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

This principle of ultranormal stimuli may be relevant not just to art but to other quirks of aesthetic preference as well, like whom you are attracted to. Each of us carries templates for members of the opposite sex (such as your mother or father, or your first really sizzling amorous encounter), and maybe those whom you find inexplicably and disproportionately attractive later in life are ultranormal versions of these early prototypes. So the next time you are unaccountably—even perversely—attracted to someone who is not beautiful in any obvious sense, don’t jump to the conclusion that it’s just pheromones or “the right chemistry.” Consider the possibility that she (or he) is an ultranormal version of the gender you’re attracted to buried deep in your unconscious. It’s a strange thought that human life is built on such quicksand, governed largely by vagaries and accidental encounters from the past, even though we take such great pride in our aesthetic sensibilities and freedom of choice. On this one point I am in complete agreement with Freud.

There is a potential objection to the notion that our brains are at least partially hardwired to appreciate art. If this were really true, then why doesn’t everyone like Henry Moore or a Chola bronze? This is an important question. The surprising answer might be that everyone does “like” a Henry Moore or Parvati, but not everyone knows it. The key to understanding this quandary is to recognize that the human brain has many quasi-independent modules that can at times signal inconsistent information. It may be that all of us have basic neural circuits in our visual areas which show a heightened response to a Henry Moore sculpture, given that it is constructed out of certain form primitives that hyperactivate cells that are tuned to respond to these primitives. But perhaps in many of us, other higher cognitive systems (such as the mechanisms of language and thought in the left hemisphere) kick in and censor or veto the output of the face neurons by saying, in effect, “There is something wrong with this sculpture; it looks like a funny twisted blob. So ignore that strong signal from cells at an earlier stage in your visual processing.” In short, I am saying all of us do like Henry Moore but many of us are in denial about it! The idea that people who claim not to like Henry Moore are closet Henry Moore enthusiasts could in principle be tested with brain imaging. (And the same holds for the Victorian Englishman’s response to the Chola bronze Parvati.)

An even more striking example of quirky aesthetic preference is the manner in which certain guppies prefer decoys of the opposite sex that are painted blue, even though there’s nothing in the guppy that’s blue. (If a chance mutation were to occur making one guppy blue, I predict the emergence of a future race of guppies in the next few millennia that evolve to become uselessly, intensely blue.) Could the appeal of silver foil to bowerbirds and the universal appeal of shiny metallic jewelry and precious stones to people also be based on some idiosyncratic quirk of brain wiring? (Maybe evolved for detecting water?) It’s a sobering thought when you consider how many wars have been fought, loves lost, and lives ruined for the sake of precious stones.

SO FAR I have discussed only two of my nine laws. The remaining seven are the subject of the next chapter. But before we continue, I want to take up one final challenge. The ideas I have considered so far on abstract and semiabstract art and portraiture sound plausible, but how do we know they actually are true? The only way to find out would be to do experiments. This may seem obvious, but the whole concept of an experiment—the need to test your idea by manipulating one variable alone while keeping everything else constant—is new and surprisingly alien to the human mind. It’s a relatively recent cultural invention that began with Galileo’s experiments. Before him, people “knew” that if a heavy stone and a peanut were dropped simultaneously from the top of a tower, the heavier one would obviously fall faster. All it took was a five-minute experiment by Galileo to topple two thousand years of wisdom. This experiment, moreover, that can be repeated by any ten-year-old schoolgirl.