This is Your Brain on Art

we're not gonna mention Paul Simon. He told us that it's it's in his the agreement that we signed with him. We're not allowed to talk about all Simon or ps as he refers to him, excellent, excellent. So I mean that's kind of limiting. Do you think maybe we should just talk about art? Yeah? Yeah, I think your art. Yeah, let's open it up a little and let's just talk about art as a whole, as in, uh more specifically

visual arts, paintings to certain degree, sculptures. Yeah, yeah, Like it's some I we're standing in front of a piece of art. I mean, this is what we're trying to get to and why we're completely arrested. What is happening in our brains? Why why are we so attracted to some will be arrested if you were trying to touch the art. Yeah, by the way, Yeah, don't try to, like, uh, make a big scene with a friend and then don't

expose yourself to it. Yeah, don't don't, Okay, yeah, no, no overcoats nakedness underneath, and don't make a big scene with a friend and then try to get them painting off of the wall and run away with it. Doesn't work. Yeah, but no, I mean seriously, haven't you ever had a moment where you're standing in front of something and you were just completely floored, You're just smacked. Yeah, specifically, like really the last couple of years, I have two examples

of like recent experiences. I love going to art museums, especially like modern art museums. But in the last year or two I got to see that a young museum in San Francisco, and there is a piece there by an artist by the name of Irving Norman, who I've mentioned before on this podcast. And the is this enormous wall sized piece from nineteen sixty six called War and Peace. And I when I there were other pieces in the room.

But when I saw that one, it was just one of these where I just stared at it because it's it's enormous, divide into three pieces, uh and uh. Like on either end there these just this dark um sort of metropolis esque visions of of like this nightmare capitalist future that that the artist was was perceiving and fearing

back in the day. He was also influenced by VS by the Spanish Civil War, so there's a lot of like the horrors of war and the whole central piece or these two titans, these two enormous pale figures, and they're about to strike these weapons together, like these giant clubs, and the clubs are like hollowed out and filled with all these tiny people, and it's just this amazing, just nightmarck image with all this stuff going on in it, and there's you know, neon and and cities and bones

and and war and strife and and all these symbols hidden in it, and it just it just you in. I just remember just standing there and just just standing there, just wanting to continue standing there in front of it.

Another another artist that really impressed me in the last year, so it was Richard Sarah h when well, actually, when both of us were in New York for the World Science Festival, UM, I snuck over to along with my wife, snuck over to the New York Museum of Art and UH, and we mainly went over to catch this Alexander McQueen piece they did with the fashion guy Savage Beauty, and that was really cool. But then we we wandered into this section about Richard Sarah and Uh in this amazing retrospective.

He does a lot of sculpture, and a lot of his work is just black and white, especially is more painting type work, and it's it'll be just like a circle, like a black circle, enormous on a large white plane. But then the closer you get, you see all this texture, like the circle is is it like comes out at you.

It's I mean, it's it's a three D it looks like it's made out of charcoal or earth or or or it's just sort of worn there and it just I had a really nice experiences staring at these various pieces and just being sucked into the into the contrast of it. So how about you, what what have you been into? Art wise? I love modern art, but one of the things that's just stayed with me throughout the years. Is a painting by John Singer Sergeant. And I'm not

a huge fan of him. By the way that his his whole body of work I think is really beautiful, but I'm not like, oh man, this guy's the best. But there's a huge painting at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston that I used to just go and stand in front of all the time, and it's called L Hello. It's E L J A L EO, and

it's just incredible. It's just it's there's like slightly erotic, and then you know it's by the way it's painted in the eighteen hundreds, and um, you know this is an American painter, so it's not you know, it's not

that racy. But there's a woman who is dancing and she's swaying to the side, and there are men playing the guitars in the background, and it's just very moody and there's a lot of space in the painting, and for some reason, I always feel like I'm going to be sucked in, and so it's very much a mood for me. Um, And every time I look at it again, same thing. I have a different understanding of that painting.

