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By Emily Reynolds and Ben Williams
Mozart and Beethoven are two names that nearly everyone in the world would be able to recognize and identify.
The two musicians lived centuries ago, yet their music is still used frequently today. It is the same for almost every area of the arts. After decades, paintings are still viewed, plays watched, books read, and music heard.
This question of why is being answered in the field of neuroscience. Combined with other fields such as psychology, philosophy, and others, neuroscience can help to explain why brain cells perceive things that way that they do, and how it makes certain works of art last for more than a lifetime.
“The problem is to understand how subjective experiences, or ‘what it’s like to be,’ can arise from the activity of physical brain cells,” wrote Dr. Susan Blackmore in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Blackmore takes the view that that there is something additional to simple brain function that causes the brain activity involved with the field of neuroscience.
For Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor to Seed Magazine, science is helped immensely by art, and is actually the future of science, especially neuroscience.
“Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal,” said Lehrer.
Lehrer adds that art can bring up great questions for neuroscience to explore, like ‘why are we intrigued by a Pollock painting’, or ‘what makes great food taste so good.’
According to William Hirstein and V.S. Ramachandran, the authors of “The Science of Art,” artists already know in their brains what will strike a fancy in someone else, and will either on purpose or not, paint for that exact response.
“A list of ‘Eight Laws of Artistic Experience,’ a set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain,” said Ramachadran and Hirstein in their paper.
The two authors, along with other colleagues, designed experiments to study how the brain responds to the arts and why. However, the data and information they have collected still can’t quite put a finger on how the brain works and why art lasts so long.
“It is possible that some types of art such as cubism are activating brain mechanisms in such a way as to tap into or even caricature certain innate form primitives which we do not yet fully understand,” wrote Ramachdran and Hirstein.
The two scientists have found that a number of factors go into art that is aesthetically pleasing, including color, depth, form, motion, etc. But these are only a few of the factors that make great art last.
Different scientists come up with different theories and different data to back up them up, but no one has yet to be able to figure out precisely why the brain likes some art and not others. In particular why some art is universally received as great while other art is not still remains a mystery, for now.
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