Human. Part 6

Part 3.

THE GLORY OF BEING HUMAN.

Chapter 6.

WHAT'S UP WITH THE ARTS?

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

-Louis Nizer.

HOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE ARTS? ARE HUMANS THE ONLY artists? Since we are products of natural selection, what possible evolutionary advantage did they bestow on us? Would a lion pause and think twice about eating your ancestor if he had done a quick little rendition of "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" in a pair of cobra skin shoes with coconut sh.e.l.l taps? Would a neighboring tribe's army crawling through the brush exclaim to themselves upon seeing your camp, "Look at how aesthetically placed those logs are! And the fire pit is simply spectacular! What are we thinking? We could not possibly consider knocking out these creative people and taking their leg o' impala roasting on the spit!"

Or maybe art is like the peac.o.c.k's tail. "Bruno makes the cutest carving instruments out of bones. All the other guys are just a bunch of Neanderthals, but Bruno, he is an artist. I think I'll mate with him."

Or is it all about status? "Bruno has the biggest knife collection of anyone. In fact he has a knife made by Gormox. I know, I know, Gormox's knives don't cut anything, and they are misshapen, but there are very few of them around!"

Or perhaps Bruno is curling up for his afternoon siesta when he catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of a snake peeking out at him. He remembers the bedtime story his father had told him about some guy who had seen a poisonous snake, and he had feigned sleep, and just as the snake was...he grabbed it and slammed it against the ground. As he skinned it with his cute knife and thought about some new taps, he considered, "Hmmmm. Maybe those stories weren't just to put me to sleep after all."

Or was he the first charming Frenchman? "Oh, my pet.i.te, slither with me through this cave just around the corner in Lascaux and let me show you my etchings." Or was art a gift to the G.o.ds? "If I can get this dance down right, we will be sure to have plenty of good hunting and great weather. I better not screw up and hip when I should hop. That will wreck everything."

And what about those intoxicating rhythms? Did the tribe that danced together bond better than the tribe who were out of sync? Were they better able to coordinate their hunting? Did the beat of drums work as an aphrodisiac? Was Pavarotti any different from a songbird attracting a mate? Is Mick Jagger another example of a peac.o.c.k's tail, or is there more to the story? Are the arts uniquely human?

Explaining the arts is a conundrum. A superficial consideration would place the arts in the position of frosting on the cake. After everything else is accounted for, then we can think about art. After we create the functional, is the aesthetic merely the extra? "I've built a chair and now I can sit down. Hmmm, it sure looks boring, maybe I should add a pillow for a splash of color." After the rent, groceries, clothes, gas, car, insurance, utilities, retirement account, and taxes are taken care of, if there is any left over, then maybe you can consider a movie, a concert, painting, dance lessons, or a theatrical production. But is that really their place? Perhaps the arts are more important. Maybe they aren't the frosting on the cake; maybe they are the baking soda, or the sugar. Maybe they are so much a part of us that once again we take them for granted. Perhaps the aesthetic quality of things is more basic to our sensibilities than we realize, and we ignore it at our peril. Does it belong to the great unconscious part of our brain we are learning more and more about to our amazement? When did art evolve? Is there any evidence of it in other animals or our ancestors? Was it necessary for big brains to develop first for art to appear, or did it contribute to their development?

Obviously many forms of art are unique to humans. Gorillas don't play the sax, chimps don't write plays. Can other animals appreciate art? Will a chimp gaze at the sunset or be enraptured by Rachmaninoff? Does your dog dig the Stones? Do we, as humans need art? Does it help develop our brains? Are piano lessons just as important as history cla.s.s? Should we be spending more money on our children's art education? Should we consider it not frosting, the last thing we spend money on, but a baseline budget item?

Many of these questions are just beginning to be addressed. We will start with a look at what art is. Then we'll see what is known of the beginning of art and what it can tell us about the brains that created it. We'll see what the evolutionary psychologists have to say, and then see what recent neuroimaging studies have revealed.

WHAT IS ART, ANYWAY?.

Can we even define art? One of art's mysteries is brought to our attention by the oft-said phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"-or the ear. We can both go to an art gallery, and one of us may have been enraptured while the other of us thinks we've seen a hack job. We may have heard the mumbled comment, "And she calls this art? I call it garbage." We can go to a concert, and one of us will think the music sublime, and the other may be on edge and have to get up and leave. One of us may walk into a room and feel warm and relaxed and find it beautiful, while the other may find it tedious and boring, whispering, "His taste is all in his mouth!" We know instantly whether we like a painting or not. It "appeals" to us or it doesn't.

Art is one of those human universals. All cultures have some form of it, whether it is painting, dance, story, song, or other forms. We can look at a painting or listen to a symphony or watch a dance recital and understand consciously how much time and effort went into the production, how much practice and education were (or perhaps were not) involved, and appreciate it, but that does not mean we like it. How can we define something about which we have no consensus? On the other hand, don't we all gaze up at a starry desert sky and think it is beautiful? Don't we all find a babbling brook lovely?

Ellen Dissanayake, an affiliate professor in the school of music at the University of Washington, points out, "The present-day Western concept of art is a mess."1 She comments that our notion of art is peculiar to our place and time, and modern aesthetics comes from philosophers who had no knowledge of prehistoric art, or of the widespread presence of art around the world in its many forms, or that we had evolved biologically. Steven Pinker, who has penetrating ideas on just about everything, reminds us that the arts engage not only the psychology of aesthetics but also the psychology of status. In order to understand the arts the two need to be separated, and this is what hasn't been done throughout many of the long windbag discussions about art in the past. The psychology of status plays a major role in what is considered Art. Just like an expensive house and a Lamborghini, an original Pica.s.so on the wall has no utilitarian value but indicates that you have money to burn. Pinker says, "Thorstein Veblen's and Quentin Bell's a.n.a.lyses of taste and fashion, in which an elite's conspicuous displays of consumption, leisure, and outrage are emulated by the rabble, sending the elite off in search of new inimitable displays, nicely explain the otherwise inexplicable oddities of the arts."2 Once the fashion, architecture, music, etc., is accepted by the seething ma.s.ses, it is no longer elite and may no longer be considered art with a capital A. Thus, it is impossible to define art if both aspects of its psychology are left entwined, because the accepted definition is constantly changing. However, if we can separate the two, then we can deal with the aesthetic aspect of art. Both Pinker and Dissanayake include in their category of art the common and not just the rarefied products. Your kitchen plates can be as aesthetically pleasing to you as a painting. Aesthetics has little to do with the monetary value of art. In the world of Art, however, it may be beautiful, but if it is a copy, it is worthless.