And I think that's what's so fascinating about art is each time you go back to a particular piece, you tend to get more from it. And how amazing that someone can create something from their brain like that and give you a new, fresh experience every time you look at it. And that is actually what VS. Ramachandra, neuroscientists who we've talked about quite a bit, says the purpose of art is. He says it's to enhance, transcend, or

indeed even distort reality. And he's really big on this because he says that the reason why we're so engaged with something is we're looking at it and it's not reality. It is somehow a caricature of it, but it has distilled the essence of some sort of truth in it. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that today and and try to even see if we

can get some science behind the art going on. Yeah, I mean it's you even hear stories that I've never had this reaction, but you hear stories about people who have had just severe reactions encountering amazing art, like people who have fainted, people who come to tears staring at a piece, and uh, I mean that and that just speaks you know, maybe not everyone has the capacity to be touched like that or that or the right wiring um as we'll discuss. You know, there may be some

elements of synesthesia at work there. But you had just the idea that a painting on a wall created by um an artist that has been dead for centuries, can still just evoke this visceral response in the viewer that it can, and also that it can. It can anger us, they can frighten us, they can disturb us. It can it can bring us to tears. It can captivate our minds.

Like you know, you go and you see a really awesome piece at a museum, it continues to play a part in your thought patterns for weeks, months, years to come. And it's so subjective, right, And this is why Ramachandran and also Professor samr. Zeki, also a neurs scientists have looked into this to see if there's some sort of unified theory of art that they can scratch at. And of everybody wants to do this, righted theory of humor or the brain or I mean, everybody just wants a

tidy explanation. And uh so we're going to talk about that quite a bit today, particularly Romantron Dron and some of the thoughts that he has on this. Um doesn't mean that it's exactly correct and we can just tie this up and call it a day. No, not at all, because, as we all know, the art is subjective and it's very hard to pin down. But what has happened is

that there's a newish field called neuroesthetics that has bubbled up. Um. This is basically a field that's trying to try to use the tools of modern neuroscience, like brain imaging to get at the crux of art. Um and this, uh, the artist is in a sense a neuroscientist. In fact, some mere Zeki that the neurobiologists that I spoke of, has said that the artist is in a sense a

neuroscientist exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain. Uh, though with different tools, And I thought that was really interesting. This kept coming up again and again in this research that artists are the original neuroscientists. Yeah, instead of using a scalpel or a or or some sort of scanning mechanism, they're using well, maybe a scalpel or um or a paintbrush or a jar, a giant robotic cloaca. It just it just varies determining on exactly what kind of archer

you're really going for. But see, it's interesting you bring up the cloaca because they say that, you know that neuroscience thinks that we can take this end product of art, right and reverse engineer to figure out how the mind works. And in a sense when when it was was the artist of VIM I can't remember his last name, Milloy, I think when he created this cloaca out of this machine was really trying to get at the the process of digestion, the second brain right, right, So a lot

of this is trying to work out our humanness. Yeah, and a and as we're talking about analyzing the brain again, it searched to to remind everyone that these the very scanning techniques that are used. A lot of it boils down to looking. We're able to look at the brain. We're able to see how blood moves in the brain when areas of the brain are engaged. Just as we're discussed with memory, the way that memory is a complex system that interacts at various points in the brain in

different systems of memory. The brain itself is rather complicated, but but we can look at it, we can see what's lighting up and we can and it's it's through that technique we attempt to understand exactly how we're processing things such as stimuli such as art or music and other studies. Well, and that's what's so fascinating about this field of neurasthetics. That's exactly what they're trying to do.

They're saying, this is knowable. We can actually take the brain and we can start to map it so that we can see when people feel anguish or when they feel uh, you know, titilated or um, you know, all these different things that are going through someone's mind. They feel like eventually they can tag it in the human brain and start to say, okay, how how did that actual piece of art do this to us? You know,

what's what's going on? Um? And this is from Jonah Laire's Psychology Today article about this UM and he's talking specifically about the Mona Lisa smile and saying that this Mona Lisa, which has captivated audiences for hundred spears, everyone's so familiar with this piece of the Mona Lisa, we really forget how captivating it is because it's it's so it's so overproduced in culture that and so I mean, we forget that it's amazing art and it's one of

the great masterpieces of of of human artistry, right, and people are you know, there's always the question about whether or not she's smiling or smirking, or she's actually quite miffed, right, And how amazing that you can look at this painting and no one can agree on exactly what her perspective is. I would see it like she's about to smile, like I've like I've told a joke that she's a little shy, says she doesn't want to laugh or give me like a full smile, but I can tell that I've made

her chuckle inside. See, I think that she just had a little bite of mutton and uh, you know, she's trying to hold still, but she's got a big water of food in her mouth. That's my interpretation. Actually. Margaret Livingston, she's a neuroscientist at Harvard, argues that da Vinci exploits the peculiar structures of the retina and this is really interesting. Um. This is again from the article from Jena Lair in

