Vilayanur Ramachandran - The Emerging Mind - The Reith Lectures 2003

I recently started reading about the history of ideas on art - especially Victorian reactions to Indian art - and it makes fascinating reading.

For example if you go to Southern India, you look at the famous Chola bronze of the goddess Parvati dating back to the 12th century. For Indian eyes, she is supposed to represent the very epitome of feminine sensuality, grace, poise, dignity, everything that's good about being a woman. And she's of course also very voluptuous

Pic. The Goddess Parvati

But the Victorian Englishmen who first encountered these sculptures were appalled by Parvati, partly because they were prudish, but partly also just because of just plain ignorance.

They complained that the breasts were way too big, the hips were too big and the waist was too narrow. It didn't look anything like a real woman - it wasn't realistic - it was primitive art. And they said the same thing about the voluptuous nymphs of Kajuraho - even about Rajastani and Mogul miniature paintings. They said look these paintings don't have perspective, they're all distorted.

They were judging Indian art using the standards of Western art - especially classical Greek art and Renaissance art where realism is strongly emphasized.

But obviously this is a fallacy. Anyone here today will tell you art has nothing to do with realism. It is not about creating a realistic replica of what's out there in the world.

I can take a five dollar camera, aim it at one of you here, take a photograph. It's very realistic but you wouldn't give me a penny for it. In fact art is about the exact opposite. It's about deliberate hyperbole, exaggeration, in fact even distortion in order to create pleasing effects in the brain.

But obviously that can't be the whole story. You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that. The distortion has to be lawful. The question then becomes: What kinds of distortion are effective? What are the laws?

So one day I was sitting in a temple in India when I was on a sabbatical and in a whimsical frame of mind I just jotted down what I think of as the universal laws of art, the ten laws of art which cut across cultural boundaries. Given our time limits, I'm going to just tell you four or five of my ten laws - the rest are on the BBC Website, so you can go look it up.

Professor Ramachandran's suggested 10 universal laws of art:

1. Peak shift

2. Grouping

3. Contrast

4. Isolation

5. Perception problem solving

6. Symmetry

7. Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint

8. Repetition, rhythm and orderliness

9. Balance

10. Metaphor

The first law, I call peak shift and to illustrate this I'll use a hypothetical example from animal behaviour, from rat psychology.

Imagine you're training a rat to discriminate a square from a rectangle. So every time it sees a particular rectangle you give it a piece of cheese. When it sees a square you don't give it anything. Very soon it learns that the rectangle means food, it starts liking the rectangle - although you're not supposed to say that if you're a behaviourist. And it starts going towards the rectangle because it prefers the rectangle to the square.

But now the amazing thing is if you take a longer skinnier rectangle and show it to the rat, it actually prefers the longer skinnier rectangle to the original rectangle that you taught it. And you say: Well that's kind of stupid. Why does it prefer a longer skinnier rectangle rather than the one you originally showed it? Well it's not stupid at all because what the rat is learning is a rule - Rectangularity. And of course therefore if you make it longer and skinnier, it's even more rectangular. So it says: "Wow! What a rectangle!" and it goes towards that rectangle.

Now you say: Well, what's that got to do with art?

Well let's think about caricature. What do you do in a caricature? Supposing you want to produce a caricature of Maggie Thatcher or a caricature of Nixon, what do you do? You take Nixon's face and you say: What's special about his face? What makes him different from other people. So what you do is you take the mathematical average of all male faces and you subtract it from Nixon's face. And you get the big bulbous nose and the shaggy eyebrows. And then you amplify it. And then you get an image that looks even more like Nixon than Nixon himself. Now if you do it just right you get great portraiture, even a Rembrandt. But if you overdo it you get caricature, it looks comical. But it still looks even more like Nixon than the original Nixon. So you're behaving exactly like that rat.

But what's it got to do with the rest of art. Let's go back to the Chola bronze of Parvati. Let's talk about Indian art. Well the same principle applies. How does the artist convey the very epitome of feminine sensuality? What he does is simply take the average female form, subtract the average male form - you're going to get big breasts, big hips and a narrow waist. And then amplify it, amplify the difference. And you don't say: "My God, it's anatomically incorrect". You say: "Wow! What a sexy goddess!"

But that's not all there is to it because how do you bring in dignity, poise, grace?

Well what you do is something quite clever, what the Chola bronze artist does is something quite clever. There are some postures that are forbidden to a male. I can't stand like that even if I want to. But a woman can do it effortlessly. So what he does is he goes into an abstract space I call "posture space", and then subtracts the average male posture from the female and then exaggerates the feminine posture - and then you get elegant triple flexion - or tribhanga - pose, where the head is tilted one way, the body is tilted exactly the opposite way, and the hips again the other way. And again you don't say: "My God, that's anatomically inappropriate. Nobody can stand like that." You say: "My God! It's gorgeous. It's beautiful! It's a celestial goddess". So the image is extremely evocative and it's an example of the peak shift principle in Indian art.

OK, this is all about faces and caricatures and bodies and Chola bronzes. That seems quite reasonable, but what about the rest of art? What about abstract art? What about Picasso. What about semi-abstract art? What about impressionism, what about Cubism? Van Gogh? Monet? Henry Moore? How can my ideas even begin to approach some of those artistic styles?

To answer this question, you need to go and look at ethology, especially the work of Niko Tinbergen at Oxford more than fifty years ago. And he was doing some very elegant experiments on seagull chicks.

As soon as the herring-gull chick hatches, it looks at its mother. The mother has a long yellow beak with a red spot on it. And the chick starts pecking at the red spot, begging for food. The mother then regurgitates half-digested food into the chick's gaping mouth, the chick swallows the food and is happy. Then Tinbergen asked himself: "How does the chick know as soon as it's hatched who's mother? Why doesn't it beg for food from a person who is passing by or a pig?"

And he found that you don't need a mother.

You can take a dead seagull, pluck its beak away and wave the disembodied beak in front of the chick and the chick will beg just as much for food, pecking at this disembodied beak. And you say: "Well that's kind of stupid - why does the chick confuse the scientist waving a beak for a mother seagull?"

Well the answer again is it's not stupid at all. Actually if you think about it, the goal of vision is to do as little processing or computation as you need to do for the job on hand, in this case for recognizing mother. And through millions of years of evolution, the chick has acquired the wisdom that the only time it will see this long thing with a red spot is when there's a mother attached to it. After all it is never going to see in nature a mutant pig with a beak or a malicious ethologist waving a beak in front of it. So it can take advantage of the statistical redundancy in nature and say: "Long yellow thing with a red spot IS mother. Let me forget about everything else and I'll simplify the processing and save a lot of computational labour by just looking for that."