Pinker goes on to point out that the psychological response to the status aspect of Art is a forbidden topic among art academicians and intellectuals. To them, it is OK to be ignorant of the sciences and math, even though such knowledge would be beneficial to health choices. However, to prefer Wayne Newton to Mozart, or to be ignorant of some obscure reference, is as shocking as wearing your boxers (only) to a black-tie dinner. Your choice in art, your personal preference and knowledge about a leisure time activity, is used by another to make a value judgment about your character. The same does not usually happen in a discussion of hammers or chromosomes. How status became enmeshed in art is one question, and why we find something aesthetically pleasing is another.

BEAUTY AND ART.

There are those who will argue that beauty has nothing to do with art. It must be because they have not separated the two different psychological responses. You don't hear, "That is the ugliest painting I've ever seen. Let's put it in the dining room." But while looking at the same awful thing in the gallery, you may hear, "This is Blah Blah's latest painting, and his last one was purchased by the Getty. I think I'll get this for our New York apartment." Camilo Cela-Conde, director of the Laboratory of Human Systematics and professor at the University of Islas Baleares, Spain, quotes the philosopher Oswald Hanfling as saying, "People who visit galleries, read poetry and so on, do it, after all, looking for beauty."3 Symphony orchestras don't survive by having this response: "It says here in the Sunday review that this symphony is the most dissonant and jarring piece of music that the critic has ever heard, and he likens it to fingernails scratching on a blackboard. Well that sounds great! Let's go." We are going to be interested in finding out if there is a universal sense of aesthetics or beauty. Pinker asks: "What is it about the mind that lets people take pleasure in shapes and colors and sounds and jokes and stories and myths?"2 One dictionary definition of art is: "Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium."4 Nancy Aiken of Ohio University breaks art down into four components: the artist who makes the work.

the work itself.

the observer of the work, and.

the value the observer places on the work.

The American Heritage College Dictionary gives four definitions of aesthetics. We are going to consider them one by one. The first definition is: "The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty, as in the fine arts. In Kantian philosophy, the branch of metaphysics concerned with the laws of perception." We've got philosophers talking about what is beautiful, and they have been talking for centuries. The philosophical discussion starts with Plato's theory that beauty is independent of the observer (although it needs an observer). If something is beautiful, it just is; no one's opinions are necessary. A couple of millennia later, we have Kant, who was concerned with the aesthetic value to the perceiver: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is then a judgment.

Neuroscience can at least study Kant's theories about perception and aesthetic judgments.6 So we have the stimulus (the object or artist or piece of music) and the sensual perception of the stimulus. Next comes our emotional response to the perception of the stimulus, which brings us to the second definition of aesthetics: "The study of the psychological responses to beauty and artistic experiences."

The study of psychological responses to beauty has actually been rather spa.r.s.e. Research in aesthetics has suffered the same fate as research into emotion. The behaviorists and the cognitivists have neglected it, and surprisingly, it has also been neglected by the more recent emotion theorists.7 It has been suggested that this neglect has been due to a failure to identify aesthetics as either cognition or an emotion, or even as both: It is an orphan child in the land of psychology. Aesthetics is a special cla.s.s of experience, neither a type of response nor an emotion, but a modus operandi of "knowing about" the world. It is sensation with an attached positive or negative evaluation. Does this sound familiar? It is like the approachdon't approach information given to the brain before it had language. In fact, I recently heard this statement: "I like that kitchen, but I can't tell you why. I guess you have to break it down and examine its components to figure it out."* After the emotional reaction, we get a judgment tempered by either an unconscious (hardwired) or conscious (conditioned by culture, upbringing, education, and inclination) idea of whether we think the input is beautiful.

And that takes us to the third definition of aesthetics: "A conception of what is artistically valid or beautiful." Donald Norman of Northwestern University suggests that there are three separate levels of beauty. The surface beauty, which is the immediate visceral reaction, is biologically determined and is consistent in people throughout the world. Then there is beauty in operation or behavior (how that beamer handles on the autobahn). Last is the beauty in depth, in meaning, and implication, which Norman calls reflective. Reflective beauty is conscious and is influenced by the individual's culture, education, memory, and experience-everything that goes into you as a person.8 Thus there are two different types of aesthetic judgment, one visceral and automatic, the other conscious and contemplative.

And finally we arrive at the fourth definition of aesthetics: "An artistically beautiful or pleasing appearance." Nicholas Humphrey tackles the question of beauty from the perceptual end by attempting to define the particular perceptual quality that things of beauty have in common. He proceeds by searching for the essence of beauty in the relations formed between the perceived elements. We can listen to a melody and think it is beautiful, but we don't think a B-flat is beautiful by itself, and an A is beautiful, and so on. It is the combination, the relations among the different notes, that are beautiful. But this doesn't really help us out all that much. Sure, we can say the relation is beautiful, but what relations are important? Why are they important? Why isn't an endless trill of B-flat and A beautiful, whereas a quick little flourish of it in the right spot is?

Humphrey calls on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins defined beauty as likeness tempered with difference. Humphrey goes on to build a hypothesis that "aesthetic preferences stem from a predisposition among animals and men to seek out experiences through which they may learn to cla.s.sify the objects in the world about them. Beautiful 'structures' in nature or in art are those which facilitate the task of cla.s.sification by presenting evidence of the 'taxonomic' relations between things in a way which is informative and easy to grasp."9 Humphrey is hinting that our ability to make aesthetic judgments is fundamental to learning.

In the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't have neuroscience to help him out, nor did Plato in his day. But things have changed and gotten more interesting. Psychologists Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman, from the University of Bergen, Norway, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, San Diego, respectively, tackle the question of beauty through neural processing. They propose that beauty, as defined by aesthetic pleasure, is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics. The more fluently perceivers can mentally process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. This theory has four a.s.sumptions: Some objects are processed more easily than others because they contain certain features the brain is hardwired to process, which it does quickly, such as symmetry. (These are features we will run into later.) But the ease of processing can also be influenced by perceptual or conceptual priming.

