Our tastes in art and painting style could be predicted by analyzing the brain by MRI.
- The researchers managed to predict the aesthetic preferences of the participants with a brain analysis, thanks to a method of computer modeling.
- Areas of the visual cortex break down the artwork into its essential qualities, and an area in the front of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, is responsible for assigning subjective value to them.
- It’s much the same way the brain decides whether it likes food or not: this “value building” system could be widespread throughout the brain and explain many of our preferences.
Aesthetic preferences in art have been the subject of philosophical discussion for hundreds of years. The fact of liking or not a work of art seems innate as it happens instantly and transparently.
“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 it’s a very open question and we don’t really know how the brain manages to do it. “explains Kiyohito Iigaya, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, in a communicated.
Brain scans to guess everyone’s art preferences
In a new article recently published in the journal NatureCommunications, he and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology show how our aesthetic preferences can be predicted by analyzing our brains through a computer modeling method. This work, carried out in the laboratory of Professor John O’Doherty, builds on previous research dating from 2021 for which researchers had trained a computer to correctly guess whether a person would like a particular style of painting, for example a Monet or a Rothko.
This method involved volunteers observing paintings (up to a thousand) for four days while their brains were scanned with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. These brain scans and the participants’ ratings of the paintings were fed into a machine learning algorithm, along with the output of a neural network trained to rate the paintings according to criteria such as contrast, hue, dynamics and concreteness (whether the painting is abstract or realistic).
How does the brain judge whether or not it likes a work of art?
Data collected by the team showed that areas of the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual input, are responsible for analyzing these criteria. An area at the front of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, is responsible for assigning them a subjective value.
In summary, the brain breaks down a work of art into its essential qualities and then decides whether those qualities are pleasant or not. It’s more or less the same way the brain decides whether or not it likes food, according to another study from the O’Doherty lab. This study had revealed that the brain analyzes a food according to its protein, lipids, carbohydrates and vitamins content, then determines if these qualities are pleasant. The researchers say their findings suggest that this “value building” system may be widespread throughout the brain and explain many of our preferences.
