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Mark Changizi on How To Put Art And Brain Together
“What initially looks like neuroscientific principles being used to explain artistic phenomena is, more commonly, suspect brain principles being used to explain artistic phenomena that may not exist. (A second common approach to linking art and the brain sciences goes in the other direction: to begin with a piece of art, and then to cherry-pick principles from the brain sciences to explain it.) (…)
We are, indeed, woefully ignorant of the brain, but we can make progress in explaining art. Here is the fundamental insight I believe we need: the arts have been culturally selected over time to be a “good fit” for our brain, and our brain has been naturally selected over time to be a good fit to nature …so, perhaps the arts have come to be shaped like nature, exactly the shape our brain came to be highly efficient at processing. For example, perhaps music has been culturally selected to be structured like some natural class of stimuli, a class of stimuli our auditory system evolved via natural selection to process. (See Figure 1.)
If the arts are as I describe just above – selected to harness our brains by mimicking nature – then we can pursue the origins of art without having to crack open the brain. We can, instead, focus our attention on the regularities found in nature, the regularities which our brains evolved to competently process. (…)
With the brain put on the shelf, the goal is, instead, to analyze nature, and use it to explain the structure of the arts. Is this really possible? And isn’t nature just as complicated as the brain, or, at any rate, sufficiently complicated that we’re headed for despair?
No. Nature is filled with simple regularities, many of them having physics or mathematical foundations. And although it may not be trivial to discover them, our hopes should be far greater than our hopes for unraveling the brain’s mechanisms. Our presumption, then, is that our brains evolved to “know” these regularities of nature, and if we, as scientists, can unravel the regularities, we have thereby unraveled the brain’s competencies. What regularities from nature am I referring to? For the remainder of this piece, I’ll give you three brief examples from my research. Only one is explictly about the arts, but all three concern the cultural evolution of human artifacts, and how they harness our brains via mimicking nature. (See Figure 2.)
The first concerns the origins of writing, and why letters are shaped as they are. Our visual systems evolved for more than a hundred million years to be highly competent at visually processing natural scenes. One of the most central features of these natural scenes was simply this: they are filled with opaque objects strewn about. And that is enough to lead to visual regularities in nature. (…)
The second concerns the origins of speech, and why speech sounds as it does. Our auditory systems evolved for tens of millions of years to be highly efficient at processing natural sounds.
Although nature consists of lots of sounds, one of the most fundamental categories of sound is this: solid-object events. Events among solid objects, it turns out, have rich regularities that one can work out. For starters, there are primarily three kinds of sound among solid objects: hits, slides and rings, the latter occurring as periodic vibrations of objects that have been involved in a physical interaction (namely a hit or a slide). Just as hit, slides and rings are the fundamental atoms of solid-object physical events, speech is built out of hits, slides and rings – called plosives, fricatives and sonorants. For another starter example, just as solid-object events consist of a physical interaction (hit or slide) followed by the resultant ring, the most fundamental simple structure across language is the syllable, most commonly of the CV, or consonant-sonorant form. (…)
Written and spoken language look and sound like fundamental aspects of nature: opaque objects strewn about and solid-objects interacting with one another, respectively. Writing thereby harnesses our visual object-recognition mechanisms, and speech harnesses our event-recognition mechanisms. Neither opaque objects nor solid objects are especially evocative sources in nature, and that’s why the look of most writing and the sound of most speech is not evocative. (…)
Music – the third cultural production I have addressed with a nature-harnessing approach – is astoundingly evocative. What kind of story could I give here? A nature-harnessing theory would have to posit a class of natural auditory stimuli that music has culturally evolved to mimic, but haven’t I already dealt with nature’s sounds in my story for speech? In addition to general event recognition systems, we probably possess auditory mechanisms specifically designed for the recognition of human behavior. Human gait, I have argued, has signature patterns found in the regularities of rhythm. Doppler shifts of movers have regularities that one can work out, and these regularities are found in music’s melodic contours. And loudness modulations due to proximity predict how loudness is used in music. (…)
Many other aspects of the arts are potentially treatable in a similar fashion. For example, color vision, I have argued is optimized for detecting subtle spectral shifts in other people’s skin, indicating modulations in their emotion, mood or state. That is, color vision is a sense designed for the emotions of other people, and it is possible to understand the meanings of colors on this basis, e.g., red is strong because oxygenated hemoglobin is required for skin to display it. The visual arts are expected to have harnessed our brain’s color mechanisms via using colors as found in nature, namely principally as found on skin. Again, the strategy is to understand art without having to unravel the brain’s mechanisms.
One of the morals I want to convey is that you don’t have to be a neuroscientist to take a brain-based approach to art. The brain’s competencies can be ferreted out without going inside, by carving nature at its joints, just the joints the brain evolved to carve at. One can then search for signs of nature in the structure of the arts. My hope is that via the progress I have made for writing, speech and music, others will be motivated to take up the strategy for grappling with all facets of the arts, and cultural artifacts more generally.”
— Mark Changizi, cognitive scientist, author, How To Put Art And Brain Together, Science 2.0, March 4th 2010. (Picture source)
See also:
☞ Mark Changizi on how we read
☞ Are We “Meant” to Have Language and Music? How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man
☞ Mark Changizi, Music Sounds Like Moving People, Science 2.0, Jan 10, 2010
☞ Mark Changizi, Can Art and Brain Be Put Together?, Psychology Today, April 5, 2011.
☞ Mark Changizi on Humans, Version 3.0.
