Gallery: Art through instability: how drawings move the brain
IN THE YouTube age it is easy to forget that artists rely on clever tricks to create a sense of motion in still images. Now brain scans show why one method of creating “implicit motion”, used by an 18th-century Japanese artist, works so well.
While admiring line drawings by Hokusai Katsushika, psychophysicist of Kyoto University, Japan, was struck by the vivid motion they convey. Instead of using blur to suggest movement, as much modern art has done since the advent of photography, Katsushika created motion by drawing bodies in highly unstable positions (see picture). This is thought to work because the brain “fills in” the effects of gravity pulling the bodies down.
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Previous research has shown that blurred photographs stimulate the same regions of the visual cortex as real-life motion, including the extrastriate visual cortex. To find out whether sketches of unstable bodies would also activate these regions, Osaka showed Japanese students Katsushika’s drawings while scanning their brains with functional MRI.
The scans revealed that drawings depicting motion did indeed prompt activity in the extrastriate visual cortex, unlike those of people or objects in static positions. Osaka concludes that there is a “common neural pathway” for interpreting implicit motion in art that is similar to the pathway used for perceiving real-life motion (NeuroReport, ).
, a cognitive neuroscientist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, says these findings could help “unlock how the brain processes visual information”.
However, Oron Catts of , a biological arts centre at the University of Western Australia in Perth, warns that the influence of culture must not be ignored. Japanese people may perceive the motion more vividly than people from other cultures because they are accustomed to this type of art, he suggests. “In Japanese culture, people are trained to read those cartoon images as the representation of movement.”
Gallery: Art through instability: how drawings move the brain
