How Does the Brain Interpret Art?
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California (San Diego), has a series of five interesting lectures online about how the brain works and how we perceive things in our environment. If you’re an interface designer or a usability specialist or even an overtly curious manager interested in organisational behaviour you will probably go directly to the podcast of Lecture 3: The Artful Brain. The transcript is on the page if you can’t get the audio working.
So why do we get a special brain buzz out of Picasso? And why is the scantily clad female form more stimulating than a straight out naked woman? Understanding questions like this can help the interface designer figure out what makes people tick and how to get strong reactions within the site user’s brain.
Dr Ramachandran talks a little about the herring-gull mother. She has a long yellow beak with a red dot on it. Why the red dot? Is this an arbitrary colourful feature or does it have a designed function for the species? Fifty years ago Niko Tinbergen discovered that the dot is what stimulates the chicks to ask for food. Brains, by necessity, aim to achieve tasks using as little computation as possible. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense. In his words, they take advantage of the statistical redundancy that a red spot equals mother. Nothing else in their world has a red spot so why not cut to the chase at the mere sight of it and ask for food. After all what’s to think about?
Interestingly experimentation has shown that it doesn’t need to be on a beak at all. They wrapped red tape around a stick and the chicks responded avidly and asked for food just like it was their mother. OK so they wrapped multiple red tapes around another stick and the birds were even more stimulated. The red is stimulating some part of their brains over and above and beyond the sight of their mother or the presence of actual food.
Transpose that to our own world. Statues which have accentuated breasts and other features. The scantily clad woman being more sexually exciting than the naked real woman. What stimulates us? What really presses our buttons? So we like Picasso because he’s jumping all over our instinctive receptors way back in the brain. This series of lectures by Dr Ramachandran is well worth the time to sit back and listen to in the office. As designers its important to understand a little more than how to use Photoshop and write reports.
