Beauty and the Brain Redux

Landscape With A Man Killed By A Snake by Nicolas Poussin

Recent neurobiological discoveries have made it possible to give a scientific account of the brain’s involvement on our feelings when looking at pictures. Neuroscience can provide the link between how pictures look and our emotional responses to them.

We now know from neurobiological studies that when we see a scary face, the visual stimulation travels to the thalamus, which in turn passes this information directly to a region of the brain called the amygdala, the brain's fear center. At the same time, visual information goes via a slower route to the visual cortex, which creates an accurate representation of the stimulus and then feeds it to the amygdala. The first, direct route to the amygdala causes the instantaneous reaction of wanting to flee from the frightening object, while the second, slower route provides a more complete understanding of the danger, and may lead to the conclusion that the object is just a picture and is not a threat.

For example, take a look at the above picture by Nicolas Poussin. Two onlookers, a man and a woman, react to the man's death in the foreground in anguish. Surprisingly, we feel a sense of wanting to move ourselves when we look at the picture. Our own legs seem to want to move as the running man's legs move. We say these feelings are in our bones, though they are really in our brains.

But how can a mere painting inspire these physical reactions? In the late 1980s, Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues at the University of Parma in Italy discovered the existence of neurons that fire not only when an action is performed but also when an action is observed being performed by another. These mirror neurons fire chiefly when we observe our peers engaging in goal-directed actions such as reaching for food.

In another study by the Parma group, observing another person being touched activates the cortical network of regions normally involved in the beholder’s own experience of being touched. Functional MRI experiments have shown that when people view others being touched, the same part of the secondary somato-sensory cortex (the so-called SII-PV area) is activated as when they themselves are touched.

It seems that viewing art is a very complex series of events.

Just paint it!