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Ramachandran, V. S. (2011)The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for

what makes us human

Article in Scientific Study of Literature · June 2013

DOI: 10.1075/ssol.3.1.14pee

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 Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for
what makes us human. New York: W. W. Norton.

Reviewed by Willie van Peer

This review is about two chapters (7 and 8) from this book only, because these are
the only chapters that have a direct bearing on issues with which Scientific Study
of Literature is concerned. Whatever merits the book may have as a whole is up to
others to judge; see, for instance, McGinn (2011) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
The_Tell-Tale_Brain for an overview of positive and negative reviews.
In these two chapters, called “Beauty and the Brain: The emergence of aesthet-
ics” and “The Artful Brain: Universal laws” respectively, the author proposes a gen-
eral science of the beautiful. Needless to say, that aim is shared by this journal. So
the claims and evidence put forward in these two chapters merit detailed analysis.
In his own words, the author says his goal is “to convince you that our knowledge
of human vision and of the brain is now sophisticated enough that we can speculate
intelligently on the neural basis of art1 and maybe begin to construct a scientific
theory of artistic experience” (p. 193). One can already see here how the author
hedges his claims. One can always speculate “intelligently,” and people have been
doing so in aesthetics for more than two millennia. Whether the author succeeds
in making his ‘theory’ both “intelligent” and even a little more compelling than its
predecessors will be the focus of this review.
Chapter 7 begins by outlining the ‘beauty’ of the nests built by male Australian
bower birds, which are indeed impressive — they require not only skill, but also
display individual styles. Could this be taken as an indication that these birds have
something like ‘art’? The author speculates that the fastidiousness with which these
birds build their nests is also “seen in many a human artist” (195) and if such nests
would be displayed in a Manhattan art gallery, they “would elicit favorable com-
ments” (195). One would like to know what kind of conception of art underlies
this statement, of course.
The chapter then goes on to “speculate on the possibility that real art (…)
involves the proper and effective deployment of certain artistic universals (…).
This isn’t a full theory, but it’s a start” (195). Apart from the final hedging, which is
perhaps still acceptable, note the words ‘proper’ and ‘effective’ in the claim, terms
that carry quite a heavy normative load. Of course a scientific theory implies that
its elements are applied in a ‘proper’ and ‘effective’ way, but the readers of the
chapter should at least be informed what these terms mean. The author then goes

Scientific Study of Literature 3:1 (2013), 161–164. doi 10.1075/ssol.3.1.14pee

issn 2210–4372 / e-issn 2210–4380 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
162 Reviews

on to spell out nine such artistic universals, a courageous and certainly important
undertaking.
The first ‘law’ proposed is that of grouping: it “simply means that the visual
system tends to group similar elements or features in the image into clusters.” We
are given to contemplate a Renaissance painting and are told that “the same azure
blue color repeats all over the canvas as part of various unrelated objects. Likewise
the same beige and brown are used in halos, clothes, and hair throughout the
scene” (202). There would be ample ground for comparison with parallelism in
literature here, where the phenomenon has been worked out into something of a
law, with good empirical evidence on its side.
The second law is more interesting. It is called the ‘law of peak shift’ and refers
to “how your brain responds to exaggerated stimuli” (206). Caricatures and Indian
statues of female goddesses with large buttocks and breasts are quoted as examples,
but more interesting is the reference to the work of the Dutch Nobel Prize winning
ornithologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, who found in the 1940s that young chicks of
herring gulls (larus argentatus) peck vigorously on a small red spot on the lower
bill of the adult gull when it returns from a flight, obviously begging for food in this
way. If the adult caught some, it regurgitates it in the chick’s beak. So far nothing
special, one might think, just some biological program in the young gulls’ brains.
But Tinbergen found that, when he presented a lifeless beak of a herring gull, or
even a piece of cardboard with a red dot on, it elicited the same behavior in the
chicks. Stranger still was Tinbergen’s observation that when he presented the chicks
with a stick that had three red stripes on its end, they actually preferred this to the
fake beak — they went really crazy over the stick. On the basis of these experi-
ments, Tinbergen (1953) developed the notion (rather uncontroversial in present-
day biology, and replicated in other ornithologists’ work — see, among others, Ten
Cate, 2009 and Ten Cate et al., 2009) the notion of supernormal stimuli, the notion
that one may produce artificial objects that elicit stronger instinctual reactions
in animals than their ordinary counterparts. (Ramachandran uses his own term,
‘ultra-normal’ stimulus for this.) Though I believe that this insight from biology
may have interesting repercussions for a theory of aesthetics, and Ramachandran
is to be lauded to have brought it to the attention of others, he makes little of it in
developing a true theory out of it. The whole idea also begs the question whether
such strong instinctual reactions (partly also of an aggressive nature) have much
to do with the experience of beauty. The assumption seems to be that there is an
intimate relation between hedonic pleasure (pecking vigorously) and beauty, an
assumption even Berlyne might not have been at ease with (though there is no trace
in the book that Ramachandran has ever read the work by Berlyne, or Arnheim or
Gombrich, for that matter.) I personally find the work of Barrett (2009) much more
promising in this respect. She at least elaborates on the ways in which the notion of

