40/40 Vision Lecture: Neurology and the Passion for Art

Rama is director of the center for brain and C cognition and professor of neurosciences and psychology here at UC SD he's also an Adjunct professor of biology at the Sal Institute Rama trained as a physician and obtained an MD from Stanley Medical College and subsequently a PhD from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge England and I think it's this wonderful combination of an MD and PhD that makes him such an intriguing thinker uh Rama's early research was on visual perception but he is best best known for his work in neurology he has received many honors and awards including a fellowship from All Souls College Oxford a gold medal from the Australian National University and the Aran kappers medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for landmark contributions in neurosciences in 1995 he gave the decade of the brain lecture at the 25th Annual silver jubilee meeting of the Society of Neuroscience and more recently the inaugural keynote lecture at the decade of the brain Conference held by n imh at the Library of Congress he also recently gave a very important public lecture at the Getty in Los Angeles I hope you note these numbers the 10th anniversary the 25th anniversary 40 years ago when this uh campus was founded neurosciences was not this robust field of scholarship and research that it is today and Rama's helping to Define just what that field is couple of other things about him I said he's published more than 120 papers and I'm going to spare you hearing the titles of all of them but he's also written for Scientific American and is editorinchief of the Encyclopedia of human behavior he's author of The critically acclaimed book and the kind of book most most of us would be comfortable reading Phantoms in the brain that has been translated into eight languages that book formed the basis for a two-part series on Channel 4 TV in the United Kingdom his work is featured frequently in major news media including NPR and Dutch television and Newsweek magazine recently named him a member of the century Club this is quite extraordinary one of the most H one of of the hundred most prominent people to watch in The Next Century we're privileged to spend a couple of hours with you tonight Rama we'll watch and listen the lecture is going to be mainly about art and the science of art there already an oxymoron there when most people think of Art and Science as completely antithetical and it seems like a travesty to even ask can there be scientific principles underlying art but that's going to be the main theme of my lecture and I'm going to try and develop a neurological theory of artistic experience next slide but before I do that various collaborators involved in this research Eric alula who's a postdoc in our lab various others including my wife Diane who's here and some of you may have guessed that this slide was made and supplied to me by Eric alula to this list I might also add um Mary be of the Stewart collection and also Kathleen stuten with the University Art Gallery have had many conversations with them about art and of course Julie can we have the next slide okay now what I usually do for a living is not art I just dabble in art you know and I collect a little bit of art mainly I do neurology and to give you some idea of the sort of thing that we do I'm going to tell you about uh an example of a very fascinating neurological disorder what we do is look at patients who have had damage to specific parts of the brain and there's been a change in the behavior change in the mind and then you study the patient in detail and then you ask yourself what can this tell you about the functions of the normal human brain so that's the name of the game you're playing Sherlock Holmes studying these patients okay now let me tell you about there's an extraordinary syndrome called prosopagnosia what this means is that there is bilateral damage to the temporal loes that's the brain frontal lobe temporal lobe parial lobe occipital lobe when there's bilateral damage to the medial inferior parts of the temporal loes you get a syndrome called prosopagnosia which means this person who's had a stroke damaging a fairly small part of the brain is suddenly incapable of recognizing people's faces he can still read a newspaper so there's nothing wrong with his eyesight but he can't look at somebody and say this is Joe this is Susan in fact he can't even identify his mother in fact he can look inside a mirror and he doesn't know it's him well he kind of knows it's him because when he Winks it wins back you know but he doesn't it doesn't look like him okay this is called prosia but there is another syndrome prosopagnosia is very well known and has been studied extensively by neurologists and and I have this habit of going after Curiosities anomalies things which nobody else finds interesting okay there is one extraordinary syndrome called cop grass syndrome which is so rare that even most neurologists have not heard of it this refers to patients who are otherwise normal sometimes even in a psychiatric setting but sometimes just after a head injury the guy's been in a car accident and maybe has been in a coma for a couple of weeks and then comes out of the coma seems quite normal fluent in conversation not emotionally disturbed not hysterical in any obvious way seems quite normal except that he has one profound delusion he looks at his mother and he says Doctor this woman looks exactly like my mother you know it looks exactly but she's not my mother she's an impostor she's pretending to be my mother okay it's a replica and he says this with a perfectly straight phase there is nothing else wrong with this guy okay he can read a newspaper he can talk to you about politics he can talk to you about the Monica Linsky case he can talk about anything you want okay but when he looks at his mother he says this is an imposter some other woman pretending to be my mother how do he explain this extraordinary syndrome the standard explanation is Freudian and you find it in most Psychiatry textbooks and that is this young man when he was a baby when he was an infant like most infants like all of us here and the same argument applies in Reverse to women but I'll just talk about men when you're babies you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother this is called the So-Cal edus complex of Freud okay I'm not saying I believe this but I'm saying this is the standard view okay then you grow up and then you repress these forbidden sexual urges thank God otherwise all of us would be sexually aroused by your mother okay and then Along Comes a Blow To The Head Bang and these repressed sexual urges come flaming to the surface and then you say my God if this is my mother why am I feeling sexually aroused when I see her okay okay she must be some other strange woman maybe it's pheromones who knows what it is this is the standard explanation and it's a very ingenious explanation as indeed most Freudian explanations are okay but it doesn't work because I've seen patients with copg gr syndrome who have the same delusion not about their mother but about their pet poodle about their dog now you think about it how does the Freudian explanation work work here okay you can start talking about the inherent beastiality in all human beings or something like that but it simply doesn't work and then I thought maybe there's a simpler explanation for this syndrome namely we know that in the temperal loes there's an area called infratemporal cortex which is concerned with just processing faces recognizing faces when that's damaged you get prosia you can no longer recognize people's faces but when you look at any object in the world it's processed there and then it gets sent to the amydala and to the lyic system which are the emotional centers of the brain so you're emotionally aroused by what you're looking at if it's a slide projector obviously you're not emotionally aroused if it's if it's you know a light there you're not aroused but if you look at a mother you say wow it's my mom you know there is this there is this warm glow or this Terror as this as the case may be okay when you look at your mother when you look at somebody else who you've never seen before there is no emotional arousal so what I said was maybe what's wrong with this guy is maybe the face area is normal that's why he can still say yeah it looks like my mother it is my it looks like my mother but the message doesn't get to the amigdala because this wire is cut because of the head injury so he looks at his mother and he says if it's my mom why don't I feel anything must be some there's something weird here it must be some other strange woman that's the only explanation that makes sense to him given his this disconnection I'm talking about now how do you test this well you can test it very easily by using what we call a galvanic skin response when any one of you if I show you you computerized images sorry images on the on the computer of different objects a slide projector the message gets processed in the visual centers in the temporal loes and you identify a slide projector goes to the amigdala which gauges the emotional significance of what you're looking at my God is this a predator my God is this a mate is this my mom or is it just a slide projector I can ignore it okay the amydala does that and then Cascades into the rest of the lyic system into the hypothalamic nuclei down the autonomic nervous system okay down the autonomic nervous system and then what happens is your skin starts sweating your heart starts pounding you prepare the body for fighting fleeing feeding or sexual behavior okay your body gets prepared for Action your heart starts pounding and your skin starts sweating because you want to dissipate heat because you're going to be doing something you're going to do you're going to be doing something active Okay you can measure the change in skin resist resistance but put by putting two electrodes on the palm of the hand and this measures the change in resistance so when I put any