The Regensburg Lecture 2010

And here is now my Regensburg lecture (October 1st, 2010) during the AISTHESIS workshop on "Aesthetic Cognition and Cognitive Aesthetics" (organized by Prof. Dr. Christoph Wagner and Prof. Dr. Mark A. Greenlee), shown here slide for slide, and briefly annotated (for all REFERENCES, see References):

=> The whole lecture can also be downloaded here in Flash-Format ([1])
Download my (never published) paper here (as a PDF): Failed critical synchronizations – my Regensburg Lecture 2010 ([2])

Slide 1
Hello every BODY!
The title of my lecture is "Mapping Shifts (or: Mapping Droodles) — Solving a map-maker's (i.e., my) first problem".
Sorry for all those people in the public who are red-green blind, because they will not be able to map — or to "detect" — a colour shift between the two first words of the title: "Mapping" (written in green) and "Shifts" (written in red and in italics).

Slide 2
Karl Kraus once noted that "an artist is somebody who can make a riddle out of an answer". This also perfectly holds for droodles:

Slide 3
According to Robert L. Solso, droodles are "pictures that are ... mostly meaningless unless we [!] give them verbal titles" (SOLSO 1994: 255).

Slide 4
Here is a famous example of a droodle — and WHAT does it represent? Try to figure it out!

Slide 5
The next picture shows a capuchin preacher asleep in his pulpit (or behind a desk):

Slide 6
In fact, this is one of the oldest droodles in the History of Art, drawn by Annibale Carracci in around 1600. (Hence, contrary to Lars MICHAEL (2009), droodles were not invented in the 1950s by Roger Price. But most — if not all — young neuroscientists and psychologists do not even read art historical books, I suppose...). Art historians like Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim were quite puzzled about these droodles and the abrupt shifts involved with them (see GOMBRICH 1960: 215). Accordingly, Rudolf Arnheim wrote the following about another droodle, which is depicted here (ARNHEIM 1974 [1954]: 49):

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Now, what does the next picture or droodle represent? Unlike in the picture here below (in the slide above), you do not need to look for a Dalmatian dog, by the way...

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The meaning of Giacometti's painting is now clearly biased and stable: it is in fact a photorealistic rendering of a rock with lichen, encountered by Giacometti while climbing a mountain (the Piz Duan in Switzerland)!
(By the way: Augusto Giacometti himself noted how he was impressed by the Art Nouveau sketches by Grasset in around 1900: "Merkwürdig war das. Einige dieser Entwürfe erinnerten mich an den Wald oberhalb Stampa, an das dunkelgrüne und dunkelfarbige Moos am Boden des Waldes. Andere Farbstimmungen waren wie die Flechten am Stamm der Tannen ... oder wie die Moose an den Steinen im Wald." --- You see: you should always read the writings by the artists themselves and take them seriously, and not the primitive art historical books like the one by Beat Stutzer, where I have taken this quotation from (GIACOMETTI 2003 [1933]: 12). Besides: Giacometti was a stained glass painter himself, and he fervently pleaded for a normation of colours and an image statistics based on colours, not on artificial Gabor wavelets).

Slide 18
What has happened? - First, in the pre-condition, and driven by some "mapping impulse" (ALPERS 1983: 119 ff.) you may have tried to desperately (!) look for some stable meanings or "attractors" — but in vain.

Slide 19
But after having seen or read the verbal label and visual prime — both acting as "cues" or "hints" — the shift happens: you will now be clearly biased toward a unique and stable percept.

Slide 20
And here it is: in the post-condition, you have now clearly found a unique and stable attractor or "meaning", the "rock with lichen".

Slide 21
In Karl Friston's "unified brain theory" (see FRISTON 2010), everything in cognition boils down to minimizing some "free energy" or "surprise" (cf. BERLYNE 1971): in the pre-condition, you may get stuck in several unstable local minima (if at all...). And during this "futile guesswork", you are stuck in some "mental impasse" or "attentional overload"; the tension (!) rises, and the intention to solve this droodle as well (see SANDKUEHLER & BHATTACHARYA 2008).

Slide 22
However, after receiving a "cue" or "hint", a "restructuring" process along with a stark shift occurs, perhaps driven by some prefrontal top-down activations in the brain:

Slide 23
In the post-condition, you will have found a global and stable minimum, and your mental shifts have come to a rest within some "homeostasis", and the original tension has now given way to some “great gush of resolution”. And interestingly, your brain has now changed its landscape completely (WITHIN A SINGLE RUN!), because you will now be biased forever, whenever you will see that painting by Giacometti again – you will now always see a “rock with lichen”...