When we perceive something we process easily, we get a positive feeling.

This positive feeling contributes to our value judgment as to whether something is pleasing or not, unless we question the informational value of this input.

The impact of the fluency is moderated by your expectations or what you attribute it to. If you go shopping at Nordstrom and enjoy the piano playing while you are shopping, you are in a positive mood. Then, when you see a red purse you like, you are more likely to buy it because of this positive mood. However, before we enter the store, I might tell you, "Don't let the piano playing go to your head. They just do that to put you in a good mood so you'll buy more." Then when you see that purse, you will be more conscious about deciding whether you like it or not.

However, even though there are hardwired preferences due to ease of processing, different experiences can increase processing fluency in novel areas, and new neural connections can be made, all of which will affect aesthetic judgment.10 Your processing fluency can be enhanced by experience. The first time you see a new architectural style, you may not like it, but after you have seen it several times, it begins to "grow on you." The beauty of this theory is that it can account for many different findings that have been puzzling. I will return to it a bit later.

Hopkins broke down the aesthetic judgment of a "beautiful" object into its perceptual and its visual or auditory components, then a.n.a.lyzed what he thought were factors contributing toward making his judgment, implying that these would be universal rules. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman a.s.sume there are some things that are innately easy to process. Norman thinks that the immediate reaction we get to surface beauty is biologically determined. Can science tell us whether there are in fact universal guidelines for aesthetic preferences that are hardwired in our brains?

Are There Universal Components to Aesthetic Judgments?

Do we share some universal preferences for certain components of aesthetic preference with other animals? If so, when did these preferences get channeled into the actual production of art? Can the past help us? Can we pinpoint when art first appeared? I won't keep you in suspense. That answer is no. The point at which our ancestors first perceived a stimulus and made a value judgment that it was beautiful is probably always going to be unknown to us. When did the first primate look up at the sunset and find it magnificent? Did this happen before we diverged from our common ancestor or afterward? Is there any evidence chimpanzees have aesthetic sensibilities? Chimpanzees will have an emotional reaction to some natural phenomena. Jane Goodall describes a waterfall in Gombe National Park where she has observed chimps on several different occasions. After they arrive there, they do a wild dance, which involves rhythmically swaying from foot to foot, and then they sit and watch the water as it falls.11 What is going on in the chimpanzees' brains is unknown. Are they excited, just as a child is excited to go to the beach? Do they feel the emotion of awe? Are they making an aesthetic judgment? ("I like this" does not necessarily translate to "I think this is beautiful.") Can they even make aesthetic judgments?

Artistic Chimps?

Some chimpanzees, especially when young, when given pencils or paints have become engrossed in using them, to the point of ignoring favorite foods and turning their backs on other chimps while working on a design. Chimps familiar with drawing have begged for supplies when they see their caretaker in possession of them and have thrown tantrums when stopped while painting. One untamed chimp named Alpha refused to draw with a pointed stick and would reject pencils with dull points. Obviously, some chimps like to draw and are a bit fussy about the results. Chimps also stayed within the boundaries of their paper, and one chimp would mark the corners before starting.12 A series of three paintings by a male chimp named Congo recently sold at auction for twelve thousand pounds.13 Desmond Morris, who studied Congo primarily, as well as the works of other primate drawers and painters, could identify six common principles in both chimpanzee and human art. It was a self-rewarding activity, there was compositional control, there were variations in line and in theme, there was optimum heterogeneity and universal imagery.12 Just as the art of children and untrained human adults across cultures is very similar in its imagery and appearance, the chimpanzee drawings and paintings also were similar to each other. Morris attributes universal imagery in human art partly to similarities in muscular movements of the body and to the constraints of the visual system. As an artist is trained, he gains more control over his musculature, and with practice, Morris suggests, a third influence becomes more p.r.o.nounced-the psychological factor.

However, Congo was not a supreme colorist, as his paintings may suggest. If left alone with the paints, he would mix them all together until he had made brown and then would use that. He was handed brushes that had been preloaded with paint, and when that color was used up, he was handed another color. In order that the researchers might study the calligraphy of the strokes, one color was allowed to dry before another color was given to him, so that the colors and strokes would not blend. If left to his own devices, he would not allow one color to dry but would slap on the next, and the colors and strokes would become muddy. Although he would signal when he was done with a drawing, he would frequently draw on top of it if it was given to him at another time. After completing a drawing or painting, he was no longer interested in it. He wouldn't just look at it for pleasure. The drawing and painting sessions were very short, never lasting more than a few minutes per picture, presenting the question of whether the end of the picture was an aesthetic judgment or simply the end of his attention span, especially since he would draw on top of it at a different session. Interestingly, he would try various techniques, such as urinating on a painting and swishing the urine around and later using dripped water on a painting for the same effect. He tried using his grooming brush and fingernails on the paints also. Novelty was important. None of the chimpanzees that Morris studied created a recognizable pictorial image.

In discussing compositional control, Morris cites a study done by Professor Bernhard Rensch in Germany, who wondered if animals had pattern preferences. He tested four inquisitive species: two monkey species, capuchin monkeys (Cebus) and guenon monkeys (Ceropithecus), and two bird species, jackdaws and crows. He presented a series of cards with either regular rhythmic patterns or irregular markings.

After several hundred tests, Rensch found that all four species would pick up the regular patterns more frequently. He concluded: "When choosing between different black patterns on white cardboards the monkey preferred geometrical, i.e. more regular patterns, to irregular ones. It is very probable that the steadiness of the course of a line, the radial or bilateral symmetry and repet.i.tion of equal components in a pattern (rhythm) were decisive for the preference.... Both species of birds preferred the more regular, more symmetrical or rhythmical patterns. In most cases the percentage of preference was statistically significant. Probably this preference is caused by the better 'complexibility,' i.e. the easier comprehensibility of symmetrical and rhythmical repet.i.tions of the same components (Rekurrenzl.u.s.t)."* Morris points out that the vital elements-symmetry, repet.i.tion, steadiness, rhythm-are the basic factors that appeal to the eye in selecting a pattern, but they also appear in the production of patterns. There is a "positive reaction to order rather than chaos, organization rather than confusion." We can see from these studies that there is a preference in numerous species for specific types of visual patterns, the same preferences that humans show. It seems that there is a biological basis to the preference for some of the components of pictorial images.