one of you here in front of the screen and show you a slide projector there's no change in resistance but if I show you if I show you a stranger there is no change in resistance but if I show you your mom you say wow Mom okay instantly it Cascades in and it makes you believe it or not every time you see your mom you sweat all of you here okay whatas if I show you some stupid inanimate object like the slide projector or something like a shoe or something like that nothing happens unless you have a shoe fetish then you can you know that's a different matter okay now what about our patient so we had a patient he came into the uh into our into our office and I hooked him up to the galvanic skin response I showed him slide projectors nothing that's obvious I showed him tables and chairs nothing I showed him people he has never seen nothing then I showed him his mother nothing nothing no galvanic skin response whereas any one of you here in the audience you see your mother you get a huge big galvanic response this supports our argument that there's been a disconnection the reason I'm telling you about this syndrome is it's a striking example of cognitive Neuroscience the power of this whole new approach to Neuroscience to the brain and that is you can take a completely bizarre seemingly incomprehensible neurological syndrome seems almost like the guy is nuts seems like a psychiatric syndrome you know the guy is saying his mother is an impostor and then say no the Freudian explanation is wrong there's a specific disconnection here between the amigdala the emotional centers in the brain and the visual centers in the brain and that's what explains his curious predicament and then he can spend one hour doing an experiment and show that that's what's gone wrong in his brain okay so that's the that's what we're doing okay now let me tell you about another very curious syndrome next slide this is a syndrome that has been it's not really a syndrome because it's seen in normal people goes back all the way to the 19th century the Victorian scientist Francis gton who's a cousin of Charles Darwin noticed that some people completely normal people otherwise normal when they hear certain tones they see specific colors this is called synesthesia the merging of the senses specific tones specific colors similarly when they see specific numbers the number five is always red number six is always green number seven is always blue maybe there's somebody in the audience who sees this gton also said this runs in families okay so it's genetic okay everybody ignored this paper and as often happens in science there have been many reports of people with synesthesia but people thought it was a curiosity it's an anally some bizarre I mean why would anybody say five is red and people said well maybe it's just memory Association from childhood you know when they were in kindergarten they saw five as red so they remember that they got stuck with it so when they see five they see red or maybe these people when they say C major is green they're just being metaphorical right like for example you may say cheddar cheese is sharp now cheese isn't sharp you rub it on your hand it's soft but he said no no no it's a metaphor it's taste is sharp but how can taste be sharp sharp and dull are skin touch it's nothing to do with taste so why do you use a metaphor okay but people said oh oh you know synesthesia they're crazy they just uh you know they're on drugs they've taken LSD maybe they're potheads or maybe maybe they're just being metaphorical now this is a classic example in science of trying to explain an enigma using a metaphor that never works okay you can't explain one mystery using another mystery saying synesthesia is just metaphor who knows what a metaphor is right nobody knows how metaphors are represented in the brain right so that's not an answer so we said first thing we need to do is to study these people and see what's going on in the brain first of all is it a real phenomenon are they just making it up are they just potheads or is there a real phenomenon here to study so what we did was an experiment which I'll show you briefly with my overheads now there are some Sines who when they see the number two they see red but then when they see the number five they see green okay normal people you look at this it all looks like Goble they C but what you do is you arrange the fives to form some shape like a triangle or a circle the sinthetic subject and we had two subjects who we found who had anesthesia this is much more common than gton thought it was about 1% .5% of the population has anesthesia I just went to my class which is 3 students and said does anybody experience this and two hands went up okay so it's much more common than people realize and and just for fun let me one of one of these subjects whose name was Esmeralda and I'll just say this subject saw five because we don't like to use real names five as red and two as green now when she saw this instantly she saw a circle or a triangle or whatever shape that was embedded this shows that this is a genuine sensory or perceptual effect it's not a memory Association or metaphor or childhood memory how can that enable them to see the triangle do something better than all of us here that means they're actually literally seeing the color that five looks red to them okay another thing people have noticed is synesthesia is much more common among artists and and Poets and creative people we don't know if this is true we're studying this but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that this is true I'll come back to that in a minute okay so it's a genuine perceptual sensory phenomenon it's not about memory we know that from this experiment this crucial experiment next question is where is it going on in the brain next slide here Ed hubard and Eric alul and I we've been studying this it turns out there's a structure in the temporal LOE called the fusiform gyrus and you see that that green dots there that's the color area of the brain it's been identified by Seiki cells that respond to color it's specialized just for color it's not doing anything else now this red outline represents the visual numerical graphine area one 2 3 4 5 they're right next to each other so what I'm arguing is that there is some cross wirring in these unfortunate or fortunate few okay and that's why when you see five they see red when they see six they see green there's some cross wirring remember it runs in families and it's true of the two subjects we tested their parents had it so there is a gene mutation that causes defective pruning of Connections in the fetus in early infancy so some areas are left with redundant excessive connections okay and the penalty is when you see five you see red when you see six you see green now that's the penalty but the bonus is what is a metaphor a metaphor is taking two completely unrelated ideas and developing a link maybe these people have much more associ wiring than normal people that's why they're good at poetry that's why they're good at visual art okay this is all speculation but it's something that we were pursuing which we're studying in detail okay now the wonderful thing about this hypothesis is Ed hubard who's a student in our lab you can do fmr you can take people patient this by the way is his brain you know which which is comforting to know that he has a brain okay and and that there is zi's V4 that's the number area and we can now see if you just show him numbers will the color area also light up in this guy so you can go from the gene if you get a large enough population large enough family you get a gene the specific brain anatomy specific phenotype okay and now I get the most exciting part and that's about metaphors what is a metaphor supposing you say uh Shakespeare says it is the East and Juliet is the sun wow you don't say Juliet is a son she's sort of flaming ball of fire schizophrenics do okay they don't understand metaphor but normal people say oh like the sun radiant like the sun nurturing like the sun warm like the sun that's what Juliet is and Shakespeare was a master at this okay what's going on there so what I'm arguing is maybe these people some people have more wiring cross wirring this enables them to link seemingly unrelated things more readily more easily than you and I that's why Shakespeare could do it so beautifully for example if I ask one of you here how do you think of an analogy for hyperbole exaggerating something overdoing it overdoing something think of an analogy for overdoing something right you know I sit here thinking for about half an hour I may come up with something but something crummy Shakespeare had three in one sentence to add another Hue to the rainbow to gild refined gold to paint the Lily this wasteful and ridiculous excess he thought of three in one sentence how none of us can do it I think it's because he's got more wiring so synesthesia is a phenomenon and people used to say synesthesia is bogus you know it's an anomaly you know it's just a metaphor I'm saying the opposite I'm saying turn the problem upside down we're all synesthetes and by studying these people with this problem you can understand how we create and represent metaphors in the brain okay think of an example think of an example for example if you say uh something is smells and tastes disgusting so feces sorry to mention this but feces or something fou smelling you say disgusting and you make an expression and in fact Darwin showed that an infant does this a newborn infant will do this for feces why is it for social disgust somebody does something disgusting you know make maybe um peas here or something I'm sorry I can't think of a good example all you say disgusting why you use the same word in every culture in every language and you know what disgusting means gustatory it means taste well the ventromedial frontal loes are where the smell all Factory bulb all Factory loes project to for disgusting smell and taste it's phog genetically very ancient and then mammals developed social behavior where is social behavior social disgust