Art And Mind

Term Paper Title	Art And Mind
# of Words	885
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.54

Art and Mind

The human mind is a very powerful
tool and organ. There are however
imperfections in the way it
processes things. Illusions for
example, are visual stimuli that
trick the brain because the brain
cannot process all visual images
correctly. Why do we see puddles
forming up the road while we are
driving in our cars on a hot summer
day? Why do some parts of a drawing
look bigger when in fact they are
smaller? There have been many
artists that have used illusions in
their paintings, M.C. Escher, Scott
Kim, and Salvador Dali. Each artist
employed a different illusionary
style. In Dali�s works of art, he
often uses perceptual ambiguity and
we often see hidden faces of
himself or others that are painted
into his paintings. To see these
images, we must step away and look
at certain objects from a different
perspective.

We must first comprehend why
illusions happen to begin exploring
perceptual ambiguity. To answer the
first question proposed above, we
must understand that heat makes
light waves bend. So, the light
streaming in from the sky doesn't
travel in a straight line to your
eye from up above, it comes to your
eye from a different direction, in
fact it looks like its coming from
the pavement. So your brain doesn't
quite know how to interpret it, it
sees a patch of sky right in the
middle of the road, and ends up
thinking that its a puddle of
water. This is also what happens in
deserts, when the heat distorts
light from the sky to make look
like there's a lake in the middle
of the sand. So why do we see
illusions in works of art? Well, we
know that the brain processes
whatever it is fed. For example, if
something is small, your brain
thinks it's far away. If something
is your brain thinks it's up close.
There are other assumptions that
your brain makes too, all based on
the fact that it remembers what
it's seen before, and assumes that
what it sees now will be similar.
Of course, all things small are not
far away and all things big are not
close, so sometimes your brain
makes an assumption and it�s wrong.

Perceptual ambiguity or double
imagery has been around

for a long time. One of the
earliest examples of this
phenomenon is a picture of an old
woman and a younger one where one
can see one or the other depending
on what features one focus�s on
first. One�s view of this image

remains static until the viewer
starts to pay attention to

different regions and contours.
Researchers have found that certain
regions will favor one perception
from the other. Once a certain
feature is identified as one part
of the face, the viewer can follow
the lines that develop from that
feature and fill in the rest of the
picture, creating another different
stable view. The human visual
system tends to group like or
related regions together, so we
cannot see the two mixed views at
one time. Researchers have also
found that we do not need to shift
o...

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