The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

The analogy with language evolution should be obvious. If I were to ask you whether chewing and hearing are modular and independent of each other, both structurally and functionally, the answer would obviously be yes. And yet we know that the latter evolved from the former, and we can even specify the steps involved. Likewise, there is clear evidence that language functions such as syntax and semantics are modular and autonomous and furthermore are also distinct from thinking, perhaps as distinct as hearing is from chewing. Yet it is entirely possible that one of these functions, such as syntax, evolved from other, earlier functions such as tool use and/or thinking. Unfortunately, since language doesn’t fossilize like jaws or ear bones, we can only construct plausible scenarios. We may have to live with not knowing what the exact sequence of events was. But hopefully I have given you a glimpse of the kind of theory that we need to come up with, and the kinds of experiments we need to do, to account for the emergence of full-fledged language, the most glorious of all our mental attributes.

CHAPTER 7

  Beauty and the Brain: The Emergence of Aesthetics

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

—PABLO PICASSO

AN OLD INDIAN MYTH SAYS THAT BRAHMA CREATED THE UNIVERSE and all the beautiful snow-clad mountains, rivers, flowers, birds, and trees—even humans. Yet soon afterward, he was sitting on a chair, his head in his hands. His consort, Saraswati, asked him, “My lord—you created the whole beautiful Universe, populated with men of great valor and intellect who worship you—why are you so despondent?” Brahma replied, “Yes, all this is true, but the men whom I have created have no appreciation of the beauty of my creations and, without this, all their intellect means nothing.” Whereupon Saraswati reassured Brahma, “I will give mankind a gift called art.” From that moment on people developed an aesthetic sense, started responding to beauty, and saw the divine spark in all things. Saraswati is therefore worshipped throughout India as the goddess of art and music—as humankind’s muse.

This chapter and the next are concerned with a deeply fascinating question: How does the human brain respond to beauty? How are we special in terms of how we respond to and create art? How does Saraswati work her magic? There are probably as many answers to this question as there are artists. At one end of the spectrum is the lofty idea that art is the ultimate antidote to the absurdity of the human predicament—the only “escape from this vale of tears,” as the British surrealist and poet Roland Penrose once said. At the other extreme is the school of Dada, the notion that “anything goes,” which says that what we call art is largely contextual or even entirely in the mind of the beholder. (The most famous example is Marcel Duchamp putting a urinal bowl in a gallery and saying, in effect, “I call it art; therefore it’s art.”) But is Dada really art? Or is it merely art mocking itself? How often have you walked into a gallery of contemporary art and felt like the little boy who knew instantly that the emperor had no clothes?

Art endures in a staggering diversity of styles: Classical Greek art, Tibetan art, African Art, Khmer art, Chola bronzes, Renaissance art, impressionism, expressionism, cubism, fauvism, abstract art—the list is endless. But beneath all this variety, might there some general principles or artistic universals that cut across cultural boundaries? Can we come up with a science of art? Science and art seem fundamentally antithetical. One is a quest for general principles and tidy explanations while the other is a celebration of the individual imagination and spirit, so that the very notion of a science of art seems like an oxymoron. Yet that is my goal for this chapter and the next: to convince you that our knowledge of human vision and of the brain is now sophisticated enough that we can speculate intelligently on the neural basis of art and maybe begin to construct a scientific theory of artistic experience. Saying this does not in any way detract from the originality of the individual artist, for the manner in which she deploys these universal principles is entirely hers.

First, I want to make a distinction between art as defined by historians and the broad topic of aesthetics. Because both art and aesthetics require the brain to respond to beauty, there is bound to be a great deal of overlap. But art includes such things as Dada (whose aesthetic value is dubious), whereas aesthetics includes such things as fashion design, which is not typically regarded as high art. Maybe there can never be a science of high art, but I suggest there can be of the principles of aesthetics that underlie it.