EARLIEST HUMAN ART.

In order to look for the origins of artistic endeavors in our direct ancestors, we need to look at what archaeological artifacts can tell us. Obviously we will never know when the first melody was strung together and hummed merely for enjoyment. Much of decorative art is likewise ephemeral, being in the form of feathers, wood, paint, and clay. We can explore this question only by looking at artifacts that have survived: stashes of dyes, tools, sh.e.l.l and bone beads, and rock art, such as can be seen in the caves of southern France and the wilds of Australia. We will discuss music a bit later on.

The question of whether stone tools were a creative endeavor has spurred some controversy. Stone hand axes have been found with remains of h.o.m.o erectus dated from 1.4 million years ago,14 and examples have been found dating until about 128,000 years ago. Although chimpanzees sometimes will use a stone as a tool to crack open nuts, and even may carry a particular stone from one tree to another, they have never yet been observed in the wild intentionally flaking a stone to make a tool.15 The basic design of the early hand ax and its production technique remained stable over many thousands of years and across a wide geography. The axes appear to have been flaked along the path of least resistance. They show a limited degree of imposed form, rather than an imagined plan in mind. Later examples began being modified with more pleasing symmetries, distinctive twisting patterns, and different length-to-width ratios. It continues to be debated whether stone hand axes represent only a mimetic ability16 or are the early products of a developing creative imagination.

British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that to fashion an ax out of a random shape of stone may indicate the presence of creativity.15 But we aren't exactly concerned with creativity, which can produce articles of only functional quality, but with art, aesthetic appeal. Ellen Dissanayake points out that some of the hand axes made by h.o.m.o erectus were made of pudding stone (conglomerate), which most people would call beautiful, rather than flint, which was more abundant and easier to use. This suggests they may have had an interest in its appearance. Later axes made by early h.o.m.o sapiens, dated at 250,000 years ago, incorporated fossils centrally (symmetrically!) displayed in their carving. Some have been examined under an electron microscope and have been shown never to have been used.1 Perhaps they were retained just for their aesthetic appeal. Although there is this evidence of some artistic sensibility, it appears to have been limited.

Researchers interested in the origins of human art are of two camps. Some believe there was an explosive event, some sudden and major change in human abilities and creativity that occurred about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago; others believe it was a more gradual process with roots extending back millions of years. We will leave this argument to those so inclined and will take from it the one thing that is agreed upon. There is evidence of decorative hand axes, beads, and ocher powders dating thousands of years before this period, but the overwhelming number of artifacts that have been found have their origins in the last 40,000 years. There was an explosion of artistic and creative activity that included cave paintings and engravings found from Australia to Europe, as many as ten thousand sculpted and engraved objects made from ivory, bone, antler, stone, wood, and clay found across Europe to Siberia, and sophisticated tools, such as sewing needles, oil lamps, harpoons, spear throwers, drills, and rope.

Many archaeologists conclude that this explosion of creativity represents a fundamental evolutionary event in the h.o.m.o sapiens lineage.17 Something changed in our brain that expanded its earlier creative abilities, something unique to h.o.m.o sapiens. Remember from chapter 1 the genetic variant of microcephalin that arose approximately 37,000 years ago? Suddenly, about 40,000 years ago, when life could not have been easy street-with infectious diseases, hunting mishaps, shorter life spans, and no convenience stores, Prada, or Armani-anatomically modern h.o.m.o sapiens, in an unprecedented burst of creative and aesthetic activity, began painting pictures, wearing jewelry, and coming up with a host of new useful items. Why were they doing this, and what can this tell us about our brains?

Evolutionary Theories About the Origins of Art.

Charles Darwin considered the aesthetic sense an intellectual faculty that was the result of natural selection. n.o.body else thought much about this until Ellen Dissanayake came along. She proposed that art is a biological behavior! She based this on several observations. To begin with, song, dance, storytelling, and painting are universal in all cultures. In most societies, art is an integral part of most human activities and consumes a large portion of available resources. For example, the men of the Owerri tribe in Nigeria who build and paint ceremonial houses don't have to partic.i.p.ate in their day jobs for up to two years. Arts give pleasure: Our motivation system seeks them out because they reward us by making us feel good. Young children spontaneously engage in dancing, drawing, and singing. Like Darwin, Dissanayake proposes that the behavior of creating art has evolved through natural selection and that the fundamental behavioral tendency that lies behind the arts is what she calls "making special."

Making something special implies intent, and the intent is to distinguish an object or action from the ordinary by appealing to the emotions through the rhythms and textures and colors that it employs. Dissanayake thinks that "making special" is a behavior that increases group cohesiveness and thus would provide a survival advantage. A cohesive group in turn could increase individual survival. She suggests that in the past, the realm where one would want to make something out of the ordinary had to do with magic or the supernatural world, in the form of rituals, not as it is done today for a purely aesthetic motive.

Whatever one calls art, one is acknowledging that it is special in some way. Using "making special" as the major motivation of art as a behavior, one can include many behaviors and leave out the value judgments of whether it is "good art." We no longer need to think of art as being done for its own sake, which makes it easier to explain in an evolutionary context. Although many people have suggested that art's origins arose from a single motivation, such as body ornamentation, a creative impulse, relief of boredom, or communication, Dissanayake proposes that it is composed of many parts-manipulation, perception, emotion, symbolism, and cognition-and arose alongside other human characteristics, such as tool making, the need for order, language, category formation, symbol formation, self-consciousness, creating culture, sociality, and adaptability. She proposes that the creation of art in terms of human evolution was "to facilitate or sugarcoat socially important behavior, especially ceremonies, in which group values often of a sacred or spiritual nature were expressed and transmitted."*

Geoffrey Miller, who, as you may remember, studies s.e.xual selection, thinks that the arts are the result of s.e.xual selection. He suggests that creative individuals had higher reproductive success. He proposes that the arts are like the peac.o.c.k's tail-a fitness indicator. The more intricate, complex, and extravagant an artwork was, the greater the skill that was required to produce it, and the less functional it was for survival, the better it would be as a fitness indicator. Such a work says, "I am so good at finding food and shelter that I can spend half my time doing something that has no visible survival value! Pick me to mate with and you will have some dynamite offspring who are as capable as I." Miller states, "the peac.o.c.k's tail, the nightingale's song, the bowerbird's nest, the b.u.t.terfly's wing, the Irish elk's antlers, the baboon's rump, and the first three Led Zeppelin alb.u.ms"18 were all examples of s.e.xually selected fitness indicators. I guess he wasn't as impressed with "Stairway to Heaven," on Led Zeppelin IV, as others were.

