The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Neuroaesthetics and the Curve

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Wheat Field with Cypresses          1889           Vincent van Gogh

   Dr. Ed Connor, Director of the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins, studies how the high-level perception areas of the brain process visual images into information about the world.

   He writes:  “Understanding what you see seems trivial—you only have to look at it! We are so good at vision that we tend not to recognize it as an ability or a process of any kind.  But in fact it is one of the most difficult things the brain does. Computer vision, even with deep networks, has not even begun to approach the kind of visual understanding that comes so easily to us. Computers can beat us at math, chess, go, and jeopardy, but they cannot understand the visual world the way we do.”

   One of the results of his research has been in finding evidence supporting our own intuitive visual preferences for rounded or curved shapes over sharper, squarer shapes. His work shows how individual brain neurons associated with visual perception respond more to broad curvatures than to sharp and pointed images. It is a biological imperative originating in our brain neurons and sensorimotor system.  

   Does it come from millions of years of evolution—from our primitive brain’s necessity to be aware of the shapes of animals that might harm us or that might save us from starvation? There is no definitive answer to the question, but the study of neuroaesthetics is leading to changes in design and architecture, with more nature-inspired curves and shapes and even a greater understanding of our urgent need to reboot ourselves by spending time in Nature.

   Perhaps this is one of the landscape/nature artist’s greatest contributions to those who suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.”

   For more information on this fascinating subject, be sure to read, Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.