Students of the humanities may have been debating the meaning and value of art and beauty for centuries but they still don’t take kindly to interventions by scientists. So it was with >Professor Semir Zeki, a renowned neurobiologist who in the late 1990s turned his attention to the study of what happens to the human brain when it sees or experiences art. His 1999 book, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain , serves as the founding text for the field of neuroaesthetics and one of his major arguments is that there can never be a complete theory of aesthetics without taking into account the role of the brain and how it correlates such experiences.
Not surprisingly, over the course of hundreds of lectures delivered on the subject, Professor Zeki, who teaches at University College London, has often been confronted with the accusation that he is attempting to demystify concepts such as beauty or even love. “I ignore these arguments now,” he says with a resigned smile as we speak over coffee during his recent visit to Mumbai as part of a lecture series organised by the British Council. “What I really object to is the use of these pejorative terms like ‘demystify’ because these criticisms are not consistent. A physicist who talks about matter has to break it down to electrons and neutrons and so on, so why just go after the neuroscientists?”
The misunderstanding, Professor Zeki explains, lies in the fact that art historians are suspicious about the fact that neuroaesthetics seeks to give an answer to the question of what is beauty, a subject, he says, that they have been debating for thousands of years without coming to an answer. But have they got the question wrong all along?
“Neuroaestheticsdoes not ask the question of what is beauty, but only the brain mechanism that engages with the experience of beauty,” he explains.
Beauty and the brain Studying the neural mechanism that goes into aesthetic appreciation has allowed Professor Zeki to frame debates around the uses of beauty that go beyond the art historian’s domain. In a 2011 study, for instance, he found that the same part of the brain that is excited when you fall in love with someone is stimulated when you look at great works of beauty. Viewing art, the study showed, triggers a surge of the feel-good chemical, dopamine, in the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain — which is involved in the cognitive processing of decision-making — resulting in feelings of intense pleasure. Apart from its utility as a scientific argument, the study also raises questions about whether more exposure to art could improve mental health. And conversely, it raises the question of whether a diminution in our ability to experience beauty is a sign of depression.
The questions that Professor Zeki is currently dealing with go even further — studying the correlation between the experience of different sorts of beauty. “Whether it is physical beauty, visual beauty, musical beauty, all cause activity in the same part of the brain. But, above all, the phenomenon is interesting because it holds true for mathematical beauty,” he explains.
Of immaculate conceptions What does mathematical beauty allude to? Plato called it the highest form of beauty because it told you something about the structure of the universe. And Immanuel Kant wrote that the pleasure that we derive from a mathematical equation is that it “makes sense”.
It is often said that mathematicians strive for beauty in their work the way painters do. And that some mathematical equations are simply found to be more beautiful than others. “Take for example Einstein’s theory of relativity, which was widely accepted because it imported a concept of extreme beauty into mathematics in the way that it sought to stabilise all that we know about the universe. And only recently, with the discovery of gravitational waves, it was proven to be true,” Professor Zeki explains. In experiments conducted in 2014, Professor Zeki attempted to demonstrate that for mathematicians the conclusive test for the veracity of an equation is not whether it is simple or complex but whether it is beautiful. “I depart from Darwin now, whose theory was that the uses of beauty are simply related to sexual selection,” he says. “I think beauty is a sign towardsthe truth about the universe.” He goes on to elaborate his hypothesis: “Take string theory for example. It has not yet been conclusively proven or accepted but I wonder if any of the equations in string theory are really beautiful and if that is what they need to strive towards.”
From causing consternation in the world of art to a deeper understanding of how the brain responds to the experiential, >Professor Semir Zeki’s explorations of the nuance of beauty will perhaps end up humanising science as much as decoding art.
jayant.sriram@thehindu.co.in