also in the ventral medial frontal Lo and I'm arguing it's not a coincidence it has to do with the economy of brain wiring you use the same area to represent both kinds of disgust and this can be tested experimentally is it a coincidence that whenever you use violence you know you want you want to say something you know I don't want to use that four-letter word you say f you okay what's a connection between sex and violence after all sex is a pleasant thing why are you connect you don't say bite you okay I bet there is something in the hypothalamic nuclei that the sexual centers are right next to the violin centers and there's some cross wirring there that's what's going on okay so the reason I'm telling you about this syndrome is it's giving you an example of the sort of research we do you can go from the gene to the brain area to the phenotype and visual ception all the way to Shakespeare and metaphor in one preparation that's what makes it exciting now now let me come to the main part of the talk next slide now I'm going to talk about art but before I do that first of all you need to understand a little bit about perception and vision because there are lot of misconceptions about perception if you don't understand vision and perception you're not going to understand art okay the most serious misconception about vision is for example I was taking a flight from um San Francisco to San Diego in southwest and I sitting next to a priest and he said what do you do for a living and I said oh I study perception I study Vision I'm interested in how the brain sees an image he said what's there to study and I said well what do you think happens when you look at this cup of tea he says oh well you know there's an upside down image in in the brain in in the eyeball you know because of the lens then it goes through the optic nerve and then there is a there's a there's a area called visual cortex and it's displayed there right no he was surprisingly sophisticated for a priest you know sorry I he knew there was an image there was thing it was displayed and all that okay but there's a serious logical fallacy he says oh that's how you see something because if you send the image and display it on a screen here then you need another little guy in here looking at that image and then you need to go into his brain and you need another little guy in his brain looking at that image add infinitum until you get an endless regress of eyes and images and little people and you don't solve the problem of perception so the first thing you have to understand when you're thinking about perception is there are no little people in the head this is just a cartoon diagram right there's no cinema screen there's no people watching okay what you have is symbolic descriptions in fact well then you say Dr ramachandran how do I know that maybe there is a picture here how do you know that's right well let me show you some evidence next slide well look at this famous necer Cube this is a skeleton drawing of a cube and you can either see it like that or like that you can flip it mentally how many of you can flip it raise your hands wonderful there are an unfortunate few and I'll will I love to see if they have a gene mutation somewhere but okay now that's important because it's an image that's constant on the eyeball nothing is changing but your interpretation changes completely into this and this next Slide the Mother-in-law daughter-in-law figure pardon me okay or the the old lady young lady figure or the mother daughter figure okay you can see this as a young lady that's what most men see right with a chin and a dainty nose and a necklace fur coat or you can see it as a hideous old hag how many of you see the alternation those of you who haven't seen the old lady the young lady's chin sorry the young lady's neck is the old lady's chin the young lady's chin is the old lady's nose with a big fat pimple on her nose Okay how many of you see it now okay excellent now here again the image is constant nothing is changing but your perception changes what does this mean this means perception cannot involve just taking an image displaying it on a screen in your brain because if it were it has to stay the same it means that perception involves active interpretation by The Observer it means that it involves Every Act of perception involves judgment it involves an opinion on the State of Affairs in the world not a passive reaction to what's coming in and this is just a striking example of that next slide another example you all see banisters but how many of you Mel green there how many of you see nudes okay you can see it as nudes facing each other I'm sorry father-in-law's okay next slide you can see that as a person looking at you or the very despondent kiss two people in profile kissing each other how many of you see that raise your hands excellent next slide okay how does all this happen well it turns out in the back of the brain and in the sides you got 30 areas 30 concerned just with seeing just with vision primates are highly visual creatures each of those areas is concerned with a different aspect of vision there's an area for for color vision there is an area for form and shape there's an area for depth relative distance there's an area for just movement there's an area for color there's this Exquisite specialization and that's because vision is much more complicated than anyone ever imagined and that's why art works because if you can simply dis Vision involves an image going to the brain and being displayed on a screen an artist would be out of business right the reason art Works he goes in there he changes the image plays with it and titillates these visual areas in your brain more optimally than just looking at the real world and that's why you get this high and that's called Art that's ramachandran's definition of art okay now the question is how does he do it okay next slide that brings me to the art part of my talk the main part of my talk and the question is simple are there artistic universals what I mean by that is despite the Staggering diversity of Artistic Styles there is Renaissance art there is Impressionism there is expressionism there is cubism there is fism there is Indian art there is Tibetan art there is Dada which is not even art there is all kinds of art okay how can but in spite of the Staggering diversity could there be some underlying common principles after all there are thousands of languages if you speak French it doesn't mean you understand Hindi but according to chamski there is a Universal grammar that's Universal is there a universal grammar for vision and for art that's what I was interested in as a scientist and if so how does the brain respond to Art these are of course two sides of a coin next slide now to put it in historical perspective I'm from India from a little town called mapor which goes back to the 4th Century BC and that Temple whose foundations goes go back to the third Century BC and I want to tell you how I got into art because mostly what I do for a living is neurology and I just dabble in art and I sometimes collect art and I want to say that until about 5 years ago I had absolutely no interest in art I mean I take that back I mean you know i' go to a city New City for a conference or something there an art gallery there there's a show I'll just go and see it you know just to show that I'm very cultured and that sort of thing you know I'll go there but I did not have any passion for art there's a big difference between interest and passion I did not have a passion and then next slide I'm going to acknowledge some other people who are involved in the art project especially my post doog William Bill hin uh who I had lots of conversations with my wife Diane Rogers ramachandran with whom I would wander the temples in India and I'll get back to that in a minute and we were intrigued by these sculptures of gods and goddesses in Julia Fuller KY some of you may know here from the Stewart collection who was giving some lectures on Picasso and Rodan which I went to and was inspired by these lectures and said why does the brain respond to Art I mean what is it about art that turns us on okay and then I went to the temples in India on a sabatical for 3 months and we were wandering around these temples and we was looking at these sculptures of gods and goddesses you know I said why are these images so hauntingly beautiful okay because my initial reaction was I grew up with these images praying to these gods and goddesses raised as a Hindu right and my I had a colonial view of this art I used to think this is this religious iconography you know this is about mythology and religion right to put it in historical perspective next slide I looked at the history of Indian art and Western reactions to Indian art when the English first arrived the Colonials arrived in India many of the art historians and art Scholars looked at Indian uh sculptures like this bronze statue of the Goddess Parvati from probably 11th or 12th century she is supposed to be the wife of Shiva and supposed to be the epitome of feminine sexuality and Grace and dignity and Poise she's a goddess the English looked at this and he said the Victorian Englishman he said yuck you know that doesn't look real look at the breast they too big look at the hips are too big you know and the waist is too thin that doesn't look realistic it's paganism it's primitive art it's not really art okay next slide and he also looked at the Rajasthani miniature paintings he said yuck there is no perspective here you know it's not realistic now of course in making this cre making this criticism he has missed the whole point of art because the point of art is not realism right the point of art is not realism you can take a $5 camera and click you know take a naked picture of somebody here nobody would pay you a dollar for it okay unless it's a picture of Mel green then you might pay a lot of money okay but normally nobody would pay your scent for that the purpose of art is not copying reality is not realism the purpose of art is hyperbole is exaggeration it's