The essence of art and the peak shift principle The wording Ramachandran used, of the meaning of art to convey the “essence” of something in order to “evoke a specific mood in the observer” was interesting to me. It reminded me of McCloud’s arguments when describing and detailing how comics work. Usage of the Peak Shift principle, whether intentional or not, is found in comics, as well as in “primitive” art as Ramachandran brought up. In the cave paintings of Lascaux, even today we know they were painting horses 20,000 years ago - the horses then, if we somehow had a photograph would likely be less recognizable than the paintings. However, it raises the question of what defines art - a question that is constantly brought up and pondered, and in all honestly will likely never be answered. Are very realistic paintings considered art (such as Dutch still lives), especially if the artist was most fixated on making the representation look as real as possible, rather than having it convey a certain emotion? I also wonder about this focus on distinctive, differing features and their accentuation and this abstraction as 1) being a very deliberative process but also 2) just being easier to draw. Looking at art history, in the Western canon at least, there was an obsession with making things look as realistic as possible - it was only once that was achieved, did artists go back to the “primitive” in order to focus more on expression and meaning. Why did other areas of the world hold steadfast to this tradition of using the Peak Shift Principle?

Isolating a single module and allocating attention / Contrast extraction is reinforcing Outlines being very effective in visual art is something I learned about in my neuroscience class - just the ways our neurons are set up in a visual system make us more sensitive to edges, just because of how we detect things. Part of it is for depth perception, and part of it is because of our rods and cones, where rods produce sharper images but are in our peripheral vision, whereas cones are more blurry (but focus on color) and are in our central vision. To me, in the context of neuroscience, outlines and edges are the same thing (the same part of the brain lights up when we see outlines and edges - after all, outlines are a kind of edge), so it is interesting that Ramachandran made these two distinct principles and portrays outlines and edges are distinct pieces.

The generic viewpoint and the Bayesian logic of persuasion To me, this ties into the Gestalt principle, the law of Pragnanz. They both are conveying that human psychology lends itself to the simplest explanation, whether it be in the context of shape, or in the context of viewpoint. For the second example, where a flat hexagon with radiating spokes can also be viewed as a cube, there is some sense of the Law of figure / ground, because I can see the cube if I shift my viewpoint a little - but the image itself is just an outline, so I don’t think it quite counts as an example of the Law of figure / ground. However, the “simplest” is not very obvious and there is no real definition for it, except for whatever is the most likely in the real world. With the mountain and the palm tree image, A is less pleasing because it is too much of a coincidence that the palm tree is in the middle between the feet of two mountains even though it is symmetric, which is supposed to be pleasing (it is another principle from above). Thus, when multiple principles are in play, which one is weighed more heavily in our brains?