Beauty- Not in the Eye of the Beholder

For millennia architects, artists and poets have tried to find beauty. Deep down they knew that beauty was more than an arbitrary judgment entirely dependent on the view of the observer. But time and again somebody comes up with that old chestnut about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. This can drive one crazy when one makes a living from wrestling beauty from things. The assumption that beauty is random and accidental belittles that effort of designers all over the world since the time of prehistoric cave paintings. Then there are the larger philosophical questions of the subject and object relations in principal (epistemology).

Brain wiring, new born (left) and older person (right) visualized by an MRI
(University of Edinburgh)

Finally, science comes to the rescue by proving that beauty is, at least in part, not random. That it is also not only cultural or social but universal. Experiments show that people across gender, race and cultural divides agree on certain visual preferences, spatial cognition and a few other things that look like plausible proxies for beauty, which otherwise remains an elusive concept. 

The science which comes to the rescue is neuroscience, currently everybody's darling.  This may have to do with the pendulum having swung heavily from nurture back to nature in recent decades. The implications are not without depressing aspects, one would think that a world where everything is determined by genes leaves little hope, after all.

But humanity yearns for eternal truth, for laws that are not subject to the whims of the moment or the result of mere conditioning. Some basic truth about beauty would make life for artists, designers and architects a bit easier, wouldn't it? As a bonus it would also settle agnostic and ontological questions about whether cognition is possible at all or whether objects are just figments of the imagination, even though it wouldn't settle where the the desire for art comes from.

Some people argue that since art is everywhere and evidence of art-like behavior exists as far back as we can tell, art-making and appreciation must be a fundamental human instinct. Others observe that since art is highly variable and culturally specific, it cannot represent an instinct and must be an epiphenomenon of other evolved capacities (“exaptation”). Anjan Chatterjee, neurologist.

It isn't likely that a few experiments will put to rest all these questions, yet artists, designers and architects are drawn to the scientists, eager to find out.

Arp sculptures

Cognizant of this attraction, the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) invited Ed Connor, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins University, as one of the speakers for its popular spring lecture series. With design professionals of all ages and backgrounds in the MICA lecture hall, Connor explained at some length his experiments that involved small abstract sculptures by Jean Arp which he had borrowed from Baltimore's Walters Art Museum when Gary Vikan was still heading it. Jointly they had conceived of the experiment the "Beauty and the Brain" that has been widely reported about.

As part of the experiment, sculptures were digitized and then gradually altered for visual preference studies in which viewers of the assorted variations indicated their favorite piece, allowing Connor to map what measurable characteristics make an object more pleasing, and how those characteristics are processed by neurons in the brain. 

In chart after chart the preferred shapes werethe versions that had just the right mix of concave and convex curves, with preferences clustered at those points on the matrices, allowing the scientists to draw some universal conclusions. It is important to understand that these preferences were not determined by polling the subjects but by measuring their brain activity ("neurons firing") when they looked at the digitized shapes.

Arp sculpture scan and modifications used to measure
reactions

Connor's conclusion was not a simple one. Even though there appeared to be some universal rules, he never tired ofstressing how complicated the brain is and that the brain's biggest achievement may well be object perception. For the architects in the audience he explained the complexity of object perception with a slide of a Paris street-scene. He said that no computer to date could decipher such an image as what it was, at least not with enough meaning and as succinctly as the human brain does it.

The brain’s most computationally remarkable ability is visual object tionsperception.  Computers can beat us at math and chess, but machine vision has never come remotely close to the human capacity for identifying, categorizing, evaluating, and interacting with objects.  The difficulty lies in the enormous complexity and high dimensionality of object information.  Our research aims at understanding the neural algorithms that make object vision possible.  We hope that our findings will not only explain the neural basis of visual experience but will someday contribute to designs for more powerful machine vision systems and brain-machine interfaces. (Connor)

An architect or artist comes to these experiments with ambivalence. On the one side the possibility that there is some mechanical determinism that would replace the act of creating art with an algorithm. It would take away the belittling "in the eye of the beholder" thing but be frightening for its implications for the artistic professions.