Distortion is to deliberately distort the image to produce pleasing effects in the viewer's brain that's the purpose of art okay it's not realism because you can take a photograph of somebody nobody calls that art okay next SL the irony is next slide come the 20th century and Picasso comes along what does he do he produces Distortion he's got this new this woman here two eyes on one sides of her face looks like a flounder right and and you know it's got a club foot and everything is distorted and what did the Western Art Scholars say my God what a work of Genius because he has liberated us from realism well guess what that's what the Chola bronze artist was doing he knew what a real woman looks like he said to hell with a real woman I want to produce something that is evocative produces emotions in your brain he was distorting it deliberately okay that's what Picasso was doing not to detract from Picasso's genius but simply to say that he's Reinventing the wheel this is known a thousand years earlier in India next slide and same thing with somebody like um matis look at how that's perspective correct oval but the table is circular completely wrong the perspective any idiot will tell you that perspective is all wrong but you say oh my my God matis he a genius you don't say oh God Yak the perspective is wrong because the point of art is not realism he is playing with colors well guess what the Rajasthani miniature painting is again he's playing with color it's a Whimsical use of color it's not about realism okay okay next slide even greater irony the same Englishman who was looking at those bronzes and saying yuck they're primitive the hips are too big the breasts are too big guess what his wife was doing okay this is the time when corsets were introduced in Victorian England and grotesquely pinched waste I have seen skeletons of these women believe it or not at the hunteran Museum of Royal College of Surgeons in London they had ribs removed to constrict the waste may have even been inspired by those Chola bronzes which that Englishman saw so he was encouraging his wife to do it and admiring her beauty and saying that the Chola bronze was primitive art okay next slide if you want realism there it is right nobody calls that a great work of art I mean he's cute but nobody says it's it's a great work of art right now speaking of many sometimes I give these talks and and every now and then somebody will get up in the audience and say but did the cha bronze artist who created these distorted women how do you know he was doing it deliberately maybe he didn't know what a woman looks like you know maybe it is primitive maybe the miniature painters didn't know what perspective is maybe it is primitive well let's go back to 2,500 BC in India in the Indus Valley that's a torso from 2,500 BC incredibly realistic and beautiful in fact it's more realistic than that Renaissance Michelangelo saw because that's what real men look like look at that belly okay not like that group you know that that God you saw earlier okay so Indian artists knew perfectly well what realism is and in fact went on for thousands of years and then they went into abstraction Distortion deliberately to evoke emotions next slide okay now if you come to Medieval Times so question is clearly art involves Distortion it involves hyperbole it involves exaggeration but you can't just randomly distort something and call it art although some people do okay especially in La Hoya but so it has to be a specific type of distortion a specific type of exaggeration what is it well if you go to the third Century BC the first millennium BC the sage bhata who wrote a big pretus on Aesthetics and art talked uses a word called rasa R AA which is a word that appears frequently in Sanskrit the s word rasa is difficult to translate what it means is the spirit of something the soul of something capturing the very essence of something to evoke a specific emotion in the viewer's brain that entire sentence is encapsulated in that one word Russa right so for example the medieval stone sculptor in kajuraho 9th century 10th Century will speak of the rasa of amorous ecstasy this is a two Celestial lovers look at the way they're gazing at each other in Everlasting Rapture intensely absorbed in each other but look at the way he's holding her chin and raising it towards him saying you're a mind okay look at the way she is holding his hand tight so there is this palpable erotic tension being built up in the image even as you watch it and that's the goal of that sculpture to evoke eroticism intense eroticism the rasa which we call shringara rasa okay it's not to say oh let's make a real looking man you don't say oh the ears are too long you know the fingers are too long that's not the point of art you can do that with a camera you don't want to go and just take a click two people necking right all right this is Art right it's to evoke that emotion right next slide this is another rasa and that is I'm using the word rasa a little bit Loosely but this is conjugal Bliss instead of erotic sexual intimacy not not necessarily incompatible okay but very different mood this is Vishnu and Lakshmi his Celestial consort his wife in in heaven look at the way they're so comfortable with each other but yet there is a little bit of understated sexuality look at the way his hand which is broken is holding her breast her hand is draped around his neck so there is this wonderful of intimacy look at how the lines just flow into each other this wonderful sense of intimacy and they're just sort of looking at the universe at all of you lesser Mortals you know because they are in charge okay so that is conjugal Bliss the Russa of conjugal Bliss not erotic intensity next Slide the rasa of maternal Bliss the woman playing with her child look at her expression the wonderful expression which combines Joy with pride that's what a mother expression is with a child combining joy and the sculptor has brilliantly evoked that combining Joy with pride it's very difficult to do in stone okay as she's playing with her infant then I started thinking what is Russa if you understand Russa you understand art and I came up with what I call the eight laws of artistic experience originally only thought of seven but then I thought of another one eight okay this is meant to be playful it could be eight it could be 10 who knows okay but the idea is that there are certain rules of thumb or heuristics and I like to call them laws they're not like laws of physics they're really Los rules of thumb that the artist unconsciously or consciously deploys to optimally titillate the visual areas in your brain to produce pleasing emotions how does the artist do this that's what I'm after so I came up with eight laws I'm only going to tell you about three or four given our time limitations for another 15 minutes okay the first principle is the peak shift principle what do I mean by that next slide this is based on experiments on rats operant conditioning scaran conditioning imagine you train a rat to distinguish a square from a rectangle so every time it sees a rectangle it gives a piece a piece of cheese but when it sees when it sees a square you don't give it anything very soon it starts liking the the rectangle although you know you're not supposed to say that if you're a skin Arian okay it it It Go towards the rectangle okay now the interesting thing is once it has learned to like the rectangle later after it's learned you show it a longer skinnier rectangle it actually prefers this to that it actually goes here now you see that's kind of stupid why does the rat prefer this to what you taught it it's not stupid at all because what the rat has learned is a rule rectangularity the greater the aspect ratio the more rectangular the better and so you give it that it says wow what a rectangle and it goes there okay now you say my God what's what the hell does that have to do with art well let's go back let's think of caricature what do you do in a caricature supposing you want to have a caricature of Nixon what do you do you want to know how is his face different from the average male face so what you do is you average all the male faces you can do this with a computer subtract the average male face from Nixon's face and that tells you what's special about it the big nose and the Shaggy eyebrow and then you amplify the difference and then you get a caricature you get the rasa the Republican rasa okay you get the rasa of being Nixon okay so it looks even more like Nixon than Nixon himself right that's the key idea now if you overdo it it looks comical and you call it caricature but if you do it just right you get a beautiful portrait you get portraiture you get rembrand okay next slide what about the Toler bronze well what's he doing the epitome of feminine sexuality Grace dignity Poise how do you do that well what he does is he takes the average male form the average female form subtracts the male from the female you're going to get big breasts big hips narrow waist and he amplifies it when he amplifies it you don't say yuck that's abnormal anatomically you say wow what a woman okay at least the lyic system in your brain is saying that okay now then you say well that's only going to produce a sexy woman what about dignity Grace po she's a goddess well what you do is there are some postures that men simply cannot adopt because of pelvic Anatomy the angle between the neck and the shaft of the femur and the way it's where your spine is articulated I mean I can't even stand like that if I want to if I try whereas a woman can do it effortlessly so what you do is you go into an abstract space I call posture space and you exaggerate that feminine Grace Elegance Po and that's what she's doing okay that's what she's doing and there's this wonderful sense of she's erotic she's sexual and yet great dignity and great Poise right she's holding that Phantom lotus flower in her hand and and and even as you watch it there something I want to tell you about a lot of Indian art including chol bronzes there's a strong exposure effect it's like