神经美学的8条定律
We present a theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. Any theory of art (or, indeed, any aspect of human nature) has to ideally have three components. (a) The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; (b) The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; (c) What is the brain circuitry involved? Our paper begins with a quest for artistic universals and proposes a list of ‘Eight laws of artistic experience’ -- a set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain. One of these principles is a psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect: If a rat is rewarded for discriminating a rectangle from a square, it will respond even more vigorously to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier that the prototype. We suggest that this principle explains not only caricatures, but many other aspects of art. Example: An evocative sketch of a female nude may be one which selectively accentuates those feminine form-attributes that allow one to discriminate it from a male figure; a Boucher, a Van Gogh, or a Monet may be a caricature in ‘colour space’ rather than form space. Even abstract art may employ ‘supernormal’ stimuli to excite form areas in the brain more strongly than natural stimuli. Second, we suggest that grouping is a very basic principle. The different extrastriate visual areas may have evolved specifically to extract correlations in different domains (e.g. form, depth, colour), and discovering and linking multiple features (‘grouping’) into unitary clusters -- objects -- is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these areas to limbic structures. In general, when object-like entities are partially discerned at any stage in the visual hierarchy, messages are sent back to earlier stages to alert them to certain locations or features in order to look for additional evidence for the object (and these processes may be facilitated by direct limbic activation). Finally, given constraints on allocation of attentional resources, art is most appealing if it produces heightened activity in a single dimension (e.g. through the peak shift principle or through grouping) rather than redundant activation of multiple modules. This idea may help explain the effectiveness of outline drawings and sketches, the savant syndrome in autists, and the sudden emergence of artistic talent in fronto-temporal dementia. In addition to these three basic principles we propose five others, constituting a total of ‘eight laws of aesthetic experience’(analogous to the Buddha's eightfold path to wisdom).
我们提出了一种关于人类艺术体验及其神经机制的理论。任何艺术理论（或者说，任何关于人性方面的理论）理想情况下都必须包含三个要素：(a) 艺术的逻辑：是否存在普遍的规则或原则；(b) 进化论的合理性：这些规则为何进化而来，又为何呈现出现在的形式；(c) 涉及哪些大脑回路？本文首先探寻艺术的普遍性，并提出了“艺术体验八定律”——一套艺术家有意或无意运用以最佳方式刺激大脑视觉区域的启发式方法。其中一条定律是一种被称为“峰值偏移效应”的心理现象：如果一只老鼠因区分矩形和正方形而获得奖励，那么它对比原型更长更窄的矩形会做出更强烈的反应。我们认为，这条定律不仅可以解释漫画，还可以解释艺术的许多其他方面。例如：一幅引人入胜的女性裸体素描可能选择性地突出了那些使人能够将其与男性形象区分开来的女性形体特征；布歇、梵高或莫奈的作品可能是在“色彩空间”而非“形体空间”中呈现的漫画式作品。即使是抽象艺术也可能运用“超常”刺激来比自然刺激更强烈地激发大脑中负责形体识别的区域。其次，我们认为分组是一个非常基本的原则。不同的纹外视觉区域可能专门进化而来，用于提取不同领域（例如形体、深度、色彩）的相关性，而发现和连接多个特征（“分组”）形成统一的簇——即物体——的过程，则得益于这些区域与边缘系统的直接连接。一般来说，当在视觉层级结构的任何阶段部分辨认出类似物体的实体时，信息会被发送回更早的阶段，以提醒它们注意某些位置或特征，从而寻找该物体的更多证据（而这些过程可能受到边缘系统的直接激活的促进）。最后，考虑到注意力资源分配的限制，艺术最具吸引力的方式是增强单一维度的活动（例如通过峰值转移原理或分组），而不是冗余地激活多个模块。这一观点或许可以解释轮廓画和素描的有效性、自闭症患者的学者综合症以及额颞叶痴呆患者艺术才能的突然涌现。除了这三个基本原则之外，我们还提出了另外五个原则，共构成“审美体验的八大法则”（类似于佛陀的八正道）。