Steven Pinker is not so sure that the arts have an adaptive function at all but thinks rather they are a by-product of the brain's other functions. He points out that the reasons on which Dissanayake bases her premise that the arts serve an adaptive function-they are present in most cultures, use a lot of resources, and are pleasurable-can also be said of recreational drug use, which is hardly what one would call adaptive.

From the evolutionary psychologist's point of view, the brain is motivated by needs that served biological fitness in our ancestral environment, such as food, s.e.x and successful reproduction, safety and predator awareness, friendship, and status. When goals are attained, the body rewards us with a pleasure sensation. We hunted and caught the gazelle, we are now munching away at it, and we get a pleasurable sensation. The human brain also has the ability to understand cause and effect and uses that to attain some goals. "If I hunt the gazelle and kill it, I will have something to eat" (and unconsciously will be rewarded with a pleasure sensation). Pinker thinks that the brain has put that together and figured out that it can get the pleasure sensation without all the hard work of actually attaining a goal. One way of doing this is taking recreational drugs; another way is through the senses that were designed to give off pleasure signals when they came across a fitness-enhancing sensation. Thus we get a pleasure signal when we eat something sweet and full of fat, a jelly doughnut for instance.

In our ancestral environment, it would have been fitness-enhancing to have a motivation to find and eat sweet food (ripe fruit) and fats, because they were hard to find and were good for survival. However, we know where that road leads today, when food is abundant. We are still motivated by the pleasure that we feel when we eat sweets and fats, although it is no longer adaptive to have such a strong motivation that is difficult to deny. Recreational drugs can also elicit a pleasurable feeling without having to do the work of attaining a goal. Listening to music gives us pleasure but doesn't appear to enhance fitness...or does it? Pinker, however, does not have a closed mind. He is listening to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barabara. They have another idea, and he is looking interested.

Something Odd Is Going On.

Tooby and Cosmides originally were also of the opinion that the arts were a by-product, but now they don't think that theory answers all the questions. They state, "Almost all the phenomena that are central to the humanities are puzzling anomalies from an evolutionary perspective."19 Especially odd is what they call the attraction to the fictional experience, whether it is in a story, a drama, a painting, or other products of the imagination. If these phenomena didn't exist cross-culturally (involvement with fictional, imaginary worlds is another one of those human universals), no evolutionary psychologist would have predicted them.

Another item in the list of odd phenomena is that the involvement with imaginative arts is self-rewarding without an obvious functional payoff. Why do people sit around and watch sitcoms or read novels or listen to stories? Is it just a waste of time? Are they just a bunch of lazy couch potatoes? Why does the brain contain reward systems that make fictional experiences enjoyable? Why would we rather read a mystery story on a rainy afternoon than the repair manual for our car, which could prove more useful? And why, when we read a story or watch a movie, do some of our psychological responses kick in but not others? Why will we react emotionally but not physically? The movie may scare us, but we don't run out of the theater. If we are scared, why don't we run? Why hasn't that unconscious reaction kicked in, as it would if we saw a snake? However, we may remember the movie and act on the memory: We may not close the shower door after seeing Psycho. It seems that humans have a specialized system that allows us to enter imaginary worlds.

The neural machinery that permits this play in imaginary worlds can be selectively impaired. Children with autism have severely limited imagination, which suggests that it is a specialized subsystem, not a product of general intelligence, which usually is normal in autism. In children, pretend play begins to appear at about eighteen months, the same time that they begin to understand the existence of other minds. How is an infant able to understand that a banana is something he can eat, but can also be a faux telephone? No one takes him aside one day and says, "Son, a banana is a piece of food, but because it is shaped like a telephone receiver, we can pretend...wait a minute, pretend is what I am trying to explain, ah, we can subst.i.tute a banana for a telephone receiver, it won't really work, but if we want to play, I mean...." How does the child understand faux anything? How does he know what is real and what isn't?

Separating Pretense from Reality.

Alan Leslie of Rutgers University proposed a special cognitive system that separates pretense from reality: a decoupling mechanism. He wrote: "The perceiving, thinking organism ought, as far as possible, to get things right. Yet pretense flies in the face of this fundamental principle. In pretense we deliberately distort reality. How odd then that this ability is not the sober culmination of intellectual development but instead makes its appearance playfully and precociously at the very beginning of childhood."20 Tooby and Cosmides conclude that the fact we have adaptations that prevent the mistaking of fact and fiction, and that there seems to be a reward system that allows us to enjoy fiction, implies that there is a benefit to the fictional experience. Good news for the authors of fiction! What could it be?

In order to navigate the world successfully, one needs accurate information. Survival depends on it. People in general should prefer to read nonfiction rather than fiction, but instead, they would rather watch a fictional movie than a doc.u.mentary; they prefer to read a historical novel rather than a history book. However, when we really do want accurate information, we go to the encyclopedia rather than to Danielle Steele.

Enhancing Fitness.

Why do we have this appet.i.te for the imaginary? To answer this question and the question of why we evolved aesthetic reactions, Tooby and Cosmides remind us that fitness-enhancing adaptive changes can be made in three ways. They can be made to the external world, with actions or appearances that increase s.e.xual encounters (a la Miller's s.e.xual selection theory). These changes include cooperation (Dissanayake's theory) and other mutual behaviors, like aggressive defense, habitat selection, and feeding your infant. Adaptive changes can also be made so as to increase the fitness of the body, such as the pleasure reward for eating sugar and fat, vomiting to get rid of toxic food, and sleeping. Last, changes can be made to the brain. Fitness-enhancing changes to the brain include capacities for play and learning. And here is where Tooby and Cosmides think our search should concentrate.