Psychology Today. It says, the facial expression of the Mona Lisa fluctuates depending on which part of our retina we are using to look at her mouth. When we first look at the painting, our eyes are automatically drawn to her eyes, which means our peripheral vision perceives her smile. This part of the retina naturally focuses on the shadows cast by her cheekbones, which served to exaggerate the curvature of her lips. As a result, our peripheral vision concludes

that the Mona Lisa is smiling. Livingston demonstrated this by blurring the entire painting with Adobe Photoshop to replicate what we would see if we were relying solely on peripheral vision. The end result is a much happier Mona Lisa that when we focus on her mouth, retina ignores the shadows. The brain blurniness disappears. Instead, we thick safe on the lips of the Mona Lisa, which are virtually expressionless. All of a sudden, she's no longer happy. Excuse me happy.

The painting has literally changed before our eyes. H It says this ambiguity is intriguing. Living Ston argues, as we keep staring at the painting to figure out what she's actually feeling, which I think that that she's nailed it. There's that ambiguity, uh, And I think that's what intrigues our minds. And somehow da Vinci had a really great understanding of perspective and how to manipulate this. And it's not just da Vinci. There are many artists who have

messed with all sorts of perspective. And again, this is what neuroscientists are so intrigued by. How artists are seeing the lines and the color and distorting and manipulating reality for us. And maybe that there's some sort of insight and how they see and how have they've kind of gotten into the human brain and figured out how our eyes are actually working. So I mean that of course

brings up this question about how do we see? Um, you know, vision and perception used to be that we thought that it was just our lens and our eyes taking in an image, flipping it, you know, an optical nerve transmits it to the visual cortex. Boom, We're done. But it turns out it's so much more nuanced than that.

What we actually perceive. Yeah, we've we've talked in the past about site and perception and about the the the idea that there's like there's like a little area, like a little pinprick of high detail site and then there's a lot of low detail side. Even though we perceive, we look at something and we think we're seeing it

all in high death, but our eyes really scanning it. Right, there's the grainy parts, right, And the grainy parts turn out to be really important in pattern recognition later on,

and we'll talk about that a little bit. Uh. In the scientists David hu Will and Torsten Weesel demonstrated that um, instead of responding to pixels, cells in the visual cortex response to straight lines and angles of light, and that the neurons prefer contrast over brightness, straight edges over curves, and that contrast allows to more efficiently pick out object.

Puble and Weasel became the first scientist to actually describe what really looks like uh, something before it has actually been perceived, when our mind is still creating our sense of sight, which I thought was really fascinating, Like, again, it's not this black and white, this is the process, this is what's happening, there are all these different things

going on. One of my favorite exercises that I may have mentioned this before that underlines just what's going on with our eyes and how there's more going on with our site perception than what meets the eye, and that is that if you go to a mirror and you look at one pupil and then switch your vision to the other people, and you cannot see your eyes move right,

you have blind spots. Yeah. Yeah, and again that's such a good example of how we can't necessarily always trust our reality and how so much which is fed to our eyes into our memory is is really just a matter of very selective pieces of things that sometimes have been manipulated for us if we haven't even manipulated for ourselves. Turns out that Dutch artists Pit mandreon and this I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with mandreon Um. This is sort of like a vertical and horizontal grid

of paintings that he produced, usually with primary colors. Yeah, and I'm gonna I'm gonna add when we do a blog post to go along with this, I will make sure that we have outgoing links to some examples of these different artists that we're mentioning. Yeah. Yeah, so that you will have a handy reference of that these guys are and you're not having to try and spell weird names, just the right way in doing Google image searches. Uh,

you know, while driving that kind of thing. And he was trying to get at the heart of like a sort of truth about forms, and he was pretty obsessive about it. This plurality of straight lines in rectangular opposition UM and Professor Zeki has said that geometrical paintings like these are remarkably similar to the geometry of lines sensed by the visual cortex, as if the painter could look

inside the process in the brain. Uh. And by the way, when we're talking about this visual cortex and talking about processing, there are really thirty areas of the brain with different aspects of UM processing your vision. So we're talking about depth, vision, movement, perception. Wow. So yeah, that again drives home there's so much going on when we were just looking at something. We're looking

at that painting on the wall. It's not just I am looking and then my brain is thinking about what I'm seeing, it's your your thirty different sections are working on this project. Of understanding what is before your eyes exactly exactly. And then now think again about Leonardo da Vinci or any of the other great the great classical painters.

