The Neuroscience of Form in Art

Abstract

8 The Neuroscience of Form in Art George Lalcofi“ The theory of form in art presented here rests on the Cog Hypothesis: There are neural structures in the sensory-motor system that are “sec- ondary” in the sense that they are connected neurally to “primary” neu- ral ensembles that are more directly involved in either perception or movement. An obvious example would be premotor cortical structures that carry out highly structured complex motor actions via connections to the primary motor cortex, which controls simple actions. When the premotor-to—motor connections are inhibited, the secondary premotor cir- J‘ cuitry can junction as a “cog’ it can still compute complex patterns that permit inferences and can evolve over time. Such patterns can structure what we see as form in art. Many kinds of cogs have been hy- pothesized and each type corresponds to an aspect of form. The idea for this chapter came from observations by Rudolf Arnheim (1969) in Visual Thinking. Though Arnheim could not supply the neural underpinnings for a general and explanatory theory, he none- theless had many of the basic ideas. I first turned to Visual Think- ing in 1975, after hearing a lecture at Berkeley by Leonard Talmy on primitives of spa 'al relations. In English, for example, spatial- relations terms include the prepositions (on, in, through, etc.). Talmy, looking at many languages, had concluded that notwo languages convey exactly the same range of spatial relations in their words and morphemes. However, spatial-relations concepts can be decomposed into universal cognitive primitives that recur across languages.