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An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to stimulate the brain's amygdala, for instance. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces so moving.

一种称为神经美学的新兴学科正试图将科学的客观性引入艺术研究，并且已经带给我们对很多名作更好的理解。例如，印象派绘画模糊的图像似乎可以刺激大脑杏仁核。由于杏仁核对我们的感觉有至关重要的作用，这一发现或许可以解释为什么很多人认为这些画如此生动。

Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from Mondrian's geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock's seemingly haphazard arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to like such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an inclination to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that this mentality would have even more impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

同样的方法也可以用于阐释抽象的20世纪作品么?从蒙德里安的几何色块，到波洛克看上去似乎随意泼在画布上的色彩?怀疑论者相信人们声称喜欢这些作品仅仅是因为它们非常有名。我们确实有从众的倾向。例如，当被要求做出简单的知觉判断比如给旋转的图像匹配形状，如果人们看到他人做出同样的行为，他们经常会选择错误的答案。很容易想象这种心态对模糊概念会有更多影响，例如艺术鉴赏，在这方面没有正确或错误答案之分。

Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many were labelled incorrectly - volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense the artist's vision in paintings, even if they can't explain why.

马萨诸塞州波士顿学院的Angelina Hawley-Dolan回应这一争论的方式是让志愿者们观察一些作品——著名抽象派画家的作品或是婴儿、猩猩或大象的涂鸦。他们需要判断更喜欢哪一种。有三分之一的作品没有给出图片说明，而很多是被错误标注的——当志愿者看到一幅受人赞扬的名画时，他们可能认为自己正在观看黑猩猩杂乱无章的绘画。在每一组试验中，志愿者往往更喜欢著名艺术家的作品，即使他们认为这是由动物或儿童完成的。似乎观察者能够感觉到艺术家在作品中的意义，即使他们无法解释为什么。

Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works that are neither entirely abstract nor dearly representational. In one study, Pepperell and his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how 'powerful' they considered an artwork to be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. The longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny, and the greater their neural activity. It would seem that the brain sees these images as puzzles, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding is the moment of recognition.

卡迪夫大学的艺术家Robert Pepperell创作了模棱两可的作品，它们既不是完全抽象的，也不是清晰具象的。在一项研究中，Pepperell和他的同事要求志愿者判断他们认为一幅作品是多么“有力”，以及他们是否在作品中看到了任何熟悉的事物。他们用来回答问题的时间越久，经过观察后给出的分数越高，并且他们的神经活动越活跃。这或许意味着大脑将这些图像看做谜题，破解其含义的过程越困难，识别的时候就会有更多收获感。

And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour? Mondrian's works are deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. With the originals, volunteers' eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the image, but with the altered versions they would fit across a piece more rapidly. As a result, the volunteers considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they later rated the work.

那么像蒙德里安这样的艺术家呢?他的作品完全由水平的和垂直的线条将彩色的色块包含其中。蒙德里安的作品使人误以为非常简单，但是眼球追踪研究证明这些作品被细致地创作，并且仅仅旋转图画就会彻底改变我们欣赏它的方式。对于原作，志愿者的眼睛往往在图画的特定地点停留较长时间，但是对于改动过的版本他们会更快地掠过。因此，当志愿者们随后对作品进行评分吋，他们认为改动过的版本不那么令人愉快。

In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to compare original paintings with ones which he had altered by moving objects around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a Van Gogh still life or an abstract by Miró. Vartanian also found that changing the composition of the paintings reduced activation in those brain areas linked with meaning and interpretation.

在一项类似的研究中，多伦多大学的Oshin Vartanian要求志愿者比较原作和在作品框架内移动物体后的作品。他发现几乎每个人都更喜欢原作，无论它是梵高的静物作品还是米罗的抽象派作品。Vartanian同样发现改变绘画的构成方式会降低那些与意义和理解有关的大脑区域的激活。

In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analysed the visual intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists use a key level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but too much results in a kind of 'perceptual overload’, according to Forsythe. What's more, appealing pieces both abstract and representational, show signs of 'fractals'- repeated motifs recurring in different scales. Fractals are common throughout nature, for example in the shapes of mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier to process such patterns.

在另一项实验中，利物浦大学的Alex Forsythe研究了不同艺术作品的视觉复杂性，她的研究结果表明很多艺术家使用关键的细节来令大脑愉悦。根据Forsythe的观点，细节太少，作品会过于乏味，而细节太多会导致一种“知觉超载”。此外，吸引人的作品，无论抽象或具象，都表现出“分形”的迹象——重复的图形以不同的比例重现。分形在自然中非常普遍，例如在山峰或是树枝的形状中。可能我们在户外进化的视觉系统发现处理这类模式更为简单。

It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation. This has led some to wonder whether Pollock's works feel so dynamic because the brain reconstructs the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be down to our brain's 'mirror neurons’, which are known to mimic others' actions. The hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular, works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten.

同样有趣的是当我们看一封手写的信件时，大脑会对动作进行加工，就像我们在重放作者的创作过程。这使得一些人猜想是否波洛克的作品令人感觉如此生动是因为大脑重建了作者绘画时使用的生动动作。这可能是由于我们大脑的“镜像神经元”，它们会模仿他人的动作。然而，这一假设需要被彻底地验证。或许我们甚至可以使用神经美学研究来理解一些艺术作品的经久不衰。一时的时尚可能会造就当今流行什么，一旦之前的流行趋势被忘记，最适应我们视觉系统的作品或许最有可能被留下。

It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably only a taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art appreciation to a set of scientific laws. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of the style of a particular artist, their place in history and the artistic environment of their time. Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with different interpretations. In some ways, it's not so different to science, where we are constantly looking for systems and decoding meaning so that we can view and appreciate the world in a new way.

神经美学领域依然处于初期阶段——这些研究或许仅仅是一种尝试。然而，将美学鉴赏简化为一系列科学法则是不明智的。我们不应该低估某类特定艺术家的风格、历史地位及其所处时代的艺术环境的重要性。抽象派艺术对不同的诠释方式提供了挑战与自由。通过某些方式，艺术与科学不会如此之不同，在科学领域中，我们一直在寻找系统并解码其含义，这样我们可以以一种新的方式观察和欣赏这个世界。