Visual Perception in Arts and Neuroscience

How do we perceive art and what is it so special about it? What processes in our brain lead us to appreciate and enjoy a piece of art in a museum? This is a fascinating question that should be ideally approached by interdisciplinary teams involving neuroscientists and artists, among others. In spite of the potential of such interactions, given the relevance of the questions that can be posed and scientifically addressed, the links between science and arts have been so far very limited. However, it is very interesting that visual artists are aware (at least intuitively) of some principles of visual perception in Neuroscience since very long. For example, Neuroscientists study issues such as color perception, how shape and depth are perceived, etc., which are well-known in Arts. In this respect, the basic idea of our project is to combine knowledge about visual perception from arts and neuroscience and create an exhibition with a selection of about 10 canvases using, and at the same time showing, principles of visual perception. The goal is not only to create novel art pieces, but also to use these canvases as an engaging way to show these neuroscience principles to the general public, which explain something as interesting as how do we see. For this purpose, each of the canvases will be accompanied with a simple and graphical explanation of the neuroscience principle used. The set of works to be presented in this Art & Science exhibition will be also used to further study how people look at art pieces in the museum environment, which is the topic of our current Beyond Text award.

The interaction between neuroscience and art is a very timely topic, given that these parallelisms are only starting to be studied by very few researchers. We believe the proposed outcomes will have a large impact for wider audiences, going beyond the particular interest of the academic sector. In particular, with the proposed exhibition we expect to attract considerable media attention based on the impact of previous press releases about this type of research. Our previous experience suggests that this will be the case, given that both our current Beyond Text project and the previous rotation of Mariano Molina attracted considerable media attention, with four press releases by the University of Leicester Press Office ('Understanding the wow factor'; 'How do we perceive art'; 'When arts meets Neuroscience'; 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder') that were reproduced by several news pages; an article at the art forum 'Arte al dia' ('Mariano Molina Brings a Dash of Intuition to Leading Bioengineering Research') and an article in the popular magazine 'The Scientist' ('Brain paintings'). Furthermore, the producers of a documentary about science and art approached the PI to feature his research in this area in a documentary to appear in Channel 4. Last but not least, the activities to be performed in this project are in complete synergy with those we are currently carrying on with our 'Beyond Text' collaborative doctoral award and will have a strong impact on this project by providing new material for these studies and an additional route of dissemination.