…I have found two aspects of viewing art that were most instructive. The first, nativistic perception (also known as “bottom-up” processing to cognitive scientists because it begins with basic physical stimuli), deals with the way the eye and brain work in matched synchrony. ….but the really personal part happens in the second stage, the stage we call directed perception. Sometimes called “top-down” processing by cognitive scientists because it is directed by an overall idea as to what one might see, directed perception refers to perception based on one’s personal history and knowledge. The way you “see” this painting is like the way no other person sees it.
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Both natavistic perception and directed perception contribute to, and are necessary for, art appreciation, and to some degree their characteristics overlap. Both forms of perception also depend on a conscious brain in order for art to be “seen”, in the natavistic sense, and “understood”, in the directed sense. As we shall see, both forms of perception are the consequences of a sensory system and brain that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for quite different purposes: distinguishing objects from their background, discerning colours, finding and killing game, picking yummy berries and nuts, and seeing faces, all of which revolve around mating and bearing children and surviving long enough to do it.
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| Theodore Gericault, The Rfat of the Medusa, 1819, Musee du Louvre, Paris |
With our eye we “see” the raft, the people, the sail, the ocean, and so on. With our brain we also “see” these things, and more. The part of the brain that processes visual signals, the primary visual cortex (PVC), is teeming with neurological activity (an intriguing topic that we are only beginning to understand). Perhaps even more fascinating is that other senses are engaged at the cortical level.
As we look at the Raft, sight is primary but all other senses are psychologically active. We not only “hear” sounds but can also smell the sea and the putrefaction of decaying bodies, taste the salt air, and feel the cool sea water as it sprays over the raft.
When we “see” this painting, as is true of many of life’s experiences, the sensation is not confined to a single perceptual system but sweeps across many sensory modalities and psychological reactions to enrich the cognitive landscape. We all see deeper, and therein lies a great intellectual distinction of human thought and consciousness.
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Art Meets Science
Art is, after all, physical material that affects a physical eye and conscious brain. The brain interprets what it sees in light of socialized experiences and a long evolutionary history. In this book we attempt to understand how the eye and brain and human psychology determine what we see and how we interpret it.
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1. Art and the Rise of Consciousness
Art is important because it stimulates the mind and stirs emotions. It is further important in the psychological history of the world as it marks the emergence of human consciousness. Late in the evolution of our species, we humans began to produce art. These initial artistic accomplishments revealed a remarkable change in consciousness made possible only by a highly complex thinking brain.
Helps us see into the minds of past civilisations that would have been forgotten if it wasn’t for the art they left behind (Easter Island heads, Pyramids etc.)
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…to completely understand art, all that you need to discover the nature of the human mind.
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Changes in Science, Changes in Art
In the beginning, art emerged as a result of a brain able to image things internally and to represent those imaged things externally. Art critics and philosophers of art followed.
This is partly why a practical approach to a PhD is important.
Now, a new neurocognitive approach to art is warranted because of our tremendously increased understanding of the brain, evolution, and consciousness. It is anticipated that such advanced knowledge will partially overcome some of the previous problems art critics and psychologists have encountered in formulating theories of art.
Art theories have been an accepted of the Western tradition for years and were based on speculation by philosophers, priests, art critics, and, lately, psychologists and brain scientists. But as we enter the twenty-first century we know far more about the eye, the brain, and the way we think about things – such as art – than ever before. Only in the past half-century have we learned the details of how the sensory system and brain receive and transform information. And only in the past few decades have we begun to understand human consciousness and how it has touched all phases of life, including art. No less important is our current knowledge of why we Homo sapiens evolved physio-cerebral-cognitive brains that were designed to see and react to a changing environment. Understanding art today incorporates information from psychology, physiology, brain sciences, and anthropology unknown to scholars from Plato to Pollock, from Aristotle to Arnheim.
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in light of what we now know about the brain (its structure and circuitry), about consciousness (its multifariousness), about evolution (its unevenness), and about imagery (its capacity to envision nonpresent events mentally), we may be ready to address the emergence of art as a result of a highly complex computational brain.
Traditional ways of Understanding Art: Psychophysical Dualism
Traditionally, art scholars have approached the understanding of art from the position that art exists in the “real” world while the experience of art takes place inside the mind of the observer. That is, experienced art is subjective – and some subjective experiences are preferred over others.
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The separation between what is in the world of art and what is in your head, and how what is in your head influences what you get out of art, are expressed by Janson in his popular book on art history: “If we are going to get the most out of art, we will have to learn how to look and think for ourselves in an intelligent way” (Janson 1991).
While such an approach engages a time-honoured position that separates the physical universe from the mind, from what we now know about the way the brain processes sensory signals we can reasonably conclude that this represents an artificial division.
Art and Mind: A Unitary View
Both mind and art are part of a single physical universe. Separate analyses of art and of mind lead to a misunderstanding of each.
Art and mind are of a single reality – they are constructed from the same base.
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It is absurd to suggest that, with less than several decades of research into the way the brain creates thoughts and actions, we know everything about the process.
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The Evolution of Art and Consciousness
For our purposes, modern evolutionary psychology along with cognitive neuroscience provides an ideal paradigm for integrating the many ingredients that constitute the evolution of art, consciousness, and brain development. The multiple facets of consciousness metamorphosed unevenly over hundreds of thousands of years, reaching their current state about 60,000 – 30,000 years ago, although the process continues today. A thorough understanding of consciousness as a cerebral process is important for the thesis put forward in this book. Consciousness is postulated to be a necessary condition for the understanding of art; and before humans became conscious, in the current use of that term, the brain had to change.
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The rise of Consciousness as a Scientific Topic
Among the many topics studied by cognitive psychologists was how art is consciously represented by the mind. If my estimates are correct, in 1950 there were 23 articles published on consciousness in the psychological literature; in 1975 that number rose to 532 and in 2000 to 11, 480. There has been an intellectual feeding frenzy over consciousness ….
To do anything but touch on the myriad papers, theories, methods, and conjecture about the scientific study of consciousness in this chapter would take us well astray of the central thesis: that the evolution of consciousness was a requisite for the production of art.
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