Neuroaesthetics and the Curve

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Wheat Field with Cypresses 1889 Vincent van Gogh

Dr. Ed Connor, Director of the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins, studies how the high-level perception areas of the brain process visual images into information about the world.

He writes: “Understanding what you see seems trivial—you only have to look at it! We are so good at vision that we tend not to recognize it as an ability or a process of any kind. But in fact it is one of the most difficult things the brain does. Computer vision, even with deep networks, has not even begun to approach the kind of visual understanding that comes so easily to us. Computers can beat us at math, chess, go, and jeopardy, but they cannot understand the visual world the way we do.”

One of the results of his research has been in finding evidence supporting our own intuitive visual preferences for rounded or curved shapes over sharper, squarer shapes. His work shows how individual brain neurons associated with vi…