Before psychologists and neuroscientists formulated theories of depth cues, these guys and and some women were actually working to create these palets on their on their canvases, to manipulate your eye, again, knowing on some level that if you draw your eye over here, then you start to to really engage the mind. You're giving the mind a bone to chew on to figure out what is the story that's going on here, and that this again is the crux of what uh rum Chendren is trying to get at. Why is some

aren't so intriguing, why is this gravi us? Is there is there one unifying thing here and it possibly is that this the ability to manipulate something to the point

that your brain is really intrigued by it. Kind of it reminds me of one of the more anequated ways to deal with a vampire in myth and legend, and that's to leave a knot out for it, or some sort of either or not or something that's woven really intricately because in the vampire will become obsessed with it and they'll just stand there trying to untie the knot or just feeling the uh, the weave in the fabric until the sun comes up and burns them a lot.

I love that. So if you're about if you if your flesh was about to be pierced, you would just throw a knot like a good sailor tied knot and be like here and there you go, and they would sort of run off like a dog. Yeah, yeah, but it's silly, But but I really love it because it in illuminating something about It illuminates something about humans and trying to come up with some of you know, mythical

um explanation of foul Vampuire's work. It really gives a little insight on how we work, because that's the way our brains are. Throw it up, throw it an not, and it's gonna set there fiddling with it. It's true. We love a good distraction. Um in a moment to hear. Right after we take the break, we're going to talk about other distractions and what seagull chicks hatching have to do it with art. This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel

at Intel. We believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right, we're back. Seagull chicks. What do they have to do with art? And what is this thing called peak shift? Peak shift? Okay again, Rama Chundra. He's thinking about art a lot these days. Right, he's a neuroscientists. He's not a big well he is at

art lever now. But at the time when he was thinking about this, he had been in India a sabbatical seven or eight years and was realizing that he was responding to the art around him and the art that he had learned in his Western culture and and getting a fuller understanding of it. And he started to think about seagull chicks that hatch and they start to peck at the mother's beak for food. And the mother seagulls beak, by the way, is a long yellow beak with red spot.

And it's what researchers found out is that the chicks were specifically pecking at the red spot on the beak that somehow they were hardwired to realize that red spot means food. So Ramchana refers to the research done in which the beak was simulated by a fake beak with red spot. Okay, some no, no mama chick was involved, and they still were pecking at this red spot. So then they thought, well, let's just get even more ridiculous, and let's put a stick with a red dot and

and do this. Okay, same thing. They were like, we love this red stick. Just give us some food. And then they just to even abstract it even further. They took the stick and I put three red stripes on it, and the chicks went nuts. So because they're like, whoa, three moms, three meals at once. Perhaps perhaps there was some sort of representation on some level, this abstraction of this idea of food in this form and this symbol

that made them go nuts for it. So so they're hardwired to appreciate certain not art, but something in the aesthetic world, some some contrast of colors and shapes, right, yes, colors and and so what what rom Charon is saying, and then this is this is sort of far reaching but interesting, okay, is that abstract artists are tapping into the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar and creating ultra normal stimuli that excites certain visual neurons in our brains

as opposed to realistic looking images. And that's the important part here, Um that he's talking about is that this excitation that's happening, Um, that the seagulls are responding again to this abstract symbol, and that we are doing it

on some level too. Any points out cubism as an example. Okay, now, before we get into cubism, it seems like a more and maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but could you say that a man um, a heterosexual sexual man looking at a painting of a naked woman, would, in addition to appreciating the the artistic merits of the piece, might be attracted to it just because it's a naked woman and he has programmed on a couple of different levels to either you know it. As an infant, he would want to

feed from abreast. As an adult, he would want he has this drive to to mate and breed with naked women in paintings. Well again, I mean I think I'm trying would point to it and say that if you look at it carefully. If this is if this is a piece of art that's let's site vetted as like a great piece of art. Right, Yeah, I'm not just talking about something by Okay, he would say that there

is disource distortion involved. And again, if you look at it carefully, probably the woman's waist is really really small, right, I'm gonna guess that the breasts are really really full. Well, I'm thinking classical art where the ladies tended to be a little bigger. But even then he and he points to some really good examples of cholla sculptures that are found in Hindu art. Uh, you'll see that there are

are fat roles, and yet they're still essential in waste. Yeah, so what he's saying that on some level, these fat roles are are communicating to the viewer, Hey, I'm able to take care of a baby. I I got tons of fat stores. Um, you know you could. You can hang out with me and genetically, I'm going to do your right. Right, I'm gonna give you some good offspring because I've got the fat to sustain another life for someone and so forth. And by the way, I've got

these great childbearing hips and I'm just voluptuous um. So what he's saying is that all of that is being radiating, radiated to us on an unconscious level. Okay, and I think it's important to bring that up before you go into something like cubism, which is sort of like the polar opposite of of UM. I don't know, like the