what we used to call in Psychology the Chinese phas phenomenon when the Chinese first came into this country all Chinese looked alike now of course they don't look alike right the reason is your brain does not have the sensitivity to the parameters that distinguish Chinese faces so they all look alike you go to Berkeley the Chinese students say all Caucasians look alike okay majority of them are from China or sorry the Chinese okay same thing with Indian art your brain developed the sensitivity to the parameters that the artist is using and then it's hauntingly beautiful not only that every time I've given this lecture about 30 times every time I to see the slide it gets better so my God first time second time my God you know it gets better and better unlike kitch art this is how you tell kitch art apart from good art kit art La Hoya art you go look at it second time you say third time you say you know great art like Beethoven's Fifth each time you hear it it becomes better each time that's the TR of Chola bronze okay next slide another example of a Celestial nymph from Madia Pradesh probably around 10th century and 11th century and big breasts of course and big hips and narrow waist but there's another clever trick the artist has used look carefully look at all these fos of fat these rolls of fat on her abdomen and you say yuck why is fat beautiful fat is ugly well that's because we live in a society where anorex models are anorexic okay but if you look at our hunter gather ancestors having fats very sexy because it means you can nurture the baby and feed the baby so this what she's telling you telling your Olympic system is come and mate with me I can feed your baby okay I got plenty of fat stores but at the same time he doesn't want to make her obese he wants to preserve that hourglass figure accentuated hips and breasts and yet give her plenty of subcutaneous fat to nurture the baby and these are all even that vertical line going through the umbilicus the belly button is a very clever trick that the artist has used these are all things you don't realize consciously it's appealing to your lyic system and to your right brain now by the way going back to posture remember I said you can here's a Celestial nymph from the Metropolitan Museum it's it's gorgeous the sense of movement see the how the necklace is flying off of course big breasts big hips narrow waist you don't say oh no that's anatomically incorrect you know you say wow what a nymph the sense of movement the dance okay that's poetry in stone it's brilliant okay next slide now by the way this is not just true of Indian art if you go back to ancient cave art for example European ancient cave art look at these Bisons beautiful but they got teeny Meeny skinny legs tiny microsopic head okay but you don't say God that's ugly it doesn't look like a real bison you say wow beautiful because it's a rasa of Bison Hood the artist is captured okay now you say all fine Dr ramachandra it's all fine and dandy about about the human female and the male and all that and posture what about the rest of art what about Henry Moore what about Rodan what about clim what about impressionism what about all that well I'm getting there okay now to understand abstract art or even semi-abstract you have to go to ethology so one of the things we're trying to do is to take strands take evidence from many different sources and weave it together okay Nobel prizewinning ethologist Timber at Oxford 30 or 40 years ago studied seagulls this is a Herring Gull with a beak with a red spot on it yellow beak red spot you can see this even on our Coast the chick the baby seagull comes and begs for food but pecking at the red spot now the question how does the chick know how does the chick recognize the mother so what simber did was he just dis took a disembodied beak with no mother and he the old guy with a beard went and waved this beak in front of the chick the chick started begging for food from him thinking he was mom so that's kind of stupid I mean here's this guy waving this beak and it's think it's mom's kind of stupid it's not stupid at all because what it's telling you is vision the visual mechanisms in the brain have evolved to economize on information processing do as little work as you need to do to to identify the object now the chick's brain knows through millions of years of evolution the only time it's going to see a long thing with a red spot is when Mom is around so to hell with the rest of the mom you know why waste processing computational power processing all that whenever I see the red spot I'll beg for food okay so it's not stupid at all now this means you can easily fool the chick but the chick can get away with using the shortcut because he never going to run into a a mutant pig with a beak or or a malicious ethologist waving a beak in front of it okay so it can capitalize on this redundancy in nature and take advantage of the fact that this is always seen with Mom next Timber Gan found you don't even need a beak you take a long stick with a red spot the chick gets fooled because the neurons in the visual pathway they have some coding SK scheme some way of encoding the shape of that beak and you can fool it very easily just like you were fooled by visual Illusions and the chick thinks that's a beak and goes in pecks for food and even better if you show it a long thin stick with three red stripes the chick goes crazy all the chicks come there attracted to it like a magnet start pecking away in incessantly right we don't know why Timber doesn't explain why but he had accidentally produced a super beak and the chicks go crazy okay that's because we don't know what the form Primitives are in the chick brain what is the language the alphabet for form perception and maybe the neurons in the chick's brain they are looking for a beak they have a certain feature they're looking for and this damn thing actually stimulates it even more right because the rule might be the more red outline the better and you give it more red outline with three red stripes it goes crazy and it says wow what a beak okay and the message then goes into the lyic system of the chick the emotional centers and it's mesmerized and it's attracted to this beak okay now even though this beak does this stick with the three strips does not resemble a beak at all the chick goes crazy now that brings me to the punch line of my art lecture and that is if the seagulls had an art gallery they would hang the stick with the three red stripes on the wall they would worship it they'd pay millions of dollars they'd call it a Picasso but they wouldn't know why because it doesn't resemble anything they said why the hell am I so excited about this okay and that's what all of you art collectors are doing in the audience okay next slide so what I'm saying is people like Picasso or Henry Morris Henry Moore have either trial and error or through Intuition or genius tapping into the form Primitives of the human brain and creating for your brain the equivalent of that long stick with the three red stripes for the chick brain so you're all behaving like those little baby seagull chicks when you go and pay all this money and buy that art okay next slide that's Henry Moore now you say fine Dr ramachandra how do I know any of this is true now that's the important thing about science what's what makes science different from philosophy philosophers have been talking about art and Aesthetics for thousands of years going all the way back to Aristotle and guess how much progress they have made I won't go into that okay now the reason is there don't they don't come up with testable ideas what I'm saying is you can test what I'm saying and I'll tell you how you can do that let's take something very specific like cubism your response to let's take Picasso right why is this putting two eyes on one side what is cubism is transcending the tyranny of viewpoint I can only see this from one Viewpoint you say no because I I'm going to drag the other side of the phas and put it here okay but why should that be beautiful that's what nobody has answered I'm going to answer that okay if you go to the visual infratemporal cortex and you record from cells in that part of the brain next slide what you find is very interesting is a schematic diagram of my graduate student's brain okay if you record from cells here each cell in the face area of the brain will respond to one view of a particular person boss the frontal view semi-profile complete profile different cells this cell for profile this cell only for frontal right these are face cells but only one view of the face okay only one view of the face but if you go to the next area higher up you get these Master face cells which respond to any view of the face so long as it's the right face boss and you go to another Mass cell it'll be my my my mate another cell my baby okay different cells for different faces how do you construct these you take the output of these any anybody here who's an electronics engineer will know this you take the outputs of all these cells for individual views and you pull them onto one master cell which responds to any of view okay now comes the punch line if you put two views simultaneously on one image it's going to excite two cells and hyperactivate that cell so that cell is going to scream its head off say my God a face okay and then it's going to tell the lyic system here is a super face that's what Picasso is that's what cubism is you're giving two views and hyperactivating is just like that long stick with the three red stripes is hyperactivating the chick's brain and the advantage with this is you can go tomorrow to a lab in Oxford or in Harvard where they're doing this experiment recording from Master cells show it a Picasso and I'm saying it'll fire more to the Picasso than to any of these faces and I love this example because you know you have often have cocktails with people scientists social scientists art historians the social scientists always say oh you know you scientists you can explain the atom you can explain this you can explain brains and