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door_of_timeI read this book last year and posted a bunch of stuff from it over in my main lj. I've been meaning to get back to some of the things it says about colour vision and synaesthesia.
Primates have "thirty areas in the back of our brains" involved in vision. The area called V4 is the one involved in colour vision. Ramachandran describes the effect of damage to V4: if it happens on both sides of the brain, the patient suffers from cortical achromatopsia, or cortical colour blindness; their eyes work fine, but their brains can't see colour.
In his chapter on art, Ramachandran talks about exaggerated figures in art, such as ultra-feminine Hindu statues, or Western political caricatures, in terms of "peak shift": the brain picks out the details that make a woman's body different from a man's, or Richard Nixon's face different from other men's; the more the artist exaggerates those details - big bust, big hips, or big nose - the more the brain notices them. "It looks comical, but it still looks even more like Nixon than the original Nixon." He goes on to apply this "peak shift" idea to colour in modern art by Van Gogh and Monet: "Hence the effectiveness of artificially heightened 'non-realistic' colors of their sunflowers or water lilies." So, because of the way the brain recognises things it sees, those flowers look more like flowers than actual flowers do. Blimey. I can't help being reminded of the Aztec idea that this world is just a "painted book", a poor imitation of the much more intense, but hidden, world of the spirit, in which flowers really would look more like flowers than actual flowers do.
More in a bit.
Primates have "thirty areas in the back of our brains" involved in vision. The area called V4 is the one involved in colour vision. Ramachandran describes the effect of damage to V4: if it happens on both sides of the brain, the patient suffers from cortical achromatopsia, or cortical colour blindness; their eyes work fine, but their brains can't see colour.
In his chapter on art, Ramachandran talks about exaggerated figures in art, such as ultra-feminine Hindu statues, or Western political caricatures, in terms of "peak shift": the brain picks out the details that make a woman's body different from a man's, or Richard Nixon's face different from other men's; the more the artist exaggerates those details - big bust, big hips, or big nose - the more the brain notices them. "It looks comical, but it still looks even more like Nixon than the original Nixon." He goes on to apply this "peak shift" idea to colour in modern art by Van Gogh and Monet: "Hence the effectiveness of artificially heightened 'non-realistic' colors of their sunflowers or water lilies." So, because of the way the brain recognises things it sees, those flowers look more like flowers than actual flowers do. Blimey. I can't help being reminded of the Aztec idea that this world is just a "painted book", a poor imitation of the much more intense, but hidden, world of the spirit, in which flowers really would look more like flowers than actual flowers do.
More in a bit.