Pnus on a half shell. Right, you could have two pieces called venus on Well, of course you're referring to the Venus de Milo, but yeah, you could have two pieces titled like newte on a bicycle, and the cubist piece would be rather different than the than than the like the straight up realistic painting, so right, you would have different body parts on the bicycle. It could be it could be actually horrific. Okay, So cubism, Yes, if you think about Picasso, then then you're on the right

track here with cubism. Um, this what is uh, you know, a painting style that at first glance looks sort of highly fragmented, but isn't um and of course kind of a kaleidoscope kind of thing going on when you look at it. Yeah, many many different viewpoints if you if in you know, obviously you can find the cubed images um in the painting most of the time. And so he talks specifically about Picasso and then he explains that in the fusiform gyrus okay, that we're we're we're processing vision.

There are cells that we respond to certain views of a face, and then there are so called master face cells. Okay, might respond to all views of a face, and normally only one view of the face would be presented at a time, But in a cube is painting, the presence of multiple views could cause multiple single views or multiple single view cells to fire at once, thus hyperactive, activating the master face cells and exciting the limbic system. Wow,

it's like art as a drug. That's like cubist stimulant. That is, that's manipulating the way that we perceive the

face of other individuals. Right exactly. It's just like if you have you know, we talked about this with sugar and you you know, have a nice burst of glucoast and the signal is really loud to the reward system, as opposed to if you just ate a piece of broccoli, Right, you're getting really loud signals in this instance, and you're hyper stimulating this part of your brain and your limbic system. And he says, this is the crux of it. We

are the seagulls. And he says, in fact, if the seagulls have their own art gallery, no doubt, they would have like a million pictures of these sticks with you know, three red stripes on it, and they would sell for millions. And uh, you know, they'd have all these Picasso seagull artists and in the floor would just be disgusting. Let's not forget that, because seagulls are kind of nasty. It's true that the art gallery you would want to wear galoshes into, uh if you weren't used to it. But

I mean, I think it's a pretty intriguing idea. Again, is it overreaching? Maybe maybe a little bit. But it's like a simplified model of how um, a human art gallery works, and how human appreciation of art works. Obviously we're more we're a more complicated mental model. Yeah, so it's gonna but but it's a it's a neat simplification

of the process. Yeah. He said that it's this way to escape the tyranny of viewpoint, which I thought, well, that's such an excellent way to put it because you know, we're so used to sing things in an our visual world that when we're presented with an abstract or abstraction of that, then it is it is sort of getting outside of our heads and the way we view things, and it's making our minds work. And to that end, he talks about a couple of different principles that he

relies on heavily to make this case. One is called grouping UM and he says that, you know, we have evolved in a camouflage environment and as a result, and we've talked about this too before, with pattern recognition, we can't help it but feel rewarded when we identifying object

a pattern instantly. What comes to mind when when you mentioned this would be the various paintings and photographs that have been created over the years in which an optical illusion or a hidden image of a skull is inserted into a piece, and of course the skull being like

this universal image of death. Uh. Probably the most famous would be uh Philip Halsman's Dolly portrait, and I believe it was titled in Voluptuous Moores Niece, you know, the one with it's like naked women um and their form they're kind of folded and formed into the shape of a skull. It was referenced on the think I know it, really it was reference on the poster art for Silence

of the Lambs. And Okay, it's like the picture itself is Dolly in the foreground and then in the background these women that are forming the shape of the skull. But there are a lot of other pieces where the effect is far more subtle, where it will be like two individuals and in the background you sort of see a skull forming um and uh, and I believe Dolly

Dolly actually did this in a number of pieces. There are a number of pieces that you see the skull sort of emerging from the background the more you you look at it, and and again in various pieces. It's the degree to which it is hidden varies, but your your brain does sort of like there's this reward center that sort of pops up. It's kind of like a more more rewarding version of Where's Waldo? You know. And