molecules and this and that DNA you never explain a Picasso okay well guess what that's what that is okay okay you can actually explain a Picasso now you can go and do the experiment you can come back to me next week and say Dr ramachandra you're full of it it doesn't work right but at least we know it doesn't work and you go to the next step that's what science is in philosophy you can't do an experiment and say Plato is wrong has you ever have you ever anybody heard say Plato is wrong nobody right okay right sorry okay well there is a philosopher in the audience next slide okay so this is just showing you what I just said next slide now another way to do the same experiment is to do galvanic skin response remember I said the visual image goes in Cascades into the lyic system makes you sweat I'm saying if you show somebody a real Playboy pinup versus a Picasso you should get more sweating with a Picasso even though the pinup looks more realistic because I'm saying it's hyperactivating the visual areas in the brain so these are all testable propositions we're working on this next slide now you say what about a Bonet what about impressionism well remember you got 30 areas which you can play with there's a color area that represents color so when you look at a water lily you got a canonical representation of water lies in your brain based on dozens of examples you've seen what Monet is doing is doing hyperbole doing Peak shift but in color space not in form so you look at this just a bunch of smudges of paint but you're mesmerized whereas you wouldn't give a dollar for a photograph of a water lily because you're behaving like the seagull chick next Slide the second principle I want to tell you about I got two more principles to go is grouping that is look at this picture just a bunch of squiggles and smudges but how many of you see a Dalmatian dog raise your hands okay many of you have seen this before isn't it amazing how the brain links these plots together knits them together in the brain and then you say wow a dog I found it there is this aha this insight and that's what point people have missed what I'm saying is when it clicks when you group it's reinforcing for the brain why is that the reason is we evolved in a camouflaged environment those of you who are not creationists up in the Treetops currying in the Treetops dim Twilight you're trying to dodge a lion right the lion is hidden behind foliage what do you see bunch of yellow splotches what does the brain do it links it's saying what is the likelihood these are seven different yellow splotches no they're probably one object it's called basian Logic Let me link them all oh my God it's a lion let me get out of here so the brain vision is mainly about discovering objects discover an object you get a pleasing Sensations wow let me get out of here oh it's a it's a mate let me Chase it whatever okay and artist can take advantage of this whether you're a Renaissance artist next slide now another example of grouping is here most of you instantly see parenthesis how many of you see parenthesis raise your hands but you can also see it as hourglasses see that right but you prefer parenthesis because most natural objects are closed boundaries it's called the gestal principle of closure the Galas knew about this artists exploit this next slide Renaissance artists use look at that Asia here same Asia same Asia same Asia and the Brain links these in the mind and says wow okay and it's pleasing to the eye and the Renaissance artists knew this the same brown same brown same brown repeating everywhere okay next slide famous van go painting here's this Kabuki this person van go put this mat there notice how he repeats the same colors in the same Textures in the mat to create this pleasing sensation little realizing he was taking advant of the fact that your your brains evoled up in the Treetops to detect Lions that's what he's exploiting here without knowing it next slide you can use multiple principles in one image here's a medieval stone sculpture from India two Celestial lovers notice how he there's a lot of things going on here first of all of course big breasts and hips and all that but also grouping look at how the lines flow into each other and the flowing of the lines into each other is a metaphor of the lovers mingling with each other the souls mingling notice also how her her head is tilted back exposing her neck her throat this is a gesture of ethological vulnerability meaning you can sink your fangs into my throat okay like Dracula and all that okay so in other words you're saying I'm completely vulnerable take me okay but the funny thing is she's saying that and look at him he's trying to peel her jeans off and yet look at the way she's holding on to it saying no not yet not yet so there's a CSH aspect to her behavior so there's this palpable erotic tension being built up in the image and all of that is unconscious it's hitting your brain hitting your limpic system and you said my God it's so beautiful you didn't you didn't notice all that in the beginning when you looked at it you just said there's a couple of lovers okay even the trick of that head being bad way and this head being this way is very deliberate is to allow that that grouping okay next Slide the next third principle I want to tell you about it's called isolation and that is every artist knows that a little Doodle or a sketch can be much more evocative and beautiful than a full color photograph right you can have a little Doodle of a of a nude by climp or Rodan right and you look at these they're much more beautiful than a full color pinup Playboy pinup or something well why is that you say Dr ramachandra and you say it's all about activating the visual areas if you have a real photograph of a nude there's color there is texture there is hair there is depth it's going to activate all those areas it should feel really good should be great work of art no I'll tell you why it's because take a great artist and who's doing a doodle a nude Picasso clet tracus um Ram any of these people doing a little Doodle of a nude you look at it the essential information about her being feminine and sexy and a nude is in the outline it's not in her skin color her skin color is the same as yours or mine or anybody here right the key information is in the outline so what you're doing is by putting all the skin color and hair and all that you're distracting the brain's limited attentional resources ultimately it has to do with attention the fact that even though you got 100 billion nerve cells in your brain you got a limited attention you can pay attention to only one thing at a time so what the artist is doing be it Clint or Rodan Rodan you think of sculptures but he also did wonderful little Doodles of nudes isolating the critical information and giving you Peak shift in that so it's saving your brain a lot of Labor you don't have to pay attention to texture and color and hair and all that and you home it instantly on the on on the outline and you say wow the Russa of a new n or Russa of a portrait or whatever okay next slide and how do I know this look at that comparison that's a drawing of a horse by a normal 8-year-old child and it's hideous okay it looks like a you know like a like a cardboard cutout there's no depth there is nothing this is a six-year-old autistic child named Nadia who can't even talk look at that horse it's leaping out from the canvas she's leaping out from the canvas it has got the Russa of a horse here is a horse by Leonardo DaVinci when I ped audiences like this many of them actually this is better than this it's got kind of too many lines you know that that like that saying about modart too many notes you know like the king said you know it's got too many lines here right this one on the other hand is perfect now here's a paradox how can a child who can't tie a shoel who can't talk create this wonderful horse the reason is the principle of isolation what artist the famous aphorism less is more in art why is less more because this child in Nadia all the other brain modules are not working but the right parietal of the brain which is sensitive to Artistic proportion sense of proportion and all that we know that because when that's damaged you lose the ability to paint and draw that alone is spared in her so she spontaneously allocates all her resources to that one area that's spared which is about artistic proportion therefore what you and I and all of us have to learn spend Years Learning to ignore all the relevant distraction and pay attention just to the outline she does it instantly she's got a module created just for rasa which is actually hyperfunctioning and maybe hypertrophied in her brain next slide now the next principle I want to tell you about the last one is the most difficult to understand it's called the principle of metaphor now you all know what a metaphor is we just talked about Shakespeare in poetry you know what a metaphor is he's taking two seemingly unrelated Realms of discourse and developing a link Juliet is a is a young lady is the son is a celestial object people nobody would think they're related but Shakespeare linked them and it's beautiful when he does that now what people don't realize is visual artists also do this take this young lady she's a Celestial nymph from kajuraho at the bottom of the temple aspiring to God looking heavenwards this is my last principle by the way aspiring to God looking heavenwards pulling her own finger so there is this sort of eroticism in there okay but also notice there's this Branch or bow with mangoes those ripe mangoes is a metaphor of her youthfulness and fertility so the mangoes are represent fertility the fecundity of Nature and they're echoing her breasts and her youthfulness and fertility and fecundity so it's a very subtle artistic trick frequently used in Indian art the other principle I want to tell you briefly is a principle called peekaboo and that is everybody knows that a nude scene behind a dianous veil is much more attractive than a Playboy pinup well he said that doesn't make any sense