As Picasso put it, “Art is the lie that reveals the truth.” What he means is that distortion/exaggeration/precise emphasis makes it easier for us to decipher what we’re seeing. And neuroesthetics may help us validate Picasso’s insight and unlock the mysteries of art, beauty, and the world around us.
Perceptual psychology studies the mental processes we use every day — problem-solving, making a decision, or creating a memory. In order to do such things, we rely on affordances (the perceived utility of an object, or an environment) to help us perform actions. For example, a button affords to be pushed, a light switch affords to be flipped. Those are obvious examples. But what about a face? Do facial features offer affordances for helping us determine beauty/ugliness or emotional cues for happy, sad, puzzled, interested, etc.?
Some artists capture the very essence of something in order to evoke a direct/specific emotional response by amplifying the unique and/or essential features and reducing redundant or low-value information. Because our brains recognize patterns first, then apply meaning, this process of intensifying reality mimics what the visual areas of the brain already do. As a result, the same neural mechanisms that were originally activated by the object are now more powerfully stimulated because the “noise” of the object is subdued — even nonexistent. Ergo, you enjoy and experience the artwork even more.
// Bonus material
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, it’s in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. Semir Zeki shows the areas of your brain associated with experiences of visual art and music — and challenges the common understanding of beauty along the way.