I was just thinking about this too. I neglected to mention when we're talking about perceiving um objects, patterns, and even faces with the cubism. The reason why ram Chan is really bringing that up is that Picasso tends to focus so much on faces, and multiple viewpoints of face is converging like an amalgamation of one face but three different views of it. And again that's that's what your brain is playing with. That's why those single face cells

start firing all at once to make one face. Uh sort of composition for you are getting so nuts because they're used to just seeing one viewpoint. Another example, UM, would if this would seem to be more abstract, abstract pieces where it first doesn't seem like anything, but then as your brain begins to assemble the pieces and begins to make sense of you, you say, we'll see the say the silhouette of an animal somewhere in the shape or something vaguely for me? Would you end up with

this interpretation of of what he's hidden in the piece? Right? Or perceptual problem solving is what he also talks about, or the peaka boot principle, and he even says this in an erotic art that's um highly abstract is that it's that peaka boot principle of well, I'm not quite sure what I'm seeing here, and then the reward sister

system starts to kick him when those patterns are revealed. Okay, yeah, so this perceptual problem solving it comes back again to trying to figure out what is the message of the piece, What is going on? If there's a scene taking place in the piece, what does it mean. So when I look at the work of Irving Norman and I see this all this stuff going on, my brain is trying to process what's going on in the piece and what the what he's trying to say about about the state

of civilization and culture. Yeah, so, I mean you're talking about highly metaphorical work. And Ramachanon also talks about metaphors being really important, and he brings up the painting Guernica, which is about the Spanish Civil War bombing of the city of Guernica, and and it's obviously it's it's not a literal representation of it. It's a bull goring a horse. There's a light bulb, and of course you see people are suffering in the painting. But it's a it's an

enormous canvas. It's black and white and gray. And what it's doing, he says, it is taking unrelated objects and directly comparing it and giving birth to a new idea. So, yes, we have these these objects going on, but we don't necessarily think, okay, a bowl of horse, you know, being gored. This means war that he is successful linked these things to us, and this is what's creating I'm sure new neural pathways actually in our brain because we are processing

this new information and making new connections. Uh. And before we go any farther, I just want to mention if you if you're interested and you want to learn more about public with Picasso, Salvador Dali, or or any of these these famous iconic artists, um, Leonardo da Vinci, Uh, go to the House Stuff Works website because we have a number of really cool articles on each of these uh, these artists, specifically Pablo Picasso. I remember Hanna Believe that

was written by Jessica Toothman. Yeah, and we actually have an article two on music and art why we respond to it? That one's by Josh Clark's pretty interesting too. But all of the sort of points to again this question, are their artistic universals. It's a hard question to answer, so the easy answer would seem to be, um, there is no universal understanding of art that it's um that it varies, just as it varies from person to person, right, the modern art that's loved by one person may be

hated by the by the other. I remember I was on this this boat tour on on the Thames and in London, and the guide with this like Cottoney, very like cottony to our guide and he was pointing out different things, and he pointed out the Tate Modern and he would who just completely dismissed it. He was like, it's like, oh, you can go over there if you want to. It's just a bunch of a bunch of rubbish shot through a pizza books in the garbage the other day, and you can put add up on the

wall and and uh, yeah, well thank you. I don't get the bust out of the cockney that often, but it was hilarious because this guy was just like, it's rubbish, a whole building full of rubbish. The real arts over here, and uh And other people would be like, oh, all that dreadful old historic garbage. Yeah, don't impressionalist, don't give

me any of that. Throw me it. Showing me the Chloeca machine, show me the show me the the the mind blowing job draw thing pieces that you walk into the room and you just stand there trying to figure out what they were thinking or like, when I was in the Tate Modern, why is that painting making a farting noise? There was this room full of pieces and they were I mean, in the Tate Modern is an amazing place and there's a lot to take in. But and so there's this one room and had several just

really amazing pieces. But one of the machines, just one of the installations there was making this farting noise over and over again, and it was kind of distracting to your appreciation to the other pieces. But I guess the artist had something specific in mind. Well, and then okay, so it makes me think, Okay, we we think we're such clever creatures and we make farting paintings. What about what about in nature? Uh? Do we create art? Do do animals creatures create art? Well? The bower bird, the

mail bower Bird, is a great example of this. And if you've if you spent any time watching some of the great BBC Discovery co productions which I'm always talking about, and I'm sure everyone's familiar with the very like Life Human Planet Um the various Attenborough pieces. You've probably seen the bower bird, the mail bower or builds this little kind of a love shock um. He uh, it's very intentional. It's not just us actually reading this is this is