after all if you show the whole photograph it's going to hit your brain big but if this is all concealed how come it's more beautiful the reason is is our brains evolved in camouflaged environments trying to discover objects so you have to give the brain incentive for finding an object peekaboo for discovering a hidden object so if the artist deliberately hides it for you the brain has to work to discover it that's actually pleasing to the eye wow there's an object there let me look at it wow there's something hidden there let me find it it's a predator it's a mate it's a prey so it's all about your ancestors up there in the fog you know in the Treetops trying to mate in the fog you know trying to find a mid in the fog and and and you have to make it pleasing otherwise you'll give up too easily right now Indian art uses the same principle but slightly differently instead of using diaphanous garments what they do is they have nudes with the jewelry with the necklace just hiding the nipple right and you look at it and you're just waiting for it to reveal it and you say and you know this builds up this erotic tension and this is the what I call the peekaboo principle okay next slide going on to metaphor this is one of my favorite slides ignore all this Baro stuff in the background this is Pala from the Pala Dynasty right from Eastern India Shiva and Parvati the celestial Cosmic couple right in Cosmic couple seated there notice how she's sitting on his right lap they're looking at each other in rapt completely enraptured okay and look at how she has her left hand draped around him he has his right hand around her breast so there is a clear sexuality in this image an understated sexuality that's just the surface but there is a lot of metaphor here if you read HRI Zimmer writing about Indian art he will talk to you about this for two hours and I don't have two hours I'll tell you in one minute what the metaphor here is what the artist is trying to convey is here's Shiva and Parvati the cosmic couple but Indian Hinduism is ultimately monotheistic very few people realize this and by I want to say at the outset I'm not trying to preach here I'm not a practicing Hindu I'm a scientist you know agnostic but you have to understand the religious metaphor to understand the art okay and what the Indian artist is doing here is he is saying it's as though they're saying although seemingly two right they are fundamentally one they're two aspects of one Divine principle namely God and then at once it's as though this God or Unity has unfolded itself into a duality for the sake of all of you lesser Mortals okay for the sake of the universe and all its beings the Supreme Spirit has unfolded into this duality of Shiva and Parvati and then it immediately becomes a metaphor of all the polarities and dualities and antagonisms and distinctions that characterize the phenomenal life such as male and female yin and yang electron and proton matter and antimatter right creation and destruction okay that's the metaphor that the artist is trying to convey in that in that image and it's brilliantly conveyed okay next slide shows you an even better example the greatest example of all and that is one of the greatest works of art of all time Rodan said it is the greatest sculpture he has ever known and that is the Chola bronze naaja from the 11th century in Southern India showing Shiva as the Cosmic dancer and what he's doing there is his dance is supposed to be the dance of the cosmos the dance of the universe the Eternal Rhythm of the universe and again mind you I'm not preaching here this is just I'm trying to tell you what the artist is trying to convey okay it's very important to be very clear about that and this ring of fire punctuated by these Flames represents the cyclical nature of the cosmos creation and destruction and notice how Shiva is right at the center of it all and the artist is very cleverly combined two seemingly antithetical elements like there is dance there is tremendous frenzy the frenzy and activity of the universe okay which is what the universe is the phenomenal Universe at the same time complete tranquility and Poise and calm I am right at the center of it just like your own human soul is is right and I'm just The Spectator but I'm also the creator of all this frenzy around you okay so that's his expression there supremely tranquil and Blissful and this wonderful PO is leg raised there gives him a wonderful sense of balance and Poise so the artist just is a genius because he's combined this frenzy of this dance of the cosmos with this calmness and dignity and Tranquility of God who's at the center of all this activity okay at the same time there's a lot of other metaphors going on here look at his right hand he's holding a drum a Tambour that is the rhythm of creation okay the rhythm of creation and on the other hand balancing it exactly is a flame in the other hand destruction so creation and destruction balancing each other out perfectly okay then look at his foot bent slightly to give him that one wonderful sense of balance crushing this I don't know how many people in the back can see this this little hideous dwarf and that dwarf is the dwarf of ignorance or Illusion or Maya okay so Shiva is saying get rid of this illusion now what is that illusion the illusion is that all of you lesser lesser Mortals have including me the illusion is that the universe is nothing but the Mindless gations of atoms and molecules that's it and we're here for a short while and we're dead gone Kap okay then you get rid of that illusion and realize that all of this is just part of this great dance of the cosmos the Great Dance of Shiva and you're really part of the cosmos you're not separate from it you're not an aloof spectator watching this dance you're part of the cosmos when you get rid of that illusion and seek salvation under my foot he's pointing to his foot and say Seek salvation under my foot then you will be released from bondage and achieve enlightenment and Union with Shiva and and realize all is illusion okay next slide I want to conclude oh briefly many people ask me you're talking about Indian art what about Western Art these principles are are not unique to Indian art it's true of Indian art Western Art Tibetan art any art okay but there is something unique about Indian art which is it has this wonderful transcendental quality many of the sculptures as though it's not of this world how does the artist achieve this I have no idea one trick they very very often use is they leave out the pupils in the eye and that gives it this otherw worldly quality but they haven't done that here he's just closed his eyes it's the way he's sitting an image of the Buddha from Salon from about the 10th century and look at that wonderful sense of Grace and Poise you know and saying don't worry everything will be fine you'll all be fine we'll all be fine F don't worry okay okay it's the bodhisatwa the enlightened one okay next slide I want to tell you about another principle which is symmetry which I won't go into I mean every child who's played with a kaleidoscope knows that symmetry is important this is because biological objects why do our brains like symmetry is it just coincidence no it's because most biological objects faces animals prey Predator mate are symmetrical so your brain has an early warning system my God that's symmetrical look there maybe it's a lion maybe it's a mate look there okay it's an early warning system artists use this Kaleidoscope Islamic Art you know all those mosaics and all that okay or the most Immortal work of art the Taj Mahal which the great Emperor shajahan built for his beloved mumtaz Mahal it's an an immortal symbol of of love okay and again it's symmetry it's all about symmetry last slide I'm concluding which is when I was a medical student what I was taught was you know certain things if you're going to get into research you're going to become a scientist you're going to do research certain things you stay away from like what is consciousness what is Free Will what is the meaning of art what does it mean to fall in love what I mean all the things everybody's interested in you sort of stay away from if you want to get tenure well fortunately I have tenure so I can pursue these questions and what I'm trying to say is given all of these wonderful new imaging technology by studying the right kinds of patients whether it's cop gr syndrome Phantom limb or whatever or even by thinking about some of these issues like art you can begin to address many of these lofty questions such as even what is the meaning of art which until now has remained the province of philosophy thank you [Applause] gentleman asked the question many of the examples I cited involves starting point starting with a real object and doing something with it what about completely abstract object sorry completely abstract art say Kinski okay now I want to say by the way in Indian art you know centuries ago they had a movement called tantric art where what they said was to hell with any object we don't want to represent anything let's have geometric designs to align forces in the mind allow you to seek God very similar to the language condens uses okay what's going on there I think is one of the principles I didn't go into is things like contrast and I only talked about a few of the principles what the artist is doing is creating object likee entities and again stimulating certain brain centers where you say look this is pleasing this contrast this positioning of the objects and also I want to say I'm talking about rules of thumb I'm not talking about absolute laws like laws of physics and a given artist may choose to deploy three of these laws another one may deploy six or seven of them and it's up to the genius of that artist and intuition of that artist which laws he deploys and how effectively he deploys them and for the record I'm not a big fan of completely abstract art I mean I like the the I don't like purely representational I don't like completely abstract I like this this bottom the art that lies of the interface