Ramachandran and Hirstein discuss some more tools we can use to examine art and how we study and react to it. They open by discussing that any theory of art needs three components: (1) the logic or universal principles and laws, (2) the evolutionary rationale or why this rule has developed, and (3) the actual neurophysiology that happens when encountering this law. I found this concept extremely fascinating because it’s really interesting how the study of senses and perception can be applied to something as seemingly nonscientific as art.

The Essence of Art and the Peak Shift Principle: The peak shift effect is a behavior studied in animal discrimination learning. If a rat is rewarded for distinguishing a rectangle from a square, it will respond to a “more” rectangular shape with even more vigor. I actually wasn’t able to think of any human equivalents for this principle however. Especially in recent trends, it feels a lot like humans are leaning more towards moderation, such as minimalism. The world we live in also has a lot of sensory input from different types of media nowadays, so I wonder if this behavior is dulled for us. I also found it interesting how the authors talked about the concept of how all art is caricature. I agreed with the authors’ analysis here, but I did wonder what the difference is between simplifying things to their essence and doing caricature – prehistoric cave art seems much more similar to the former than the latter.

Perceptual Grouping and Binding is Directly Reinforcing: The process of discovering visual correlations is positively reinforced for us. This makes a lot of sense to me as someone who likes playing those games on the App Store where you just sort things by colors and shapes, etc. – our bodies reward ourselves by discovering these connections. I really liked the tie into music, with the concept of “good” chords being sounds that seem more like they come from “one object” and dissonant chords sounding like they originate from separate entities. I think our natural grouping can definitely be overridden by learned laws – for example, the mental closure of () being more intuitive than )( despite spacing in the authors’ example.

Contrast Extraction is Reinforcing: I think the ideas of grouping and extraction are very related to me. Reinforcing as described by the authors is the process of extracting features prior to grouping and then discarding redundant information while extracting contrast. I think it makes a lot of sense how contrast and similarities are both rewarding to us, even though the authors mentioned it seemed antithetical – it seems natural that we try to bring order to the chaos of the world around us, spotting similarities and differences and letting those guide our behavior.