November 8, 2011 • 43 mins
Julie and Robert examine the neurological side of your trip to the museum. What happens when we lose ourselves in Mona Lisa's smile or the nightmare worlds of Hieronymus Bosch? Were artists the first neuroscientists?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
today we're talking about your brain on art. We were
discussing the way that art Guard Funcle's music transforms the
mind um scans of of the brain while listening to
(00:28):
some of his classics while listening to say Bright Eyes
or even some of his work with Paul Simon. Oh yeah,
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,
(00:50):
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
(01:10):
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,
(01:31):
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
(01:54):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:39):
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.
(03:00):
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,
(03:21):
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,
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:48):
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,
(05:08):
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
(05:31):
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.
(05:54):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:59):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:43):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:25):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:10):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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.
(11:15):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:05):
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,
(13:28):
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
(13:49):
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
(14:10):
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
(14:30):
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
(14:54):
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,
(15:15):
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
(15:36):
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,
(15:59):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:41):
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
(17:03):
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
(17:24):
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
(17:45):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:51):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:37):
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
(19:59):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:44):
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,
(21:06):
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
(21:28):
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
(21:52):
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
(22:13):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:55):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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.
(23:58):
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
(24:22):
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,
(24:44):
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,
(25:08):
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,
(25:29):
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,
(25:51):
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
(26:11):
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
(26:34):
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
(26:56):
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
(27:16):
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
(27:37):
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
(28:00):
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,
(28:21):
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,
(28:43):
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
(29:04):
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
(29:29):
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
(29:51):
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
(30:14):
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,
(30:35):
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,
(30:55):
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
(31:16):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:19):
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
(32:42):
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.
(33:05):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:46):
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
(34:08):
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
(34:30):
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,
(34:51):
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,
(35:15):
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,
(35:38):
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,
(36:02):
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
(36:23):
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
(36:44):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:27):
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
(37:48):
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
(38:11):
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
(38:31):
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
(38:53):
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
(39:16):
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
(39:36):
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
(39:59):
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
(40:20):
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
(40:42):
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
(41:02):
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,
(41:24):
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
(41:46):
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
(42:08):
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
(42:30):
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
(42:50):
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.
(43:11):
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
(43:32):
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.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
today we're talking about your brain on art. We were
discussing the way that art Guard Funcle's music transforms the
mind um scans of of the brain while listening to
(00:28):
some of his classics while listening to say Bright Eyes
or even some of his work with Paul Simon. Oh yeah,
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,
(00:50):
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
(01:10):
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,
(01:31):
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
(01:54):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:39):
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.
(03:00):
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,
(03:21):
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,
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:48):
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,
(05:08):
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
(05:31):
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.
(05:54):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:59):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:43):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:25):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:10):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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.
(11:15):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:05):
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,
(13:28):
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
(13:49):
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
(14:10):
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
(14:30):
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
(14:54):
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,
(15:15):
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
(15:36):
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,
(15:59):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:41):
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
(17:03):
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
(17:24):
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
(17:45):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:51):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:37):
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
(19:59):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:44):
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,
(21:06):
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
(21:28):
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
(21:52):
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
(22:13):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:55):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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.
(23:58):
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
(24:22):
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,
(24:44):
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,
(25:08):
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,
(25:29):
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,
(25:51):
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
(26:11):
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
(26:34):
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
(26:56):
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
(27:16):
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
(27:37):
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
(28:00):
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,
(28:21):
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,
(28:43):
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
(29:04):
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
(29:29):
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
(29:51):
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
(30:14):
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,
(30:35):
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,
(30:55):
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
(31:16):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:19):
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
(32:42):
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.
(33:05):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:46):
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
(34:08):
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
(34:30):
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,
(34:51):
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,
(35:15):
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,
(35:38):
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,
(36:02):
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
(36:23):
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
(36:44):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:27):
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
(37:48):
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
(38:11):
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
(38:31):
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
(38:53):
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
(39:16):
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
(39:36):
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
(39:59):
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
(40:20):
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
(40:42):
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
(41:02):
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,
(41:24):
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
(41:46):
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
(42:08):
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
(42:30):
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
(42:50):
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.
(43:11):
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
(43:32):
email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
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