Title: What Rene Magritte's 1933 Painting Tells Us About Perception & The Brain

What is it about?

We humans have been in the art-making business for at least 40,000 years. Scientists studying perception and the brain now recognize art as a rich resource that can reveal how daubs of paint on a 2D canvas work their magic to elicit perception of a vivid 3D scene, rich in forms color, and emotional & aesthetic impact. Magritte's iconic painting, La Condition Humaine (1933), René Magritte once said “...the function of art is to make poetry visible, to render thought visible”. His poetry emerged on his canvases by meticulous, aesthetically engaging depiction of objects and scenes replete with surprise and apparent perceptual self-contradiction. La Condition Humaine is one of his most philosophical works. We see a room with a painting on an easel that appears to paradoxically reveal exactly what it hides: a pastoral scene outside the room. Magritte had a sophisticated understanding of perception as representation in the brain, and he discussed this theme explicitly. This article examines in detail visual cues in La Condition Humaine that lead us to inexorably perceive an alternation between salient yet mutually exclusive percepts, transparency vs opacity, of the same object. The conflicting percepts are experienced as surreal, drawing us into the heart of the nature of representation (in art and in the brain), a meditation on the localization of thought, while beckoning us to ponder the nature of reality and what Magritte calls ‘mystery of the ordinary’. The painting also illustrates the power of subtle painterly gesture, i.e. when small details act as ‘perceptual amplifiers’, inducing a strong effect on both our perceptual and cognitive understanding of scene elements across a large region of visual space. Finally, examination of how the competing percepts are established, and the emergence of some perceptuo-cognitive features provide clues about the visual system’s scene processing hierarchy.

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Photo by Natalia Trofimova on Unsplash

Photo by Natalia Trofimova on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Modern research into human perception now sees the study of art as a hugely valuable branch of neuroscience. In fact, there are many labs and research departments around the world devoted to "Neuroaesthetics" or "Empirical Aesthetics", i.e., the study of the neural-brain bases for the aesthetic responses evoked by art. This line of research, buoyed by hugely impactful advances in noninvasive brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has even begun to zero in on where in the brain "beauty" is experienced - a "beauty module". Much remains unknown, and the enormous range of qualities we experience as aesthetically pleasing still resist explanation in neural-brain terms.

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