How Art Affects the Brain

What do you make of this? Do you agree? From the wall street journal.

At an exhibit opening this weekend at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, visitors will be asked to wear 3-D glasses and walk around with clipboards and pencils while looking at images of sculptures.

"Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics," enlists the public as participants in a Johns Hopkins University study that looks at why the human brain is attracted to artwork.

Museum-goers will look at 3-D printouts of altered versions of sculptures by abstract artist Jean Arp. One of his works, "The Woman of Delos" (1959), will also be on display at the Walters. While looking at computer-altered versions of the sculptures—some skinnier, others more rotund—participants will be asked which they are most attracted to, and which they like the least.

Organizers say they hope to shed a scientific light on some of the ideas that philosophers have discussed for centuries. One of those is that there's a unique way that the brain activates when we view compelling artwork, something philosophers have called the "aesthetic emotion," says Gary Vikan, director of the Walters and curator of the show.

A related hypothesis is that successful artists are like magicians who have learned to exploit the edges of the brain's perception with sleight-of-hand trickery: They have an innate sense of what tickles the parts of the brain that process visual cues. "The artist is intuitively a neuroscientist," says Mr. Vikan.

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