not the place he lives. This is a wonderful little artist. Like it looks like modern art made from foul materials, and I mean that's what it is. He makes this lovely little little hovel um with archways, weaves it together. He gathers colorful um just bits of everything, like if there is human garbage around, he will incorporate that, like

if you can find some. And that's one of the reasons when they're filming these documents, they have to got in the middle of nowhere to try and find them because they don't want bower birds that are gathering things like car keys or or or candy rappers that would be modern art, right, but instead, you know, they're ideally they're gathering um, little bits of flowers, even little bits of like rotting material, just very just various color schemes

going on exactly. They're grouping and by light, so they'll have red berries all in one group and blueberries all in one group, and the whole idea, of course, is to impress a potential mate and be like, look at this bower bar. He's got it going on. He's got fantastic artistic ability, fantastic artistic taste. He was able to build this thing. He's going to be a great bird to mate with for like five seconds or however long. It's amazingly fast, all of that, but just five seconds,

I'll tell you. Um. But yeah, I mean so we see this in in nature, and certainly there are people who will say that the reason why humans do it is because on some level it is transmitting this uh, this idea to a potential meet that we're skillful and we're intelligent, and we're you know, we already know that we're tool users, but we're able to plan and to create these abstractions or abstractions of our lives. Um, so you know there's a there's a reason for the reason

for why we do it. It's just a question of, um, why is it good and why does it provoke emotion? So we know it's not just this idea of okay, well, we're all just seagulls looking for some representation of our next meal. Um m r s have actually shown that when we look at are the same reasons of the brain that are involved in experience emotion are activated when shown really esthetically pleasing art. And also there's memory involved too. It's just not as clear cut as like, hey, this

is a representation of of what we desire. Yeah, yeah, you're gonna have some pieces of art are going to speak to nostalgia, They're going to speak to uh to two memories, and very much to emotion. I mean, you can't you can't look at a painting one on one level, there's painting of a beautiful woman. It's going to evoke some sort of emotional response in addition to viscal response in many viewers. Painting of a baby, same thing painting.

I mean, just look at any given picture of a cat, right, yeah, then it's going to it's going to interact with this on some level. I mean, how can you not, Yeah, you know, put that cats. You know you're you're going to be like, oh that cat. Okay. Well. This is from an article by Professor Hanging from Stanford University, and he says, what if instead of viewing art as a dispensable luxury, we could see it as a key ingredient

in Unlocking the Great Mysteries of Neuroscience. University of California, San Francisco, surgeon, art enthusiasts and author Leonard Slaine writes that just as combining information from our two eyes enhance us the third dimension of depth, by quote seeing the world through different lenses of art and science, and by integrating these perspectives, we arrive at a deeper understanding of reality. Well,

this sounds pretty good. I'll go with that. I mean, and again, it's like if you want to study the digestive system, you want to feed it something and see how it moves through and and it keeps coming back around with the cloic about it. But but but likewise, with the brain, you want to give it something to chew, and you wanna give it that bone and then and then see how it isn't how it is chewing it,

how it is interacting with the stimuli. And as if we as we've discussed their few stimuli as powerful as and as complex as as art, the question is whether or not Ziki and Ramachandra and the others will be able to actually pinpoint in the in the brain and uh and sort of reveal to us the magic show that's going on, and will that dissipate our interest in art if that happens? Do you think? I don't know. We keep coming back around to that, that sort of

question when it comes to neuroscience. Do we end up explaining way the magic of something and then does it still have an effect on it? I guess my my opinion kind of tends to vary depending on where I am uh mentally and uh and the specific topic. I tend to find it hard to imagine a space where we would explain away the magic of art and we would not be able to at least suspend that knowledge and appreciate it. Okay, well, just just uh indulge me

from one moment. What if they were able to do that to to map these processes in the brain, and the Blue Brain project also was finished and it was successful, and they were able to re engineer the human brain, and they were able to then download a version of your brain right onto a computer, okay, and then they could create a Picasso painting system or rather software that they could then download into that version and then upload

to your current brain, and then you could paint like Picasso. Well, I guess that would be cool. I mean that gets into that gets into the whole question two of robotic paintings there there there have been a number of projects. I wrote a little about this for Curiosity Project. People working on computers that can paint, that can create works of art. And at what point are we in danger of or or in a situation? I don't know if it's danger depends on your perspective, whether or not you're

an artist. But do we reach a point where a computer can create a piece of art as compelling as human created art? And I don't know, I mean it it Some people would say yes, it will definitely, definitely get there. Other people say, well, the human uh, creative spirit is always going to bring something a little different there that you can't map, that you can't match that with a computer. I don't know. We'll see what do you guys think? Yeah, and what is your favorite piece

of art? Would love to know and why? Yeah? Yeah, send us a link to it too so we can we can look at it. In the meantime, let's let's get some letters roll and let's get the art off the conveyor belt in the love letters on Yeah, I've got a couple of two equipments here. Um we heard a little from a lot of people about imaginary friends.

