A major interest in our laboratory is the exploration of the visual brain through science and art, and how these two approaches can complement each other. We use a multiplicity of scientific techniques. Here are three of them:


Functional imaging allows us to obtain pictures of brain activity when the subject is viewing a particular scene, such as a painting.

Visual psychophysics is the study of what we see when confronted with various unusual visual displays, such as visual illusions.

Single cell physiology enables us to assess the contributions that individual neurons in various parts of the brain make to the task of seeing.

At first sight, the assertion that we can also explore the brain through the arts may seem eccentric. However, it would be difficult to dispute the fact that great art is conceived and appreciated largely by operations within the human brain. The suggestion that what constitutes art is defined by the properties of the human brain is perhaps more controversial, but as neuroscientists we are happy to accept this as a reasonable working hypothesis. It must follow that the nature of art can teach us about certain operations within the human brain. Conversely, the more we know about the brain, the better chance we have of understanding what constitutes art.

Our efforts to understand to brain have concentrated on the brain areas concerned with vision. Functional imaging work in this laboratory first demonstrated the existence of a 'colour centre' on each side of the human brain, and more recent studies have shown that this area can be sub-divided into at least two areas, V4 and V4a. In the future, a more precise understanding of the way in which these 'colour' areas function may yield a better understanding of why some colours are more attractive and evocative than others, and why artists use colours in the ways that they do.

The fauvist artists painted objects in colours radically different from those which those objects would have in the real world. The potent visual impact of their work must originate in areas of the brain where inappropriate colours are distinguished from appropriate ones. Recent functional imaging studies here have demonstrated where these brain areas are. So we don't just know the areas which are concerned with identification of colours, but we are beginning to identify other areas which are concerned with the appropriateness, or meaning, of the colour.