Running hard on the heels of a previous post on Neuroesthetics, I started looking around for more studies on the effect of art on the brain. Is the recognition of beauty inherent or is it learned. I always assumed that I picked up my sense of aesthetics from the environment that I grew up and was trained in. I’m slowly learning to think different.
Some new research data is coming in from the department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy, where researchers are discovering human cognition of ancient rules of proportion like the golden ratio (1:0.618). Most design or art students come across the golden ratio somewhere in their studies, though how many consciously adopt this into their work is questionable. Researchers are now finding that there are perhaps rules that apply to our appreciation of art. There are proportions that we find naturally pleasing…
In a study to determine if the human brain can indeed distinguish between such factors, the researchers hooked up subjects to fMRI machines to map the brain areas that correspond to art appreciation. The subjects were picked from a group of ‘naive’ art critics, or people with no apparent history of art-appreciation and the images shown were those that correspond to the western concepts of aesthetics such as renaissance sculpture. The images themselves were doctored forming three different image types with only one of them remained unaltered. They were changed subtly so that the bodies were not deformed yet there was a perceptible difference. The parameter that they were pursuing was proportion, in respect to our appreciation of the Golden Ratio.
Subjects rated the original sculpture significantly more than they did the altered images…
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