© 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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 Reviews 163

supernormal stimuli functions in various social domains nowadays, such as por-

nography, the food industry, territorial protection and hedge funds. She documents
how in our present world we have access to larger-than-life objects. There is a sense
in which the great literary works, such as Moby Dick, Don Quixote or War and
Peace are also ‘larger-than-life’ objects, albeit linguistic rather than material ones.
I venture to also ‘speculate’ that the biological propensity to prefer slightly
exaggerated artifacts to their natural counterparts by animals may be related to
the notion of foregrounding (see the 2006 issue of Language and Literature on this),
but any such relationship between biologically innate dispositions and culturally
developed strategies on the part of artists is not spelled out by Ramachandran.
Things become more disputable when the author considers the issue that many
people do not like abstract art, something explained along the following lines: “In
short, I am saying all of us do like Henry Moore but many of us are in denial about
it!” (213). This sounds ominously like immunizing his theories, which certainly is
not ‘proper’ or ‘effective’ in a scientific approach.
The final part of this chapter is devoted to methodological issues. There is value
in the suggestions made by the author, but one wonders why no mention is made
of the richness in empirical methods with which cultural artifacts can be studied
in the humanities or in the social sciences. Where, for instance, are the refer-
ences to fMRI studies of ‘beauty’ such as Ishizu and Zeki (2011)? Or Chatterjee’s
(2004) work on the neuroscience of aesthetics? What about the correlation between
beauty and brain activity by Jacobsen et al. (2006)? Where is the reference to the
work of Miall (2006) or Oatley (2011)?
Spilling over into Chapter 8 is the third ‘law’, that of contrast: “juxtaposing dis-
similar colors and/or luminances” (219). The fourth law is that of isolation: “The
artist emphasizes a single source of information — such as color, form or motion —
and deliberately plays down or deletes other sources” (221). Law number 5 is called
“peekaboo”: “the fact that you can sometimes make something more attractive by
making it less visible” (227). The sixth law is “one of the most important laws in
aesthetic perception: the abhorrence of coincidences” (232). But the seventh law,
that of ‘orderliness’ is equally deemed important in art and design “Symmetry”
is law number eight, no surprises here, though what exactly is meant by the law
does not become clear. What does become clear to the author himself, though, is
that sometimes a lack of symmetry is appealing (235). This contradiction is easy
to solve, we are told, then “the symmetry rule applies only to objects, not to large-
scale scenes.” If this is puzzling, look at how this solution is defended: “This makes
perfect evolutionary sense because a predator, a prey, a friend or a mate is always
an isolated, independent object” (236). Law number nine is “metaphor”….
Ramachandran then takes stock and informs us that he has offered these nine
‘laws’ as a way to explain why artists create art and why people enjoy viewing it. If

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All rights reserved
 164 Reviews

one takes the word ‘explain’ here in the usual epistemological sense in which sci-
ence ‘explains’ things, then the reader may very well disagree: the formulation is so
vague that there is hardly a way of making them scientifically applicable to art in
general or to individual works in particular. The fact that such verdict is formulated
in a journal that is dedicated precisely to the aim of making the study of literature
founded on a more scientific basis, must be seen as a rather devastating judgment.
So in the end, what started out as a thrilling exercise in aesthetics, has led to very
little in terms of tangible results. In general the effort succumbs to the vagueness
of formulation, which leaves little to build on for future researchers.

Note

1. There is a further constraint, in that the author restricts himself to the visual arts. Why this
is, and why literature and music are excluded, is not made clear, but it is a legitimate choice, of
course. I do believe, however, that the links between the arts in general are strong enough to
have warranted the inclusion of the verbal and musical arts.

References

Arnheim, R. (1974). Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal stimuli: How primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Berlyne, D. E. (1971). Aesthetics and psychobiology. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Chatterjee, A. (2004). Prospects for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Aesthetics. Bulletin of
Psychology of the Arts, 4, 55–60.
Gombrich, E. (1982).The image and the eye. Further studies in the psychology of pictorial repre-
sentation. Oxford: Phaidon.
Ishizu, T. & Zeki, S. (2011). Toward a brain-based theory of beauty. PLoS ONE, 6: e21852.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021852.
Jacobsen, T., Schubotz, R. I., Hofel, L., & Cramon, D. Y. (2006). Brain correlates of aesthetic
judgment of beauty. Neuroimage, 29, 276–28.
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2011, 32–35.
Miall, D. S. (2006). Literary reading: Empirical and theoretical studies. New York: Peter Lang.
Oatley, K. (2011). Such stuff as dreams: The psychology of fiction. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Ten Cate, C. (2009). Niko Tinbergen and the red patch on the herring gull’s beak. Animal
Behavior, 77, 785–794.
Ten Cate, C., et al. (2009). Tinbergen revisited: a replication and extension of experiments on the
beak colour preferences of herring gull chicks. Animal Behavior 77, 795–802.
Tinbergen, N. (1953). The Herring Gull’s world. London: Collins.

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