We think that the task of organizing the brain both physically and informationally, over the course of the lifespan, is the most demanding adaptive problem posed by human development. Building the brain, and readying each of its adaptations to perform its function as well as possible is, we believe, a vastly underrated adaptive problem. We think that there is an entire suite of developmental adaptations that have evolved to solve these adaptive problems, and that the possible existence of many of these adaptations has gone largely unexamined. Thus, in addition to world-targeted and body-targeted aesthetics, there is a complex realm of brain-targeted aesthetics as well.19 Do aesthetic experiences make our brains work better? Did Humphrey hit it on the head? Was he right when he hinted that aesthetics was fundamental to learning?

We are born with brains that have a lot of hardwired systems, but unlike computers, the more software you load into them and the more internal connections that are forged, the faster and better they work. For instance, we have language systems ready to learn a language, but the specific language is not encoded. The hardware is there, but the software isn't. Some of the information necessary for the development of the adaptation of language is economically stored in the external world; you have to input it. The genome does not have to be so complex if reliable information can be stored in the outside world. This is true not only for language but also for parts of the visual system and other systems. Tooby and Cosmides believe that we may have aesthetic motivations that have evolved to serve as a guidance system to prod us to seek, detect, and experience different aspects of the world, which will help our adaptations reach their full capacities. We get rewarded with a pleasurable feeling when we do this.

With this in mind, the two researchers suggest that a neurocognitive adaptation may have two modes. One is a functional mode. Once it is up and running, it does what it has been designed to do. The functional mode of the language system is speaking. The other mode is an organizational mode, which is what builds the adaptation and a.s.sembles what is necessary for the functional mode to start working, as when a baby babbles to develop its language system. The organizational mode is necessary to produce the functional mode. The famous example of not stimulating the organizational mode is Victor of Aveyron (Francois Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage), the young boy who was found living alone in the wilds of France in 1797. Three years later, at the estimated age of twelve, he allowed himself to be cared for by other humans. However, he was never able to learn language beyond a couple of words. It is now understood that in order to learn to speak, one must be exposed to language at an early age. There appears to be a critical period in which one must be exposed to a particular stimulus. Critical periods of learning are also doc.u.mented in birds. A young chaffinch must hear an adult singing before it s.e.xually matures, or it will never properly learn the highly intricate song.21 Critical periods have been identified to construct other adaptations, such as binocular vision. The critical period for the development of a human child's binocular vision is thought to be between one and three years of age.22 The organizational mode of each different adaptation is expected to have a different aesthetic component. In this way, Tooby and Cosmides explain that aesthetically driven behavior only seems to be nonutilitarian because we are a.n.a.lyzing it from the aspect of changes adaptive to the external world, not to the internal world of the brain. We see some nonutilitarian behavior, such as dancing, but we don't see how that affects the development of the brain. "Natural selection, a relentless but devious task-master, seduces you into devoting your free time to these improving activities by making them gratifying." It is fun-that is, it feels good-to dance, so we do it. This happens when the external price is not too great and we are not concerned with competing for food, s.e.x, and shelter. These circ.u.mstances are most often present when we are children.

Tooby and Cosmides' conclusion is a most important aspect of this discussion: "The payoff on such investments is greater earlier in the lifecycle, when competing opportunities are lower, the adaptations less well developed, and the individual can expect to benefit over a longer subsequent lifespan from her investment in increased neuro-cognitive organization. For this reason we expect that children should live according to behaviorally imperative aesthetic sensibilities in an aesthetics-drenched world, although their standards of the fun and the beautiful will be somewhat different from our own." It is interesting to note that the male chimpanzees, as they matured and started to vie for mates and social position, were less inclined to paint.12 The external costs were becoming too great.

Tooby and Cosmides' answer to the nature-versus-nurture argument, which really should be put to bed, is that we have genes that code for certain adaptations (nature), but in order to realize their full potential, certain exterior conditions need to be met (nurture). "Innate ideas (and motivations) are incomplete ideas.... Our evolved inheritance is very rich compared to a blank slate, but very impoverished compared to a fully realized person." They think the arts are not frosting but baking soda.

The two go on to propose an evolutionary theory of beauty, which they concede is not very informative. "A human should find something beautiful because it exhibits cues which, in the environment in which humans evolved, signaled that it would have been advantageous to pay sustained sensory attention to it, in the absence of instrumental reasons for doing so. This includes everything from members of the opposite s.e.x to game animals to the exhibition by others of intricate skills.... However, the cla.s.s of beautiful ent.i.ties is immense and heterogeneous, with no other unifying principle except that our evolved psychological architecture is designed to motivate sustained attention to them through making the experience intrinsically rewarding." They don't believe there is a general prescription for beauty, but there are several subsets that have strict principles that differ for different applications, such as s.e.xual attractiveness, and landscape.

An example they use is that many natural phenomena are considered beautiful, such as a starry night, natural landscapes, the pattering of rain, and running water. As we sit in the chaise longue on a warm evening, or lean back from the campfire and gaze up at the desert sky (where we can actually see the stars), or lean back in our chair while gazing up at a leafy plane tree and listening to a fountain's burble in a square in Aix-en-Provence, what we experience is the pleasure (emotionally positive response) of relaxed attention. But why is it relaxed? They think this is caused by an organizational mode adaptation that provides us with an innate program for these invariable phenomena. We unconsciously know what they should sound or look like. They are the default mode, and they are aesthetically pleasing. They are used as test patterns against which actual perceptions are compared. The scene agrees with the innate principle of babbling brook and leafy green tree. It is when a stimulus varies from the programmed default that increased attention is aroused. When the birds and frogs stop chirping, when the stars disappear, and when the babble becomes a roar, our attention becomes focused.

