For all their vaunted acuity, our senses gather only fragmentary and ambiguous
information about the world around us. All that our eyes "see" and
ears "hear" are photons of light and pressure waves traveling across
space.
The energy forms don't necessarily contain data critical to human survival
- such as where they came from, what object caused them or how far they traveled.
Our brain supplies all this - fills in the blanks and resolves the ambiguities
- with remarkable speed and agility.
The brain interprets these sparse stimuli as real objects and sounds. It stretches
well beyond the available data to makes our world visible and audible in meaningful
ways.
But what makes an opera stirring? A photograph beautiful? A piece of modern
art emotionally shocking or intellectually arousing?
Scientists are just opening this new chapter in exploring the brain and human
nature. Rather than scalpels, they're using powerful new brain-scanning tools
to decipher responses to language, music and art.
And in a rare case at Berkeley, they're reaching across the traditional chasm
between the sciences and humanities to seek insight from artists, musicians
and architects.
Artists might not think of themselves as neuroscientists, but they've
been at least as successful in tapping the wellsprings of human emotion, intellect
and appreciation of form, according to University of London neurobiology professor
Scour Zeki, a pioneer in the rapidly evolving field of "neuraesthetics," a
term he coined.
"
Scientists have a view of artists as 'the world out there,"' said Zeki.
Yet from Renaissance sculptors to Impressionists to modernists, artists manage
to depict the essential and unchanging nature of things in ways that appeal
to their own brains and to ours.
Zeki's school and the Berkeley based Minerva Foundation brought dozens of experts
in art, music, architecture and neuroscience to Berkeley recently for a conversation
about. the latest and future research in the neurology of aesthetics.
Increasingly, neuroscientists suspect our sense of beauty - and perhaps a wealth
of emotional and intellectual triggers - are at least partly hardwired, a product
of evolution as much or more than cultural or personal experience. How much
is a matter of debate.
"
I would say it's not a settled issue," said University of Arizona psychology
professor Lynn Nadel, now on sabbatical at Berkeley. "There's no question
that evolution shapes the way we are, but there's plenty of questions about
how detailed that shaping is with respect to human evolution, especially for
things like beauty and harmony."
Scientists already possess some intriguing clues. Designers of the Egyptian
pyramids and the Greek Parthenon drew on a special formula to make their forms
balanced and pleasing. Architects know it as the Golden Rule, the Golden Mean
or phi - a mathematical ratio of length to
width or other features equal to .6150339 ad infinitum - that seems unfailingly
to elicit a sense of harmony and balance.
It also dictates the distribution of petals on chrysanthemums and the shape
of shrimp shells. It crops up in studies by Leonardo da Vinci and fills the
modern art of Piet Mondrian with harmonious rectangles.
"
We're born with a hard-wired part of our brain geared to proportion, and that
proportion is the Golden Rule," said John P. Eberhard, director of research
planning for the American Institute of Architects. "Now why we needed
this concept of proportion biologically in architecture, I don't know. But
there's this generic foundational concept of good proportion, and we apply
that in architecture and in art."
Music supplies other clues to this notion of human beings' hard-wired aesthetics.
Every culture for thousands of years has employed some form of harmonic organization
similar to the octave. It could be the human need to break musical information
into understandable pieces. Or it could have a altogether different explanation.
Pythagoras studied harmony in sound and reasoned it had a mathematical basis
that appealed to something innate in the brain, across cultures, said David
A. Schwartz, a cognitive psychologist and researcher in the famed Purves Lab
at Duke University Medical Center.
"
He said the evidence suggested this particular ordering of tone is much the
same among people of different societies, even among infants. So it seems to
be somewhat independent of the musical environment in which one grows up," Schwartz
said. "It seems to be telling us something fundamental about the human
auditory system."
Scientists such as Schwartz are looking for evidence that musical aesthetics,
a love of specific harmonies, cross cultural lines and so are products of evolution.
If so, the implication is that playing CDs of Japanese language or Bach concerti
in the nursery won't necessarily give a child a jump start on genius. But it
also would imply a fundamental human need for beauty and harmony that has nothing
to do with art or music.
"I think everything arises on evolutionary scales," Zeki said. "And
to seek an answer, we have to ask, 'Why do we have an evolutionary sense of.
beauty?'"
Some scientists suggest beauty must be tied to a biological advantage, for
example, discerning ripe fruit on a tree or attractive qualities in the opposite
sex.
"At a very vague level, it must be to attract the individual from things
that are biologically useful and away from those that are harmful," Schwartz
said.
"How specific the evolutionary instructions are, I think, is where the debate
is now," said the University of Arizona's Nadel. "It could be that
all humans fixate on something early in life, and that could prefigure everything
we do... What we end up preferring could very well depend on experience."
For the next 10 or 20 years, neurobiologists will search for explanations.
Are there "golden rules" of harmony and beauty for all arts? Or for
each kind of art? Or do we as individuals develop our own, unique rules for
aesthetics?
Studies suggest the areas of the brain engaged in making music or art are scattered
all over, producing a complex landscape for neurobiologists
to navigate. Is the same true for those parts engaged in appreciating beauty
and satisfaction? What is their evolutionary cause and rationale?
So far, Zekt said, science's evolving picture of the brain and its aesthetic
responses "has been stunning in its simplicity."
"I think there will be layers of complexity," he said. "But one
thing I'm sure of: Whether it's 100 years or 50 years or 20 years, it's going
to
be simply organized. Well look back and say, 'My God, we spent all this time,
and here it is."'