Slide 24
This big dramatic (Aristotelian? kathartic?) shift "from nothing to someTHING", or: from some initial futile guesswork to finding a unique and stable attractor, or: from "tension to relief", may be one of the most significant shifts happening in your brain and may be accompanied by some “surprise” or “Aha-effect” (see LUO et al. 2004). But unfortunately, this EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT SHIFT has not been mapped so far neuroscientifically, nor in full detail and high-resolution down to the mechanistic synaptic level. P.S.: Most stimuli used by neuroscientists today are neither ecologically nor art historically validated, nor simple, nor SIGNIFICANT. I even suppose that most neuroscientists do not care about their rather ARBITRARILY chosen stimuli at all, and most of them apparently have not the faintest idea about some History of Art at all... Following Karl Kraus, I would really like to propose to them: "Please send me your experiment and stimuli BEFORE publishing your stuff. In this way, I can check your stimuli first — afterwards, I will have much fewer (and only the best) publications to read and browse through weekly..."

Slide 25
According to Leonard B. Meyer (see MEYER 1956), similar processes and shifts like surprise, violations, mismatches, emotions, homeostasis, harmony, and meanings are also occuring while listening to music. However, these extremely pure shifts have not been mapped by neuroscientists so far either.

Slide 26
This process of minimizing free energy or "surprise" can also be described and mapped out mathematically (see FRISTON 2010: Bayesian neural networks and mappings):
Upon receiving the sensory stimulus at the retina, higher cortical networks will then be recruited for the build up of models and hypotheses.
However, in droodles, this search for models and hypotheses will be largely in vain. But then the prime comes into play and the whole neural network will be biased toward a unique and stable percept: A clear target map has now been found and the unique pathway leading to this stable percept will now have been strengthened forever, acting as a new bias for later perceptions of the same (!) visual stimulus. And please note here that the visual stimulus (or droodle) always remains the same — the ONLY thing that changes is the shifts in your brain.

Slide 27
Hence, everything in cognition DEPENDS on the individual onlooker and listener as well, that means: on the already stabilized maps, biases, priors, or attractors within an individual map-maker or Self. And that's why Karl Friston also notes: "what is surprising for one agent, may not be surprising for another".
That means: an art historian who already knows everything about the Giacomettis and music will not be surprised any more — because he already knows EVERYTHING, hence always remaining in some perfect homeostasis.

<<<<Postscript (November 2011):

Dear Prof. Karl Friston

At first sight, your general theory of nervous function (i.e., to minimize "surprise" or -ln (p(s/m))) seems to be contradicted and violated by art and artists.

However, having the old Karl Kraus (the teacher of Erwin Chargaff) and Daniel Berlyne ("surprise") and music theorists like Ernst Kurth and Leonard B. Meyer ("surprise") in mind, this apparent contradiction may only hold for all those baffled spectators of art, i.e., "the general public".

According to Karl Kraus, artists -- by creating their works of art -- simply "make a riddle out of a solution", i.e., they display to the general public how to minimize "surprise".

And it may be the job of museums, art historians, neuro-estheticians, and neurobiologists to show to the general public of baffled spectators not only the "riddles" (i.e., the works of art), but also the "solutions" found by these artists (i.e., how they minimized your -ln(p(s/m))). After all, it would be a very big step for education if spectators and art gallery goers were not surprised any more when viewing works of art...

And in the end, everything boils down to a "mapping problem" anyway (thank you always for that!).

Since only those who will have the "best" maps (and tell the best stories...)

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org <<<<

Slide 28
As you have already noticed, the priming can be done verbally or purely visually. Either you give a textual prime (e.g., "the next picture shows a friar sleeping behind his desk"), or you give a visual prime (that means: a Dalmatian dog, a "face", or a rock with lichen: cf. DOLAN et al. 1997).

Slide 29
Just for recreation now, because you now know the game: What does the next picture show?

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I hope that you have been able to feel the shifts in your brain while looking at these partly identical droodles but different primes! Most droodles can be very ambiguous, and they can be primed by quite different primes!

Slide 37
However, the most fascinating and difficult droodles can be seen in the more recent History of Art, and not only in the works by the Giacomettis. Here I will argue that Mark Rothko, with his untitled (!) signature paintings displaying rectangular fuzzy blobs, has indeed created droodles that can be primed by (nearly) everyTHING:

Slide 38
When you see a Rothko-like rectangle, you can be primed for example...

Slide 39
... by a face, so that you will indeed see a face when you look at the identical ....

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... post-stimulus, especially when the post-stimulus is ...

Slide 41
... a bit blurred, so that you will even better imagine a face.

Slide 42
But you can prime the Rothko rectangles not only with blurred motherly faces, but with everyTHING else: with clouds, temple-veils, bodies, parts of bodies, etc. Indeed, there have been lots of quarrels, "limitless suggestions", and papers by art historians about "WHAT does Rothko paint?" (see in detail CHAVE 1989).

