Ramachandran's Theory of Neuroaesthetics: A Reaction Paper

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In Ramachandran's exemplar case for many of his laws, the Chola bronze sculpture of Parvathi is a metaphor for live, human women. She represents the appearance and virtues that mortal women may have, by virtue of her appearance being shifted away from that of the average woman; her appearance is a metaphor for her divine perfection.

The scientific basis for Ramachandran's claims comes from behavioral studies of rats and herring-gull chicks, and from neural recordings of monkeys. In the case of herring-gull chicks, his description of the connection between peak shift in newborn herring-gulls towards an extreme visual exemplar of their food source and the aesthetic response to representational peak shifts in human art is a bit lacking. Gulls, he claims, have "hard-wired" neural circuitry that predisposes them to peck at elongated yellow objects with focal red spots when they are young. Presumably, this circuitry does not decay when gulls reach adulthood, although the pecking response can clearly be inhibited. Another major source of data that the author refers to is neural recordings from the fusiform gyrus (FFG) which has become known as the "face and place processing" area of the brain (Zeki, 1999). One of Ramachandran's more controversial assertions, in my opinion, is that the brief success of cubism is due to its ability to multiply activation of neurons in the FFG. Ramachandran leaps to the conclusion that this constitutes a "neural explanation for Picasso" (p. 177) but it strikes me as premature.

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Even Picasso was not always a cubist, and while the fractured portraits produced during the cubist movement were certainly sensational in their day, and still have the power to surprise us, I have not seen direct evidence that they produce stronger activation in the FFG than any other variety of portraiture. Of all the points in this book where I thought "someone should do that study!" this was the most obvious.

I would be eager to see more empirical research using human brain measures of any of Ramachandran's Universal Laws of Art. It is perhaps the most important quality of his work that his writing makes us wonder exactly why no one has tested such-and-such explanation for such-and-such human behavior yet. I look forward to reading the research reports of people who have been inspired by these broad assertions about art, and perhaps undertaking similar research of my own.

Figure 1. Sculpture of Socialist ironworker. (Jennmaur.com, retrieved 26 Jan 2011).....

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