Archive for the ‘Neuroscience’ Category

Art + Science Wednesday: Brain Size and Intelligence

Posted by Gary Vikan on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

 

Photo: GV ("Pippi")
Photo: GV (“Pippi”)

If you care at all about creativity and/or dogs and/or the most exciting frontier for research these days, have a look at the interview with Princeton neuroscience professor Samuel Wang in the Science Times  last week: ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09conv.html?scp=2&sq=claudia%20dreifus&st=cse).

Learn why he chose neuroscience over physics as his career (isn’t it obvious); learn that Sudoku won’t do us older folks any mental good (though more exercise might), and that playing Motzart for babies is a waste of time (for both parent and baby).

But the really intresting part is about dogs. Dr. Wang studies dog MRIs (brain scans) looking for correlations between brain size/characteristics and dog breed characteristics. There’s quite a range, because dogs can vary by a factor of x60 in  body mass and x3 in brain size.

So, poodles are smarter than most dogs, and pugs (Wang has one) are sweet but not so bright.  I will assume for now that my French Bulldog’s brain is closer in size to that of the pug than the poodle, but I (we both) await Dr. Wang’s findings. 

Of course, compared with dogs, humans are all alike, Einstein’s brain included.

Where’s this all going?  I don’t know, but stay tuned, it’s got to come around to art sooner or later.

Posted in Neuroscience, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Art + Science Wednesday: Come on down!

Posted by Gary Vikan on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Photo: Tony Venne

The exhibition “Beauty and the Brain,” on the 4th level of the Walters’ Centre Street Building, is small (just one work of art!) but it has gotten a whole lot of attention, not only in the SUN, but also in:

But we need your help.  This is more of an experiment than an exhibition. You, our visitors, come down, put on 3D glasses (think AVATAR!), and pick your most and least favorite shapes from among each of 10 groupings.

Put your scorecard in the box, add your e-mail address, and we’ll keep you posted on the progress of the experiment.

We are exploring, with Ed Connor of the Mind/Brain Institute at JHU, the notion of “significant form.” Do some shapes appeal more than others to our visual brain?

And is this what artists are after?

And there are no wrong answers!

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Baltimore, Neuroscience, The Walters, Uncategorized | 765 Comments »

Science Wednesday: Museum Labels – good for what?

Posted by Gary Vikan on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Photo: GV

Photo: GV

Each Wednesday, thoughts on art and science….

We in art museums spend a lot of time researching and writing labels, but sometimes I wonder what value they add to the museum experience – which, for me, is an aesthetic experience first and a learning experience second. 

Artists, after all, whether their works are in the caves at Lascaux or the galleries of the Walters, are no more “teachers” than their viewers are “students” or their setting a “classroom.”

Anish Kapoor’s gigantic stainless steel elliptical sculpture “Cloud Gate” in Millennium Park in Chicago hardly needs a label. You simply experience it! 

In his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, neuroscientist Semir Zeki invokes Cezanne’s dismissive dictum that “all talk about art is almost useless,” and observes that language was a relatively late arrival in our evolutionary history. 

Four years ago Walters curator Eik Kahng did an innovative (and controversial) exhibition without labels called Courbet and the Modern Landscape. The art experience was instead accompanied by contemporary music composed in response to the works, and by subtle fluctuations in the light levels in the galleries, to evoke the passing of clouds in the paintings. 

We discovered through research that our visitors not only said that they had a more immersing art experience than usual, but also that they spent significantly more time with each work of art than is typical for museum goers.  

Is there a disconnect between those mental processes that are called upon to create a verbally discursive art historical experience of a work of art - e.g., learning to put a “new” Courbet landscape into an art-historical sequence - and those that are useful in maximizing an immersing aesthetic experience of that same work?

I think Cezanne would have said so.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Museums, Neuroscience, The Walters, Uncategorized | 732 Comments »

What’s a “VELVIS”????

Posted by Gary Vikan on Monday, February 1st, 2010

Photo: GV ("Velvis")

Photo: GV ("Velvis")

On January 23rd of this month, after four years of much notoriety and some ridicule, “Velveteria,” the one and only “velvet painting museum,” in Portland, Oregon, closed its doors. Its 300 plus paintings on velvet were a monument to a peculiar medium that seemed to have reached its apogee in Tijuana in the 1970s.

Elvis pictures have been so prevalent in this medium that they have their own term of identification: an Elvis on velvet is a “Velvis.” Why the association?  Is it simply because velvet painting is ipso facto a genre of high kitsch art and for many, Elvis Presley is the essence of kitsch?

This may explain some of the association, but probably not all of it. Think of what dominates the iconography of velvet painting, besides Elvis, naked women, and unicorns. This is an art form for charismatic martyrs, including Jesus, JFK, MLK, Michael Jackson, and Che Guevara, and for various incarnations of sad, big-eyed waifs, sad big-eyed clowns, and sad big-eyed puppies. And everywhere possible in velvet art there are tears.

The decent from canvas to velvet is the decent from pathos to bathos.

With their dark, dramatic backgrounds, and sketchy, ambiguous details, paintings on velvet are powerful agents for opening the emotional floodgates of susceptible viewers. As neuroscientists have recently discovered, our visual brain will “complete” the compositional and emotional ambiguity of works of art to suit our own sensibilities. This is part of the work and the joy of viewing art.

The sweating/weeping Elvis on velvet will be empowered by our mental workings both to capture and to evoke a profound sense of compassion and pity.