We discussed as is one of our sort of Halloween fenlands, about creepy awesome world of imaginary friends and about you know how it's a little weird and how but it's how it it ultimately is is very much a part of how our brain works. Um. So we asked everyone to share their imaginary friend experiences and we heard from a lot of people. We don't we can't read them all,

but here are a couple. Uh Daniel writes and says, hey, guys, I was listening to your podcast about imaginary friends, and I wanted to share my imaginary friend I had when I was little. I can't remember his name, and it is kind of embarrassing, but I had an imaginary cheated with bat wings. He could fly super fast and on long car rides, I would imagine he would roll really

fast like Sonic the Hedgehog. I created this imaginary friend when I was at my grandparents house in the summer in my room, and in my room I would sweep it would appear very dark and scary. He would protect me from the shadows of the night. Furthermore, I adore your podcast. Thank you for all the interesting information. Alright, I cheated with Flying Wing. I love that. That's That's that's one of the best ones me for suit. Um. We observed from Zach Zach Wright sin and says high

stuff to blow the mind people. I just finished listening to your Imaginary Friends podcast and started to think about my own imaginary friends. According to my parents, I had an imaginary friend called Jeremy who was a mouse squirrel um the Pokemon, which is weird because I've never been into Pokemon uh and assorted barn animals. I was also surprised by Robert's comment about having Fantasy World's friends uh to in an inappropriate eight. Personally, I don't think there's

an inappropriate age to have Fantasy World at. I'm in at grade eight, and I still play with spaceships and pretend to captain them too far reaches of the galaxy, and I'm not the only one of one of a lot of my friends who play role playing games and other such fantasy games. I think it's appropriate as long as it is fun. Zack and I totally agree. Um. I mean, I was definitely one of those kids where like growing up I was I feel like I was

into action figures a little. It felt like I was into them more than I longer than I should have been. And a lot of that is you know, when you're a kid, nothing seems more amazing than growing up and putting behind childish things, even though you're really into childish

things and they're awesome. And then when you get older you realize that, you hopefully realize that this is completely stupid, and you spend the rest of your life, even at least, reminiscing about the childish things that you wish you had, or pursuing these old hobbies and interest uh and uh, like I remember, even when I wasn't I got away from the action figures, I still have these rich fantasy

um ideas in these settings. And I would I would This is kind of weird and maybe embarrassing, but I would walk around sort of not really kind of pay I would kind of circle the house in the afternoons, and and uh, I would run these stories over in my head. And I would carry a little red rubber band or sometimes it was green, and I would move it around in my fingers um which it was kind

of I guess, the tactile thing. But also maybe a color thing, and I would the the rubber band would represent explosions, and I would make explosion noises, uh to, and these would represent you know that, because my early the early stories that I formed in my head had a lot of explosions in them, because they were basically all actions yarns about spaceships and robots and and all this and and some of them where I think we're kind of intricate and uh and I'm rather proud of

the early me having them. But I spent a lot of time doing that to sort of walking around in the yard, and my parents probably were really concerned. I can just imagine your mom, Look, can't the wind to going? He's doing it again? Yeah, yeah, hearing you making a

lot of bomb realises. But but definitely I I will be the first person to encourage everyone out there too, and not to you know, set aside your toys just because he's some some voice in the world around you seems to think that that you should, you know, put

your fantasy world away. I mean, I always come back to the famous CS Lewis quote where he and I'm paraphrasing here, but he says, you know, when I when I became an adult, I put away childish things, including the fear of appearing childish and the desire to be very grown up. So you keep those fantasies with you by all means. Indeed, and if you want to share

your fantasies with you specifically um, imaginary friends. UM. And of course we're always interested in your your your dreams and uh, and certainly any kind of art you're into. I mean, I'm I'm always gay to see some cool art, So feel free of it is uh, as long as it is not profane. Uh, feel free to share it on Yeah, yeah, as long as it's safe for work or at least, you know, very classy. Share it on

the Facebook page for stuff to all your mind. We're blow the Mind on that and we're also blow the Mind on Twitter, and you can also send us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.