which is most evocative I think because we're all like seagull chicks very good question no they're not stupid but what's happening is there their mothers told them they shouldn't like it to put it differently their basic lyic mechanisms in the brain are still hyper responding to Picasso compared to a normal phase but then another part of your brain you see your brain is very modular there are lots of brains in your brain there are about 25 brains I don't know about you but generally there are 25 brains okay okay and what's happening is some of these are saying hey this doesn't make any sense how come a woman has two eyes on one sides H I am aroused by it I like it but I'm not I shouldn't tell anybody about it Emperor's New Clothes you know I shouldn't tell anybody about it so what I'm saying is the basic circuitry may be there in all of you to respond to Picasso to respond to cubism but there are so many layers before you finally say yeah I like it to somebody that those somehow you're engaging in denial okay you're and denial is a very common phenomenon in human nature not just about art but I was telling a student the other day you know that half the human race is in denial about their stupidity I'll tell you why because if you do polls you find that 95% of people think their IQ is above average now this is mathematically impossible okay so this means 45% of people who are stupid are denying that they're stupid okay and this may be equally true of response to Art you know we have not done that yet my prediction is that doesn't matter because what you're tapping into is an earlier visceral reaction which should be same for both of them but you were saying had to do with the mother now suppose your mother likes to be cast when you don't but the galvanic skin response is tapping at an earlier stage before it gets to the thinking part of the brain which is starting to think about your mother and saying and all all that so my prediction is even though he says he doesn't like it his skin can't lie just like a lie detector the Galvan skin response is basically the same as a lie Det detector so this guy is lying he likes Picasso okay so you can you can actually you know put these in art galleries and and and and and and tell somebody you know you can tell somebody you know you you have to pay a million dollars for this whether you like it or not because you know your skin is telling you you like it you know so so so that's that's my that's my response to that yeah oh absolutely I stand corrected I was using the example of just blindly aiming a camera and just taking a photograph certainly using photograph photography you can do clever tricks emphasizing some aspects of the image not emphasizing some aspects of the image and then of course you have a work of art so I was just using I was car it's a caricature yeah the question is the people with synesthesia these subjects these uh 1% of the population who when they see five they see red when they see six they see green when they see seven they see blue is it the concept of seven or is it the is the actual visual image the answer is depends on the subject of the three or four subjects we've tested the most common is it's the actual visual graphine as we call it if you draw five they'll say it looks tinged red but you give them a Roman five right five objects are similar I'm coming to that you give them a Roman five they say it doesn't look colored or you give them five Strokes of the pen so they got the concept of five doesn't look colored so it's the visual not the graphine but of the four subjects who tested one subject we found the opposite for him if you show him five cluster of five he'll say that's also tinged red or if you give him a Roman five the reason is I only showed you the fusiform gyrus if you go to the next stage of number processing where it gets more abstract you get to the angular gyus okay to the front of the angular gyus and zeki's next stage of color processing is also in that region so you may get cross wirring at different stages in different people and in that guy it's the concept of the number that evokes the color not the visual appearance of the number this is why we think we've got this wonderful new area of of of Arena research it even overlaps with art to some extent because many artists are cetes you know uh Kandinsky certainly was and another chap was it Pollock somebody here may know yeah and and many artists and noov many novelists disproportionate number of them and I think this is because they can form more associations in their brain than lesser Mortals like us you know very good question the metaph for stuff is kind of like in the borderline between conceptual and perceptual right it's kind of neither here nor there when you get even further and start talking about somebody who's deliberately per perverse and takes you know a a toilet bowl and say that's that's a that's a work of art then you're getting far away from what I can do as a scientist I can say I can come right up to here and then you're on your own you know okay it's a very good question what you're asking is these voluptious goddesses and all that you know um is it modulated by sex hormones I bet your lyic response will be much higher your your GSR if you know if you have a high high level of testosterone or some other transmitters in the brain again it's an interesting question it hasn't been change the perception it may indeed change it that's a good question we have not looked at that yeah yeah no that's a very good question you see this harks back to what I was saying namely maybe these great artists are tapping into form Primitives we don't know what the brain uses as the alphabet to represent form the Gul chick likes that long stick with the three red stripes it fetishizes that similarly it could be we have certain form Primitives you know maybe platonic um Primitives who knows and and the artist can tap into that and exploit that but none of this has been studied in a proper manner scientifically that again is related to yungi and archetypes except he starts getting mystical and saying there is uh some Mystical Force but if you ignore that aspect of it certainly there could be archetypes there could be um mechanisms in the brain which are especially active when seeing certain types of universal shapes you know that's a very good question that's a good point I mean there's a big jump between the creators obviously have an extra something in addition to the Cross wirring which enables them to do these leaps whereas the appreciators can only go so far as seeing a great work of Genius when it's presented to them but not themselves so it's all a little bit woolly I mean I'm not I can't really get at the neurological basis of the Creator versus why is moart Mozart saleri can understand appreciate enjoy but it's tormented because he can't create like mozard right but there are some people who can't even appreciate Mozart so at least we're better than them yeah sorry one more question no no no no I mean not necessarily you see because well no because the world is gations of atoms and molecules and and and we can understand those things and we can make progress we can send people to the Moon that's all science and we can understand that nobody saying all all that Shiva metaphor is saying Behind These appearances is a deeper reality which science cannot access and oh maybe there is you know as I said I'm not going to dispute that to me it's beautiful as a as a poetic metaphor and it works for me and and it's beautiful you know and I think somebody said I don't know who maybe it was Rodan that there's no better instantiation of the concept of God than the Shiva Nat Raja because it doesn't appeal to a personal see a lot of people you know English going back to the English Listen to listen to this you know the victorians coming to India looking at all these said monstrosities you know multiple arms and monstrosities not realizing this is all metaphorical no Indian not not even an Indian presentant think there's a man dancing with five legs up in heaven okay this is the stupidity of this Englishman who came there confusing metaphor with reality it would be like it would be like an Indian scholar reading Shakespeare and saying what a stupid man Shakespeare is thinking Juliet is full of fire and flaming up you know because he says Juliet is the son it's the same era okay confusing metaphor with reality sorry I don't know if I answered your question but yeah sorry your question yeah okay one more and then we're done right okay very good question all I can say is with music I know much more about Indian music than Western certainly principles like grouping apply like like for example why is it you talk about Harmony right very often a single object produces overtones okay which are in fact have that relationship they're harmonics right and the the brain the auditory brain is trying to discover objects too that's why harmonics are pleasing now going back to Peak shift India it's all about Raga it's about Melody it's not about Harmony and what you're doing with Melody is you're stretching it doing hyperbole doing Peak shift so there is a Raga called roudra roudra rasa where it produces anger another Raga which is supposed to be like thear Canada which is all about sort of sorrow and and mellow and what you doing is taking primitive primate vocalizations like the infant separation cry right the infant infant starts screeching when when it's separated from a mother it's a very primitive powerful thing built into all your brains and when you listen to darbari Canada what the artist has done is to do this this thing this peak shift with that infant separation cry and you just sit there crying right and you you're one with God you know so that's what that's about but we haven't looked at it as carefully as with visual art that's fine thank you [Applause] [Music] than [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 207,513

Keywords: neurology, art, science

Id: 0NzShMiqKgQ

Length: 89min 29sec (5369 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2008