Art: beyond the brain

Human perception is a creative and complex process, not an objective one. The brain is not a camera that passively registers the external world or forms representations of external phenomena; it’s not a mere recorder of images and sounds, of tactile sensations and odors. The brain interprets. It brings to bear its previous experience and analyses isolated cases in the framework of general laws, subjectively.

Among the many aspects that might be studied about perception there is one that is especially interesting: man tends to find an aesthetic aspect in what he perceives. The human being, when perceiving, discovers beauty or ugliness. People have expressed these perceptions in art and have created images, sounds, flavors and texts that appear to be beautiful and that transmit their own subjectivity to other human beings.

The laws of perception have been used very intelligently in art. The artists play with perspective, with the shapes of figures, with light… Leonardo used sfumato to create that enigmatic smile of the La Giaconda. Abstract art seeks elementary forms that create sensations in the viewer. The cubists mould forms until they go back to being basic.

The poet plays with words, and in that play he enters more deeply than anyone else in the subjectivity of another person. The novelist uses the same words as the man in the street and with them he unleashes emotions. Every writer uses the laws of language to establish empathy with the reader, transmitting the greatest intimacy, what is most deeply personal, and the person who is reading understands what the novelist has intuited.

We make contact with each other by means of beauty, and in this beauty a heart or a brain rubs up against another one and makes it vibrate. And that vibration is what we call art.