Are We Wired for Beauty?

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Primavera Oil Ann Trusty

The science community is investigating the mechanisms and processes by which people are able to perceive the world around them and make visual sense of it. There are many basic questions to be answered. For example, a six-year-old possesses the mundane ability to distinguish things which are out-of-place at a glance - something the most powerful computers can’t do. How does the brain interpret a vast amount of seemingly unrelated visual stimuli and cohere a picture of the world from it? Is it just in the immense amount of neuronal connections or their interrelated connectivity, the sum of all individual specialized functions adding up to a greater whole? Current research points to the possibility that the latter is the case. Simply wiring up an immense network of computers won’t do the job. It is how the information gathering and processing parts relate to each other and at the same time to the whole system that gives us…