaps the most extreme example of beauty that is dependent on culture and learning. Yet when mathematicians of different cultural language learn the language of mathematics, they are able to experience the beauty of mathematical formulations. This, indicates, I believe, that the logical, deductive systems of our brains are similar, irrespective of our cultural, educational or ethnic origins.
Q: Despite these new findings why are philosophers loathe to accept the empirical approach to aesthetics
A: Many philosophers and historians of art are critical of neuroesthetics because, they believe, correctly in my view, that what is perceived as beautiful is very much shaped by culture, learning and environment. But, again, there must be some common apparatus in the brain, one which, in the words of Clive Bell, is "common to all and peculiar to none" that must be at the basis of the human ability to experience beauty. And it is that common apparatus that neuroesthetics wants to learn more about, without denying for a moment that culture and learning may modify and shape what one individual or another finds beautiful.
I think that these are interesting facts about the brain and its knowledge acquiring system. Once you take away the straw men set up by those who have been vocal in criticising neuroesthetics, without apparently acquainting themselves with the aims of neuroesthetics, it becomes difficult not to conclude that the hostility that some have shown must have different causes, but what these are I would not care to speculate about.
Q: Critics also claim that neuroscientists like you are trying to tag everything to a few results of brain scans. And this is one of many fields that attaches 'neuro' to some human trait with the implication that the techniques of neuroscience, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, will explain it. We have neurotheology, neuroethics, neurocriminology and so on. Isn't it too reductionist an approach?
A: Yes, they believe we are "reductionist" because we find that the experience of beauty, for example, correlates with activity in a given part of the brain. But no neurobiologist I know has ever pretended that this activity in this part, acting in isolation, correlates with such an experience. We all acknowledge that all specialized areas of the brain do not act in isolation but as part of the whole brain. Our only point is that some areas are especially important for some functions and other areas for other functions, a fact which has been shown again and again throughout the history of neurobiology.
Science, of course, is essentially reductionist as is mathematics. Physicists break down matter into atoms and sub-atomic particles in order to understand the nature of matter. But you do not have to remain in science to see the reductionist approach at work. When Piet Mondrian was asking what the essential constituents of all forms were and settled on the vertical and horizontal straight line, what was he doing but trying to reduce all forms to basic elements. I happen to believe that he was mistaken, yet I have not heard the chorus of execration levelled at him that is levelled at neuroscientists. I would indeed go further and say that many novelists are reductionsists, Anatole France being a notable example. So, in a sense, is philosophy. In other words, if one wants to attack neurobiology for being reductionist, one must be consistent and see reductionism in a broader context, one that encompasses the humanities as well as science.
Q: So you are out to "de-mystify" our emotions, sense of beauty, art and love.
A: Well, there is mystery that still remains and will long continue to do so, of how a brain system can be so exquisitely controlled and balanced to yield such experiences, even when we understand the mechanisms involved. But I have not heard the loud howls attacking astronomers for trying to de-mystify things by studying the extent and origins of the Universe. Again, there is a lack of consistency here.
Q: Surprisingly, artists seem to be more open minded regarding your ideas, unlike art historians and art critiques. Why this disconnect?
A: Artists are experimentalists, just like scientists. Although they use different techniques, the questions that they address are often very similar, if not identical, to those asked by neurobiologists. I could give you a whole catalogue, but I will restrict myself to a few examples. The question that Picasso and Braque addressed in the early, analytic, phase of cubism was how a form could maintain its identity when viewed from different distances and angles and illumination. This translates neurobiologically into the question of form constancy, which is a topic that is being addressed by many neuroscientists today. Alexander Calder and other kinetic artists pursuing the representation of visual motion would have been fascinated to learn that, just like the conclusions they reached, neuroscience has shown that there is a specialized visual area, area V5, whose cells respond to the direction of motion of visual stimuli but are otherwise indifferent to the form and colour of these stimuli. And Francis Bacon, whose professed aim was, in his words, "to give a visual shock", subverted the brain's representation of faces and bodies, by painting almost uniquely mutilated and savaged faces but rarely mutilated objects. Bacon was in fact interested in neuroscience and would have been fascinated to learn that the brain's reaction to mutilated and disfigured faces and bodies is significantly and consistently different to its reaction to normal faces and bodies. Finally, let me give you the examples of Mondrian and Cezanne, both of whom tried in their different ways to reduce form in general to their universal constituents, a problem that continues to tax neurobiologists. It is for this reason that I have referred to artists as neurobiologists who pursue the same problems as us but with their own techniques.
Q: Your effort has been to bridge the gulf between science on one hand and arts, philosophy and humanities on the other hand. Do you think the gulf between the 'two cultures' is gradually getting diminished?
A:I believe, and hope, that the gulf has narrowed and that sooner rather than later we will reach the levels prevalent in the days of Aristotle, Leonardo and Michelangelo - when the distinction between the two was far narrower than it is today. On the other hand, I think that the process has been slower than I had hoped, and one reason among others for this is the structure of research grant awarding bodies. And here, I utter a warning for those who are hoping to start careers in interdisciplinary fields. Although most research councils use the buzz word "interdisciplinarity" to advertise themselves to prospective applicants and to appear modernistic, this really is nothing more than cotton wool dressing. They do not mean it and the real sense. Because the compositions of their boards consists mainly of scientists or of humanists, they themselves have difficulty in understanding the nature of interdisciplinarity. To them, interdisciplinarity means something like "neurochemistry and neuropathology" or "geography and anthropology" or "philosophy and politics". That is largely the limit of their horizon. That anyone should consider neuroscience and philosophy, or neurobiology and aesthetics is a bridge too far. They do not understand it and condemn from the outset.
But there are signs that this is rapidly changing for the better. Major universities in the United States have started programmes in which participants can approach humanistic questions scientifically and this is beginning to happen in Europe too, though the Europeans are still far behind in this but far ahead in paying lip service to it. The change is also being forced about by other developments in neurobiology. For example, years ago when I raised the importance of knowledge derived from brain studies for criminal law, I was somewhat laughed at. But I now notice that eminent universities, again in the United States, have instituted courses with the general theme of law and the brain.
Dr Zeki will talk about Organisations of the Visual Brain at IISER and Presidency University on Feb 9 and 10
