The Golden Ratio – Inherent or Learned?

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…

Read and see the images here…

rofl!

Here’s the best damn site on the internet.

#23 +(1349)

<Guilty> Oh god I just changed my pw and instantly forgot it

#514353 +(6720)

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<Insomniak`> “The” is a common word, and was not included in your search
<Insomniak`> “Who” is a common word, and was not included in your search

#2999 +(6722)

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#574642 +(6746)

* Porter is now known as PorterWITHGIRLFRIENDWHOISHOT
<Strayed> he shot his girlfriend?

#583977 +(6934)

<DannyB> some girl on the street asked if i was saved yet
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#39 +(2365)

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<FuNGiSiDE> er wtf

From Bash.org

Free will, but only after

Marcus Menezoid and myself sat late into the night talking about a bunch of things. Free will turned up into the picture with Marcus threatening to go get the kitchen knife, chop my finger off and offer to show me that it’s free will and real. This post narrates the line of thought I took to pooh-pooh the knife threat. And Marcus, here are some videos that explain how this works…

Discovering Synesthetic Abstraction

I studied design in an art college. If you have a background in design education, you know how frustrating that can be. An art college views design from the point of view of applied art, or ‘applying art to commerce’. It doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the educators are all out of work painters, perspective artists and poets. While philosophy was abundant, there was absolutely no rationale or logic, business or otherwise. Design approval was arbitrary.

After the first 2 years of art college education, I began to feel irritated with the lack of accurate feedback. The internet wasn’t available to me at the time, and our college library only had art books. British library was ok, but I couldn’t decipher head or tail of the science books there because popular books on neuro-science weren’t as widely available. It was frustrating because, like any student I developed theories of my own on why some visuals appealed to some and not to others. Some worked and did what they had to, others fell flat, and there was no way of objectively verifying my theories…