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

Many principles of aesthetics are common to both humans and other creatures and therefore cannot be the result of culture. Can it be a coincidence that we find flowers to be beautiful even though they evolved to be beautiful to bees rather than to us? This is not because our brains evolved from bee brains (they didn’t), but because both groups independently converged on some of the same universal principles of aesthetics. The same is true for why we find male birds of paradise such a feast for the eyes—to the point of using them as head-dresses—even though they evolved for females of their own species and not for Homo sapiens.

FIGURE 7.1 The elaborately constructed “nest,” or bower, of the male bowerbird, designed to attract females. Such “artistic” principles as grouping by color, contrast, and symmetry are in evidence.

Some creatures, such as bowerbirds from Australia and New Guinea, possess what we humans perceive as artistic talent. The males of the genus are drab little fellows but, perhaps as a Freudian compensation, they build enormous gorgeously decorated bowers—bachelor pads—to attract mates (Figure 7.1). One species builds a bower that is eight feet tall with elaborately constructed entrances, archways, and even lawns in front of the entryway. On different parts of the bower, he arranges clusters of flowers into bouquets, sorts berries of various types by color, and forms gleaming white hillocks out of bits of bone and eggshell. Smooth shiny pebbles arranged into elaborate designs are often part of the display. If the bowers are near human habitation, the bird will borrow bits of cigarette foil or shiny shards of glass (the avian equivalent of jewelry) to provide accent.

The male bowerbird takes great pride in the overall appearance and even fine details of his structure. Displace one berry, and he will hop over to put it back, showing the kind of fastidiousness seen in many a human artist. Different species of bowerbirds build discernibly different nests, and most remarkable of all, individuals within a species have different styles. In short, the bird shows artistic originality which serves to impress and attract individual females. If one of these bowers were displayed in a Manhattan art gallery without revealing that it was created by a bird brain, I’d wager it would elicit favorable comments.

Returning to humans, one problem concerning aesthetics has always puzzled me. What, if anything, is the key difference between kitsch art and real art? Some would argue that one person’s kitsch might be another person’s high art. In other words, the judgment is entirely subjective. But if a theory of art cannot objectively distinguish kitsch from the real, how complete is that theory, and in what sense can we claim to have really understood the meaning of art? One reason for thinking that there’s a genuine difference is that you can learn to like real art after enjoying kitsch, but it’s virtually impossible to slide back into kitsch after knowing the delights of high art. Yet the difference between the two remains tantalizingly elusive. In fact, I will lay out a challenge that no theory of aesthetics can be said to be complete unless it confronts this problem and can objectively spell out the distinction.

In this chapter, I’ll speculate on the possibility that real art—or indeed aesthetics—involves the proper and effective deployment of certain artistic universals, whereas kitsch merely goes through the motions, as if to make a mockery of the principles without a genuine understanding of them. This isn’t a full theory, but it’s a start.

FOR A LONG time I had no real interest in art. Well, that isn’t entirely true, because any time I’d attend a scientific meeting in a big city I would visit the local galleries, if only to prove to myself that I was cultured. But it’s fair to say I had no deep passion for art. But all that changed in 1994 when I went on a sabbatical to India and began what was to become a lasting love affair with aesthetics. During a three-month visit to Chennai (also known as Madras), the city in southern India where I was born, I found myself with extra time on my hands. I was there as a visiting professor at the Institute of Neurology to work on patients with stroke, phantom limbs following amputation, or a sensory loss caused by leprosy. The clinic was undergoing a dry spell, so there weren’t many patients to see. This gave me ample opportunity for leisurely walks through the Shiva temple in my neighborhood in Mylapore, which dates back to the first millennium B.C.E.