PATTERNS in brain activity can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso.
of ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and colleagues showed 12 students dozens of Picassos and Dalis while scanning their brains using functional MRI. A program then identified patterns in activity that were unique to each artist.
When fed brain scans produced by students looking at fresh paintings by the same artists, the program correctly identified the painter better than chance alone: it was correct 83 per cent of the time among the six students who were art majors and 62 per cent of the time among the others (NeuroReport, ).
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To identify the artists, the program relied on activity in multiple brain regions, not just visual ones. So John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, says the brain has an 鈥渁bstract code鈥� for different artistic styles, which could one day be used to classify art.