So what does this all have to do with our attraction to fictional experience? Tooby and Cosmides suggest that it increases the opportunities in which adaptation-organizing experiences can occur: nurture building on nature. Pretend play, such as hide-and-seek, can develop skills that are better learned in a play situation than when they may need to be actually used. It would be fitness enhancing to learn to hide or run from a predator, or stalk and search for food, before one actually needs to do it for survival. If you recall, one thing that is correlated with brain size is amount of play. We discussed play in terms of practice for real life, stress reduction, and s.e.xual selection, but not in terms of imagination. From having read the fictional story about the boy who cried wolf when we were children, we can remember what happened to him in the story and not have to learn that lesson the hard way in real life. The more fictional stories we hear, the more circ.u.mstances we become familiar with, without having to actually experience them. If we do run across the same circ.u.mstances in life, then we will have a wealth of background info to draw from. "This same thing happened to Sally in that movie. What did she do? Oh yeah...that worked out pretty well, I think I'll try that." It is interesting to note that throughout world literature, there appears to be a limited number of scenarios, and they are all related to evolutionary concerns, such as protection from predators, parental investment, proper relationships with kin and non-kin, and mate selection, to name a few, and all fiction draws on these.23 Becoming Mentally Flexible.

The core ability that enables us to use all this fictional information is the decoupling device separating pretense from reality in our brains, which Leslie proposed. This device appears to be uniquely human. Tooby and Cosmides comment that humans are radically different from other species in the amount of contingently true information we use. We can categorize information as always true, true only on Thursdays, true only when told by a related person, true if done before winter, true if you are talking about orange trees but not plum trees, used to be true but isn't now, true in the mountains but not in the desert, true about lions but not about gazelles, true when Josh is talking about Sarah but not about Gabby, etc. Our ability to use contingently true information is unique. Our brains store not just absolute facts but information that may be true only temporarily or locally or to a specific individual. And we can break information down into component parts and keep this info stored and separated from other info. We can mix and match info from different times, places, and input types, and we can make inferences based on the source. This allows us to separate fact from fiction, and also to know that the store is open every day in the summer but not in the winter. This has allowed us to be very flexible and adapt to different environments.

Joseph Carroll, an English professor at the University of Missouri interested in Darwinian theory, points out: To the modern human mind, alone among all minds in the animal kingdom, the world does not present itself as a series of rigidly defined stimuli releasing a narrow repertory of stereotyped behaviors. It presents itself as a vast and perplexing array of percepts and contingent possibilities. The human mind is free to organize the elements of its perception in an infinitely diverse array of combinatorial possibilities. And most of those potential forms of organization, like most major mutations, would be fatal. Freedom is the key to human success, and it is also an invitation to disaster. This is the insight that governs E. O. Wilson's penetrating explanation for the adaptive function of the arts. "There was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence.... The arts filled the gap."24 So the arts may be useful as a form of learning. As Humphrey suggested, they help us categorize, they increase our predictive power, and they help us react well in different situations-and thus as Tooby and Cosmides suggest, they do contribute to survival.

AND WHAT ABOUT BEAUTY? IT'S BIOLOGIC, BABY!

It boils down to this: What people find beautiful is not arbitrary or random but has evolved over millions of years of hominid sensory, perceptual, and cognitive development. Sensations and perceptions that have adaptive value (i.e., that enhance safety, survival, and reproduction) often become aesthetically preferred. What evidence do we have for this? To begin with, remember that every decision is funneled through the approach-or-withdraw module in the brain: Is it safe or not? And these decisions happen fast.

You'll recall that people have an instantaneous reaction, using what Jonathan Haidt calls the like-o-meter.25 For instance, people will judge whether they like or dislike a Web page in 0.5 seconds, and the stronger their evaluation the faster it happens.26 What is it that influences how our like-o-meter reacts? What are the physical elements in a visual or auditory stimulus that make one like it, dislike it, or respond fearfully to it?

More is known about the visual system than about other systems. There seem to be certain elements that can be extracted from an image extremely quickly. A preference for symmetry has been shown to exist cross-culturally,27, 28 and has also been found in other animals, as I have mentioned earlier. It also plays a role in mate selection. Symmetry is a.s.sociated with mating success or s.e.xual attractiveness in many species, including humans.29 For example, symmetry in both s.e.xes is a.s.sociated with increased genetic, physical, and mental health.30 Men with symmetrical features have greater facial attractiveness31 and lower metabolic rates,32 attract a greater number of s.e.xual partners, have s.e.x at an earlier age,33 and have more extra-pair copulations.34 In women, asymmetry is correlated with increased health risks,35 while symmetry is a.s.sociated with higher fertility 32, 36, 37 and facial attractiveness.38 Ovulating women are more attracted to the body scent of symmetrical men, and symmetrical men are more muscular and active.39 The voices of both men and women with greater bilateral symmetry were rated as more attractive by members of both s.e.xes than those with asymmetrical traits.40 Symmetry seems to be an important indicator of genetic quality and attractiveness for potential mates of both s.e.xes. It seems the preference for symmetry has its roots in biology and s.e.xual selection. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman suggest that it is not symmetry per se that is preferred, but the fact that it has less information and is easier to process.10 It also appears that when one is judging the attractiveness of human faces, beauty is not all in the eye of the beholder. Faces judged attractive in one culture are also judged attractive by other cultures.41, 42 This makes sense if biologically relevant characteristics are revealed by attractiveness.

Babies as young as six months old prefer to look at attractive (as judged by adults' preferences) faces. This effect is independent of race, gender, and age; it indicates an innate sense of what a human judges to be attractive.43 Women with more attractive, healthy, feminine faces have higher estrogen levels and thus reproduce better.44 s.e.xual selection has provided an aesthetic concept for facial attractiveness.

People also like curved objects better than angular ones. Researchers correctly predicted that emotionally neutral objects with primarily pointed features and sharp angles would be less well liked than corresponding objects with curved features (e.g., a guitar with a sharp-angled contour compared to a guitar with a curved contour). The rationale for this prediction was that sharp transitions in a contour might convey a sense of threat, on either a conscious or a nonconscious level, and would trigger a negative bias.45 Or is it because curves are processed more easily?

