It’s our brain that dictates our artistic preferences

Researchers have tried to understand how our brain decides whether a painting is aesthetic or not. They explain in a studyrecently published in the journal NatureCommunications, that we form an opinion on a creation after having analyzed it under different prisms. Our brain pays attention to certain basic characteristics such as the colors or the texture of a work of art, but also to more complex elements such as the style. He evaluates each of these criteria individually before issuing a general judgment on the painting, sculpture or installation before his eyes.

To reach this conclusion, the scientists asked six volunteers to look at up to 1,000 paintings while their brains were scanned with a functional MRI machine. These images are then fed into a machine learning algorithm, as are each participant’s ratings of the canvases they have seen, and data from a neural network trained to analyze paintings based on different criteria (contrast colors, style, etc.).

The research team found that several brain areas participate in the construction of an opinion regarding a work of art. Among them are, unsurprisingly, the occipital lobe, this region of the brain processing visual information, but also the prefrontal cortex. The latter plays an important role in emotions and decision-making. “When you see an image, you immediately decide whether you like it or not, but if you think about it, it’s really complicated because the information collected is very complex“said Kiyohito Iigaya, assistant professor at Columbia University and co-author of the study, in a statement.

In other words, contemplating a masterpiece is a much more cerebral activity than is commonly imagined. Caltech researchers say, however, that more scientific work is needed to try to unravel the mystery of our aesthetic sensibilities. And for good reason, they did not take into account the influence of social and cultural factors in the construction of our taste for art.