Art & Neuroscience

Ed Connor, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University is interested in whether we intuitively favor certain shapes over others and, if so, what that could mean for how we experience art.

Connor joined forces with Gary Vikan, then the director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, to set up a two-part experiment to measure how people respond to different surface curvatures. They chose to use non-representational art to keep from being sidetracked by the subject matter.

Connor’s team scanned images of sculptures and the team gradually alter the surface curvatures of each piece from full-bodied and rounded, to elongated and pointier. Subjects donned 3-D glasses to view arrays of these altered shapes on a computer monitor, clicking on the ones they preferred.

The result: participants preferred softly curving shapes as opposed to pointy and elongated ones.

When participants were put in an MRI, softly rounded forms produced a stronger neural response in the higher-level visual cortex, which contains regions that register shape.

Connor says it’s possible that humans have evolved to favor that sort of shape because softer, rounder shapes are more evident in living organisms. “It makes sense for finding mates, finding good things to eat,” he says. For instance, “you are going to eat the grape with the nice curved surface, not the shriveled one that’s not ripe.” (Hey, what about raisins?)

Connor acknowledges that a preference for certain shapes over others is only one part of our response to art. He cites Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, whose long, thin, and pointy sculptures are also extremely popular. “Most of what we call aesthetics is forever beyond the reach of neuroscientific explanation, because it’s simply too high-level,” Connor says. “It draws on history and biography and art criticism.”