Humans easily make aesthetic judgments about shapes. Richard Latto coined the term aesthetic primitive to suggest that a shape or form is aesthetically pleasing because it is more effectively and more easily processed, due to the processing properties of the human visual system.46 To find evidence for this, he investigated a phenomenon known as the oblique effect, which he attributes to Joseph Jastrow, who first described it in 1892.47 Observers with normal vision are better at perceiving, discriminating, and manipulating horizontal and vertical lines than oblique ones. He wondered, if people are better at perceiving them, do they like them better? Apparently so: Latto found that humans prefer pictures whose component lines are verticals and horizontals rather than oblique angles.48 People recognize objects faster when there is high contrast between an object and its background. Contrast makes identification easier. Objects are more easily processed with higher contrast. People also like higher-contrast pictures. Is this because they process them more easily or because of the contrast per se? If stimuli are presented quickly, people prefer the high contrast, but if they are given more time to decide, the preference weakens. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman have found that contrast influenced aesthetic judgments only at short exposure times. If someone is given more time to process a picture, then the ease of processing is no longer a factor in the decision,10 so it is not the objective factor of contrast that caused the earlier decision, but the fluency of the processing.

We also appear to have an innate preference for natural landscapes. When comparing urban landscapes, people prefer those that contain some vegetation.49, 50 Hospital patients with views of outside trees feel better, recover faster, and require less pain medication than those looking out on a brick wall.51 What is really interesting is that we have a preference for particular types of landscapes. People always prefer to have water in their landscapes, but when this variable is excluded, there is yet another preference. When shown a series of photographs of five natural landscapes-tropical rain forest, temperate deciduous forest, coniferous forest, savanna, and desert-the youngest subjects (those in the third and fifth grades) picked the savanna as a preferred landscape. Older subjects equally preferred those landscapes with which they were familiar, as well as the savanna.52 People were happier viewing scenes with trees rather than inanimate objects, and also preferred the shapes of trees with spreading canopies, similar to those found on the African savanna, rather than rounded or columnar ones. This was true even of people who were raised in areas where round or columnar trees were dominant.53 Gordon Orians, an emeritus professor of ecology at the University of Washington, formulated the savanna hypothesis. He proposed that human aesthetic responses to trees with spreading forms would be based on innate knowledge (of our ancestral habitat) of the shapes of trees that would be a.s.sociated with productive human habitats in our ancestral landscapes.54 What is it about natural landscapes that attract the brain? Can you say fractals? Nature's patterns are not the simple shapes we learned in geometry cla.s.s. Trees are not triangles, and clouds are not rectangles. We learned to find the areas of squares and circles and triangles, and the volumes of cubes and cones and spheres. That was Euclidian geometry, and this is a whole other ball of wax. We did not learn to find the area of a tree's branches or the volume of a cloud (luckily). Nature's forms are more complex.

Many natural objects have what is known as fractal* geometry, consisting of patterns that recur at increasing magnification. Mountains, clouds, coastlines, rivers with all their tributaries, and branching trees all have fractal geometry, as do our circulatory system and our lungs. For instance, we can see the veins on a leaflet, then the leaflets that make up a leaf and the leaves on a branch and the branches that make up a tree. If I gave you an empty piece of paper and asked you to draw a branching tree on it, how could you describe to me how dense the branching is that you drew? Well, there is a measurement called D. The empty paper would have a D of 1. A completely blackened paper would have a D of 2. Somewhere in between is the amount of branching you drew. When you show people fractal versus nonfractal patterns, 95 percent of people prefer fractal patterns.55 Humans generally prefer scenes with a D (fractal density) of 1.3 and low complexity,56, 57 and they have a lower stress response when observing them.58, 59 This may explain why hospital patients improve faster in a "room with a view." They look out and see a natural fractal pattern of 1.3 D. This preference for fractal patterns with a D of 1.3 extends from natural scenes to art and photography,60 independent of gender and cultural background.61 Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, wondered if the eye is aesthetically "tuned" to the fractals surrounding us in nature.62 Is it some property of the visual system that makes us prefer fractals of specific dimensions? How does it discern them in complex scenes? Taylor knew two things about eyes. One was that the eye fixates predominately on the borders of objects while examining a scene, and the other was that the edge contours play a dominant role in the perception of fractals. Putting those two facts together, he figured the tuning might be through silhouettes. His group has found that people like skyline scenes with fractal values of 1.3!63 He suggests that it might not be merely that people like natural scenes but that they like any scenes with the right fractal value. Gerard Manly Hopkins's "likeness tempered with difference" actually has a specific D number. If this is so, then designing architecture and objects with this fractal value would make them more pleasing to the human psyche and perhaps lead to less stressful urban landscapes.

So there is plenty of evidence that there are some hardwired processes that are influencing our preferences and our visceral reactions. But we all know that some of our aesthetic preferences have changed as we have gotten older or perhaps studied some form of art. We didn't like opera, but now we do. We didn't like Asian art, but now we do. We didn't like Andy Warhol, and we still don't. We used to like colonial furniture, and now we don't. Our preferences evolve over time. What causes them to change?

The fluency theory of Reber and his colleagues suggests that the various preferences described above are things our brains have evolved to process quickly, and when we process something quickly, we get a positive response. We process the fractal D 1.3 quickly and get a positive reaction. They have been able to measure this. Positive emotional responses increase activity over the zygomaticus major, or smiling muscle, in our faces. This response can be measured with electromyography. When we see something that our brain processes with high fluency, we actually get increased activity in this muscle way before a judgment about it is made. We get a little positive priming action for the judgment we are about to make. They have shown that this positive emotional response then contributes to the aesthetic judgment, "Yes, that's good, I like it." So the basis for our aesthetic judgment is not the fluency alone, but fluency coupled with the positive response that one feels when something is processed quickly.10 This means that what we like is the process, not the stimulus. Plato was wrong, beauty is not independent of the observer. It can also explain why, if someone tells you, "You aren't going to like this!" before you process it, the negative bias may overwhelm the positive one you would have received on your own.

We like things that are familiar. We have all had the experience of not really liking something the first time we have seen it or heard it, but over time it has "grown on us." We increase our processing fluency with increased exposure. The liking of familiar things and wariness of the new obviously can be adaptive. In exposing ourselves to the unfamiliar, our memory, learning, and culture are involved. They are supplying past data about what we are exposed to, or forging new neural connections to accommodate new information, or speeding up the processing of recently novel stimuli. This is another type of fluency besides perception. This is conceptual fluency: the meaning of a stimulus. Sometimes more complex stimuli are necessary to convey meaning. This is what Donald Norman was referring to as beauty in depth, in meaning and implication-reflective beauty.

Neural Correlates of Beauty