Event 3 | Art + Brain -- featuring Mark Cohen

Our brains evolved without anticipating creation and appreciation of art. Instead, our brains evolved over long long time to aid in our survival and reproduction. Art was never the main 'purpose' of our brains. With visual perception, for instance, both predators and preys can evolve over time to use camouflage to hide themselves for hunting or avoiding being hunted. Then in an evolutionary arms race (the so-called Red Queen Hypothesis), the predators or preys in response evolve to have better visual acuity (among many other possibilities) to overcome the camouflage. Perhaps in an evolutionary trajectory involving such struggles, our vision evolved to distinguish colors and shapes in relatively high resolution in animal kingdom. Nevertheless, there is still a wide gap between having sharp vision and manipulating our visual sense to create art.

Some explain creation of art as akin to peacock's tail: to showcase surplus of resources channeled to create what may be seen as wasteful behavior. Of course, it would be a mistake to think every artist has this ulterior motive at the back of their minds. Think of how people over history and all over the world fall in love and start a family. It has been happening almost as a physical law over eons all over the globe. Nevertheless, people don't (I hope) have evolutionary calculations to proliferate their genes before making love. At the same time, we are not forced to get married and have children; some people are content to never do so. 

Cohen, Mark. "DESMA9: Art + Brain -- featuring Mark Cohen". DESMA 9. 26 May 2022

The same goes with art. We create and appreciate art, with genuine accompanying emotions and without being forced to do so. We rely on our unaltered senses, but we also develop tools to see things previously invisible or alter our visual experience entirely, with scanning tunneling microscope, MRI, and psychedelic drugs, for example. We are aware that we do not have perfect vision: not only are we prone to visual illusions, but we also can't tell the real image from a compressed one created by computers (see figure above). Despite these perceptual limitations, we explore, manipulate, and play with objects filling our visual space. We go beyond what is immediately visible to make connections and meaning (see Mark Cohen and Victoria Vesna's Octopus Brainstorming). Thankfully, however our physical or biological nature came to be, the joy from art and play always welcomes us.

“Technical.” OCTOPUS BRAINSTORMING, https://octopusbrainstorming.com/technical/.



Hoffman, Donald. Case against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Ridley, Matt. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. HarperCollins, 2003.

Simler, Kevin and Robin Hanson. Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2020.



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