Slide 43
But Rothko may have simply found the invariant and hyperstable "THING-attractor" in the brain (or in Latin: the "forma formarum"), that means: the lateral occipital complex (or in short: the LOC) — a brain area and giant attractor that is activated by all "things" with closable (and especially fuzzy) contours (MALACH et al. 1995; cf. also EGER et al. 2008).
Accordingly, most art historians writing about Rothko may have been stuck in rather local minima and arbitrary "things" and attractors so far, not seeing this global minimum or giant attractor in the LOC.

Slide 44
Or in terms of neural networks: When seeing a fuzzy rectangular blob painted by Rothko, most art historians will try to make some arbitrary guesses like "faces", "facades", "temple veils", "clouds", "bodies", or WHATever else.
Accordingly, you can prime these art historians with nearly everyTHING: clouds, temple-veils, faces, bodies, etc.
BUT Rothko's real goal or target map was NOT those arbitrary and variable "things" or maps on higher cortical levels, but rather the invariable global minimum in the LOC — that means, the hyperstable "THING-attractor" lying at the very bottom of this whole process of shape perception along the so-called "WHAT-pathway" (cf. PALMERI & GAUTHIER 2004; see also Claude Cernuschi's "containment schema" in CERNUSCHI 1997). In fact, Rothko did not care about the "higher" visual percepts and categories — he always spoke of painting "just things" (ELBS 2005: 79).

Slide 45
YET, the most difficult droodles so far may have been painted by Barnett Newman (according to Yve-Alain Bois, see SCHOR 2002). His huge signature paintings are composed of near-Ganzfelds divided by a few vertical lines or "zips".

Slide 46
When confronted with such a zip, you may be primed by ...

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... an image of an elongated body —say, a Giacomettian or gothic cathedral sculpture, or a dancer in starting position—...

Slide 48
... so that you will indeed see a body or part of a body when you look at the post-stimulus, especially ...

Slide 49
... when the post-stimulus has been further enhanced by blurring (thereby "improving quality").

Slide 50
But now come the art historical quarrels again: WHAT does Newman paint? Does he paint "upright erect figures" (which is fervently denied by Yve-Alain Bois, see BOIS 1988: IV ff.), or does he paint some "Self" instead (which is corroborated by Newman himself, who always spoke about "painting the terror of Self" — see EVERY word in NEWMAN 1990…)?
Or does he paint both "things" at once, as shown perhaps in this photograph by Hans Namuth?

Slide 51
HOWEVER, while BODIES can be clearly seen and used as visual primes, the rather abstract notion of some "SELF" will be difficult to be used experimentally as a prime, since "Selves" can NOT be seen, but ONLY "inferred" (within some social "Theory of mind" or "social guesswork").
Hence, dis-entangling both these two different primes and percepts — BODIES or SELVES — will be no easy task for neuroscientists at all (see, e.g., BERLUCCHI & AGLIOTI 1997, ARZY et al. 2006, CRAIG 2009, DOWNING et al. 2001).

Slide 52
But the neuroscientific dis-entangling of BODIES and SELVES will be of the highest ethical and socio-political importance, as already expressed by Newman himself in 1962 (see text in the slide above).

Slide 53
Well, every scientist today has to add some mapological caveats or "limitations" in the end of his lecture or paper, and so do I. According to Giambattista Vico exactly 300 years ago (see VICO 1979 [1710]), map-makers (or Selves) can only "understand" maps or "other" (synchronized) Selves or map-makers, but never some "NATURE", that means: something that is not made by man, but which can only be mapped by map-makers.

Slide 54
Hence, "nature" may only be mapped (e.g., by fMRI, PET, EEG, mathematics, etc.), but each scientific method and mapping tool may always be extremely selective, biased, and local — and there is still NO TOTAL ATLAS in sight (despite Google and some "human brain atlas", or rather: human brain slices).

Slide 55
Furthermore, you may always remember Piet Mondrian's caveats with regard to art as well (and Karl Friston's "homeostasis", by the way): Art may only be a "substitute" as long as the "beauty of life is deficient". Art may have been extremely important in 1942, but perhaps not in future, when the "laws of equilibrium" and the associated shifts will have finally become clear and transparent and mapped... (MONDRIAN 1951: 32).

Slide 56
Now the SUMMARY:
1) Mapping droodles and shifts in real time and full resolution will be a very BIG step for neuroscientists, especially when regarding their limited mapping tools available today. And simple mapping tools require very simple, but extremely significant stimuli that are ecologically and art historically validated as well.
2) Rothko has painted droodles that can be primed by nearly everyTHING — since his goal was the LOC or "forma formarum", but not some arbitrary particular "things" themselves.
3) Newman's droodles may be primed by both BODIES or SELVES— but the dis-entangling of both these two things on the neural level will be no easy task for neuroscientists.
4) According to Vico, map-makers (or Selves) may "understand" (i.e., map) maps and "other" Selves, but never some "NATURE" (which can only be mapped, but not made).

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Thanks to every BODY (and perhaps also: every SELF) here in the public!