Photo: GV

Photo: GV (Elvis Icon)

As an Elvis icon (above) is created to enable viewers make conversational contact with the King, a Velvis is created to enable viewers to tap into their most profound emotions about the King.

That’s why they looks so different.

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Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Elvis, Neuroscience, Religion | 728 Comments »

This Could be Your Dog on Music

Posted by Gary Vikan on Monday, January 4th, 2010

Photo: GV - "Scooter"

Photo: GV - "Scooter"

Wouldn’t it be nice if your best friend – i.e., your dog – were as blissful as this one?

Well, now there are some clever folks writing music to soothe the souls of monkeys and so, can dog music be far behind?

This came to my attention in the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times of December 12th, “The 9th Annual Year in Ideas” (p. 55: “Music for Monkeys”).

A cello player from the National Symphony Orchestra has this idea that (human) music is responsive to the pulses and heartbeats that we first encounter in the womb. And so, he reasons, one should be able to write music specifically responsive to the primal rhythms and sounds of other species.

He got in touch with a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin who runs a “colony” of cotton-top tamarins (a kind of monkey), and got from this professor tamarin calls that demonstrated fear and others that demonstrated calm.

The cellist then wrote music for cello and voice based on those different sorts of monkey vocalizations, and played that music back to the monkeys, along with some people music (Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and Metallica’s “Of Wolf and Man”).

Generally, the monkeys didn’t much care for the people music, though they did show at least a little interest in excerpts from Metallica.

But they really got excited about the monkey music.

The pieces based on threatening calls made them anxious, which they manifested by cocking their heads and scratching themselves, whereas those pieces based on calming calls induced the tamarins to engage in foraging behavior, eating, and drinking.  In a nutshell, happy activities.

This clever NSO cellist has since written species-specific music for cats and for mustached bats.  

So, can dog music be far behind?

Posted in Classical Music, Neuroscience | 46 Comments »

You got a problem with Jeff Koons?

Posted by Gary Vikan on Friday, December 18th, 2009

Photo: GV

Photo: GV

Well, I did, too.

I used to be really hostile toward the glitzy sorts of things in this photo.  Specifically, the shiny busted eggs and balloon dogs, at  $10+m.

A gimmick.

Koons was born in York, PA, and went to MICA.  A home town guy.

Nonetheless, I just didn’t like those things.

But I’ve changed my mind.  Artists, I’ve come to recognize, are intuitive neuroscientists. Which means to say that I believe that they struggle to “work” our visual brain. Our neurons. Simple as that.

Michelangelo was doing just that as he probed Carrara marble to discover those powerful “slaves” imprisoned inside.

And I think Koons has figured it out, too.  Sort of.

So what if those Koons dogs and eggs cost a fortune?

Posted in Art, Baltimore, Neuroscience, Uncategorized | 864 Comments »

Hunter-Gatherers, Michelangelo, and the Buddha

Posted by Gary Vikan on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

IMG_8318In the Ideas & Trends section of The New York Times of  November 15th, Nicholas Wade waded into the murky waters of natural selection and religion (“The Evolution of the God Gene”). The idea is that religion – the potentiality for any and all religions – is hardwired into our brains from our hunter-gatherer days, some 50,000 years ago. Why? Because those  egalitarian groups of naked warriors from which we descend were in constant battle with their neighbors, and internal cohesion as generated by ”religious” rituals (initially dancing, later ancestor-worship, later still, the worship of solar deities) had great utility to the group’s survival. And thus, procreation.

The article was illustrated with pictures of Catholic bishops and Buddhist monks doing their respective (but fundamentally identical) things.  But the article’s editors could as will have show Michelangelo’s famous frescoes in the Sistine Chapel or a bronze Buddha from Thailand at the Walters. Since both would be, no less than the bishops and monks in action, the glittering “residue” of our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ survival rituals.

Posted in Anthropology, Art, Neuroscience, Religion | 45 Comments »

Why do some shapes look better than others?

Posted by Gary Vikan on Friday, November 20th, 2009

When I was an undergraduate I was taken with aesthetics. And especially with Clive Bell’s notion of ”significant form.” The idea that some shapes simply look better than others, eternally and universally, as he said. Kant had said so, too, but the idea never really stuck.  Why? Because of it’s circularity. Who, after all, gets to decide what shapes look better – art critics, those “in the know”? If so, what happens to the idea of  universality?Picture1

But now, the “century of the brain” invites a  revisit.

The Walters has partnered with the  Mind/Brain Institute at Hopkins in an  exhibition/experiment that will open at the  WAM in January (thewalters.org). It’s called  Beauty and the Brain. Our colleagues at the Mind/Brain Institute, under Professor Ed Connor, have supplied groupings of 3D shapes that are “morphed,” in some cases (as illustrated), from original works of art by the French/German sculpture Jean Arp.

Visitors will put on old-fashioned 3D glasses, look at the groupings, and choose the 3D shapes that they find most and least appealing.

The project is based on the idea that artists are “intuitive neuroscientists,” always searching for new and more powerful ways to stimulate the visual brain. And that there is, in fact, a neural reality to “significant form.”

Our goal is to begin to understand how people recognize and appreciate beauty, which lies at the heart of the museum experience.

Here, you’ve got 15 variant forms to choose from. Which do you like the most, and which the least?

Posted in Art, Neuroscience, The Walters | 1 Comment »