Your Brain On Art

The ability to scan the brain is like the phrenologist's dream. Where the MRI can accurately locate what part of the brain is working during specific activities. The possibility of the ultimate lie detector is only few years away. It already been demonstrated that the brain operates in recognizably different patterns when either lying or telling the truth. The problem is packing the technology into a device that's smaller and less obtrusive than an MRI machine.

 

One undergraduate student is trying to map the brains of wide range of mammals. He believes that there is a special group of neurons for anticipating the future. His theory is animals that can anticipate the future or future rewards should be easier to domesticate. Animals that are now consider wild could be tamed through brain development. Imagine herds of domesticated rhinos grazing on scrub lands where cattle can't go.

 

This kind of research has implications for human behavior too. Psychologists and Social Scientists already know that a person who can anticipate the future is less impulsive and less violent. The dark dystopian vision is the creation of a drug that manipulate mind into passivity. But much more benign actions could be the answer too.

Since the days of Ancient Greece up to the Industrial Revolution children were taught with a curriculum known as a "classic education". Students learned writing, reading, logic, rhetoric, astronomy, literature, music and math. Music and math even in the days of Plato were seen as complementary and tightly connected subjects. Over 20 centuries later the science bares that out. The brains of musicians and mathematicians are physically different that the average person. This points out two things, the brain is like a muscle -how you exercise it dictates how it develops; and if you want your child to excel in math music lessons on the side might give your child an academic edge.    

As school budgets get cut things like music, art and recess have been eliminated. More than one social or educational critic has notice the school budget cuts starting in late 1970's have probably given rise to rap music, the surge of students diagnosed with ADD, and graffiti as art. When impoverish school systems had their music departments reduced to a record player and a pile of old vinyl ... well kids learn to scratch and make their own sounds. Some of my friends, if they could go back in time they would give those kids real musical instruments and real art supplies. For me it just shows the need to be creative is a powerful human need and to deny people the right or means to be creative is as oppressive as imprisonment. And if you had to sit at school desk all day long without any recess, that can be like prison too. 

As Hans Litten might say "thoughts are free".

When a person listens to music, the average brain reacts to the rhythms and melodies in very predictable ways. Usually a person listens to the music first and the lyrics second. The lyrics can be a  more complicated process. So universally among all cultures and peoples a song in a minor key sounds sad but the words to ....let's say Ode To Joy gets interpreted through a whole series of mental filters. One comedian mused how "things that are too ridiculous to say out loud, can always be sung in a song". If you examine the lyrics of practically any love song, you realize that they would sound anywhere from goofy to scary demented if they were said without the accompanying tune.

There are brain scans where the subject is happy, depressed, suffering from a mental illness and many other circumstance. Each time specific areas of the brain light up with activity. The one exception is when people look at art.

When you look at art like a painting or sculpture, the patterns of brain activity is more generalized and more diverse. How people react to art is dependent upon the metal filters that we carry and create in our minds. Even our reactions to pure color can vary because of our past life experiences.

The Austrian psychoanalyst, Ernst Kris, concluded that great works of art really need an element of ambiguity so that the audience, the beholder, can self reflect and try and find their own answer. Maybe what makes the Mona Lisa so alluring is that we don't know what she is smiling about. She could have been in a deep meditation about her existence as a woman or she might have been suppressing the urge to scratch an itchy nose.

Both beauty and art are in the eyes of the beholder. A work of art is a communication between the artist and the beholder that is at least partly oblique and indirect. One computer engineer wanted to create a program that would allow computers to read printed text. The problem was with every type of font the computer had to relearn the alphabet. The new program used fuzzy logic where if a shape was approximately the same, then it was accepted as being the same. After that almost any font was an easy for the computer. Art is like an advanced fuzzy logic where creative expression can give a context to very complex metaphors and messages. And things that are expressed in art could also have extra meanings that are only relevant to the beholder.   

When your mind is engaged in a work of art -it can be a full brain work out.          

Freud might conclude that even in a work of art "a cigar is just a cigar" -but common wisdom through the ages and modern neural medicine will tell you an artist's brain is different. There is so much to life we don't understand, classic psychology would theorize those thoughts would stay in the sub-conscious until we can attached those thoughts to a narrative about ourselves. It's one of the reasons why talk therapy still remains an important part of treating mental illness. Great art is a fishing net into the sub-conscious and what it brings up can enrich our life narrative. The therapeutic value of art has only been lightly explored because it's not easy to measure results and yet art might be the only way to reach some parts of the mind that are inaccessible  by any other means.

 

Explore reality and do some art today.