Brain activity to help classify art?
The participants viewed a variety of pieces by Dali and Picasso
What type of artwork people are viewing could be determined by a scan of their brain activity, according to new research.
The research, which was conducted at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, highlights the different ways the human brain reacts to surrealist landscapes, such as those by Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso's cubist paintings, reports New Scientist.
Over the course of the study, which is detailed in the journal NeuroReport, 12 students were shown dozens of Picasso and Dali's paintings while researchers used functional MRI to scan their brains.
Different patterns in activity which were unique to each artist were identified. However, the programme did not simply use visual brain regions to identify the differences in activity, instead using multiple areas.
Speaking to the publication, John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, said this could mean the brain has an "abstract code" for varieties of artistic style which could one day be used as a means of classifying artwork.
Despite their very different styles, Picasso and Dali are regarded as two of Spain's greatest artists.
Their best-known artworks include Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Dali's The Persistence of Memory, which features the famed melting clocks.
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