On the other hand a designer would be hoping that beauty isn't so fuzzy that it would be entirely arbitrary. Ed Connor assured his audience that the matter wasn't easy. This conclusion satisfies the architect just as much as the finding of some rules.  

Ed Connor, Ph.D (Hopkins)

Both those findings assert the professional role of anybody who designs; especially gratifying may be that even the most powerful computers still have trouble with making sense of spatial arrangements. So architects can't be bumped out by a robot just yet.

Connor's complicated answers correspond directly with  his complicated path in education and training: he studied biology, a bit of philosophy, pharmacology and law before finding satisfaction in neuroscience. Along the way he was fascinated by Husserl's phenomenology.

In Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, then, the lived body is a lived center of experience, and both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations play a key role in his account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world.(IEP)

The question whether a reality is out there, independent of our minds, or if our minds just make it all up has preoccupied thinkers since antiquity. Sophists and skeptics went as far as to to postulate that  nothing exists.

Even if something exists, some said, nothing can be known about it and even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. Beauty, then, would also be entirely a construct of the mind. Beauty, thus would manifest itself a-priori, it would set humans out on a quest of find conforming aspects of reality. This would be not unlike theoretical physicists who embark on checking if the world is like the beautiful equations they conceived in their minds.  

Not that neuroscientists measuring neurons of many different subjects firing at a higher intensity at particular images put the matter to rest entirely, but the experiments certainly suggest that "knowledge" [about aesthetics, for example] can be gained and that it could be communicated as well. Some kind of cognition and the communication both clearly preconditions for art of any kind.

Without quite those multidisciplinary academic credentials, Brent Canfield spoke in the same auditorium in Baltimore's Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) just a couple of weeks later. 

This time it wasn't the AIA who invited but young professionals and students who collaborated on human centered design. They had organized the first ever SEAM conference to illustrate the power of design (and beauty). Canfield's topic: "Product design, typography and pattern recognition. Coming from the side of commercial application, he, too, stressed that there are universal rules which make (typographical) patterns more or less legible, no matter who the reader.  He spoke about cognitive dissonance (when recognition was difficult) and resonance when viewer and design harmonized. Clearly, for signage, for example pattern recognition was important and so it was for reading. (The ideal line length is 68 characters). Canfield also showed us the example of the recently developed font that is supposed to reduce the fluctuation in character recognition which dyslexics experience. 

His talk about pattern recognition reminded me of Max Bense, also a multi disciplinary talent. Bense taught semiotics at the University of Stuttgart at a time when I attended architecture school there. With references to informatics he tried to quantify the information architectural design provides. Some of us were smitten by the idea that we could scientifically optimize design. (How many bits of information per second when walking down a street?). 

New font for the dyslexic

Bense combined natural sciences, art, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary perspective that only now has become widely popular. In his "information aesthetics" and "semiotics" the separation between humanities and natural sciences is removed. This was the very goal I had pursued by picking architecture as my subject matter, a field bridging those same fields. I recall Bense setting forth  Wiener's cybernetic theory, about sender, transmitter and recipient and the bouncing around of information in danger of being distorted at each of these points.

So here it was, the big trajectory from Wiener to Bense to Ed Connor and the applications of cognitive resonance. My immediate motif is the need for a better bus stop sign, fueled by a rich body of philosophy, information science and neuroscience. In the end it all comes back to the good old design recipe that has served architects and designers throughout the ages: one part craft, one part intuition, and one part knowledge. 

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

Beholding beauty: How it's been studied

Beauty and the Brain: Understanding Our Responses to Art (Science Friday)
Beauty and the Brain (Dana Blog)
Feeling Beauty (MIT)
Towards a Typology of Typographic Signification (Mark Lemon)