Are you impressed with meals that look like one food but are actually made of something else? Tofu burgers and artificial crabmeat, for example, are not what they appear to be, yet the masquerade half-convinces our taste buds all the same.
Such ruses have a venerable history. In medieval times fish was cooked to imitate venison during Lent, when it was customary to abstain from meat and other indulgences. At all times of the year, celebratory banquets included extravagant (and sometimes disturbing) delicacies such as meatballs made to resemble oranges and shellfish made into mock viscera. Recipe books from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance also describe roasted chickens that appeared to sing, peacocks redressed in their own feathers and made to breathe fire, and a dish aptly named Trojan hog, in which a whole roasted pig was stuffed with an assortment of smaller creatures such as birds and shellfish, to the amusement and delight of cherished dinner guests. Food illusions don’t appeal only to the palate. Some exploit quirks of our neurological wiring to confuse and entertain both the eyes and mind.
Take this still life by Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593), which depicts the ingredients for his favorite minestrone soup (top left). Turned upside down (top right), Arcimboldo’s bowl of vegetables becomes a whimsical portrait of a man’s head, complete with a serving-bowl hat.
This image raises a couple of questions. First, why do we see a face in the arrangement, when we know that it is just a bunch of vegetables? Our brains are hardwired to detect, recognize and discern facial features and expressions using only minimal data. This ability is critical to our interactions with other people and is the reason that we perceive personality and emotion in everything from crude masks to the front ends of cars.
Second, why do we see the face only when the image is flipped? The same brain mechanisms that make face processing fast and effortless are optimized to recognize faces the way we generally see them—right-side-up—so upside-down ones are harder to recognize.
A Lot to Digest
Arcimboldo’s work demonstrates that, neuroscientifically speaking, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Clever arrangements of individual fruits, flowers and legumes become exquisite portraiture when viewed in their entirety, such as in the likeness of the Hapsburg emperor Rudolf II, here depicted as Vertumnus, the Etruscan god of transformations.
The brain builds representations of objects from line segments and tiny patches of color, then identifies them for what they are by comparing them to a mental library of similar visual images. The viewer first makes out a bulbous protrusion in the middle of Rudolf’s face because thousands of retinal photoreceptors in the eye react to the various shades of color and luminance in that area of the painting. There are no retinal cells specialized in recognizing noses, however. That next step occurs when high-level neuronal circuits in cognitive areas match the information to the brain’s stored template for noses, created from a lifetime’s experience of viewing them.
In this case, the output from those same photoreceptors also activates the high-level object-tuned neurons that recognize fruits, which is what makes images such as these so much fun to look at. A nose is a nose is a nose, to riff on Gertrude Stein—except when it’s a pear.
Such visual puns, artfully constructed, appeal to the mind as much as any wordplay. For example, in this image of a hummingbird the brain simultaneously detects animal features (eyes, wings, tail) along with plant parts (eggplant, artichoke leaves). This dual spark of recognition, with all its contradictions, tickles the fancy.
Delicious Deceptions
The dots that compose this image of a cherry-topped cupcake are multicolored jelly beans, a technique that recalls the works of painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. The pointillists juxtaposed multiple individual points to create hues that were very different—when viewed at a distance—from the actual colors of the painted dots.
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12 Comments
Add CommentNot sure about this one. Does the brain not continuously generate possible models of data presented to it by light impinging upon the photoreceptors combined with synesthetic connectivity to perhaps the auditory ststem etc - where specific shapes in the visual field acivate linguistic representations of the visual data. Similarly the other sensory domains will be generating possible models that might appear to fit externally impinging stimuli. Hence a number of perspectival views of the outside world will be generated from different foci within the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuch a process would fit Nietzsche's perspectivism whence the 'true' reality of the external world would arise through the intersection and agreement between different perspectival views of the senses.
The process producing effectively a linguistic narrative describing the outside world and organising a response to it?
Peter Reynolds
Reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
Faces being easily recognised because of the synesthetic stimuli they produce - as for example manifest in the Mc Gurk effect where the visual cues of faces are inseparable from the auditory cues.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis particular focus of synesthetic connectivity and connectivity between visual and auditory perspectival views perhaps revealing the fundamental power of linguistics in representing - predicting - expressing and experiencing the world. So determining our conscious experience and marrying it to unconscious process.
Reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
So - yes I disagree in toto with the premise of the article that face recognition is essential pattern recognition from a visual stimulus.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI posit face recognition to be fundamentally synesthetic and linguistic perspectivism formaing templates which filter visual stimuli and assess for salience.
Reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
Peter Reynolds
The beauty of such a model would be that each different perspectival sensory view could of itself project back or forward in time so to establish a synthetic representaion or synthesis of 'a priori' or 'before the fact' representations or 'preception' with 'postceptions' to produce a perception of the here and now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo the 'now' of the 'film in the head' being a synthesis and projection of future possible images with past memories or images(short and long in sequence arranged on linguistic lines) to produce an apparent approximation of the 'here and now' which has evolved to closely model the external world as it exists in real time and integrate it with the internal world of the body/brain.
I suppose one could say from this perspective that what evolution has really produced is the 'here and now'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd moreover it has in doing so produced the past present and future.
Peter Reynolds
Reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
And because evolution produces the here and now - it is the way we see the world. The template through which we (have to or - have naturally come to ) model our conceptuality of life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut who knows what is outside of the 'here and now'. That is the deepest mystery of all.
Peter REynolds
reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
reflectogenesis...nice train of thought...I would only add that I think that relationships(friends,family,...) are also part of what goes on in the head...ie. when you think a thought, it is bounced off of zero to many internal representations of external relationships(think of it as a proving ground) before being externalized...just a thought....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes I think undoubtedly that there are lots of things going on during thought and some maybe conscious and some not so. So like you say - there might be competition between different perspectival views of the world, and I suppose the brain might need more data to decide how it should incorporate relationsips into its ongoing existence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut the point I'm trying to hit home is that its not just visual pattern recognition (memory storage and access through the visual pathway) which allows us to identify faces. Rather it is the synesthetic connectivity between our senses which labels a face with an identity.
In accordance with what you say, I suggest there might be expected to be special or accentuated synesthetic connectivity which allows us to easily identify family members and loved ones. In such a case different rules might then be applied to the way in which conflicting data associated with such a family of views might be assimilated.
Indeed the fusiform gyrus is responsible for recognizing the faces of loved ones and even familar objects such as pets or even houses. So particular brain areas must kick in when we form perspectives which incorporate particularly salient and famiar objects and environments.
Likewise my guess is that there are particular synesthetic pathways that contribute to deriving and generating perspectival views of the world at various stages along the optical pathways depending upon what is judged to be salient within the multiperstival views that the brain must continually be generating.
Eureka.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've worked it out.
Consciousness first arose when deaf and blind first interbred. That is when a society had evolved sufficiently to support them.
The enhanced ability of the deaf and blind to detect motion and position in the remaining modalities would have been kept alongside their normal senses in their offspring. Hence synesthetic connections could for the first time represent movement with static images. These abilities would subtend the normal senses of the offspring to give rise to a 'subconscious' or sub-sensory ability which could guide the senses and integrate them at an unconscious level.
Thus we would become 'aware' that we had abilities outside those derived purely through our senses.
Later when we had mirrors in the age of metals those abilities would becoome tuned so that those sub or none conscious abilities to detect and control movement would become synergistic through the positive feedback with the mirror. These subconscious abilities would become more important in driving the senses and controlling attention.
We are effectively therefore super hominids.
reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeter Reynolds
see also academia.edu Peter Thomas Reynolds
I've since read 'Country of The Blind' by H G Wells who describes exactly the scenario I imagine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf there was a 'Country Of The Deaf' in a parallel valley - and the two interbred- it would be possible for them to regain their primary senses and keep the enhancement of all sense modalities inherited from their parents.
I was puzzled by the the section of the article that read "[w]hy do we see a face in the arrangement, when we know it is a bunch of vegetables? And why only when the image is flipped?" I must be the exception that proves the rule, because I immediately saw an upside-down face wearing a bowl as a helmut when I first looked at the Arcimboldo painting, and then couldn't understand why the same painting was then shown right side up beside the original until I started reading the article. Perhaps the cause is an unusually wired brain: I underwent split-brain surgery to remove a central neurocytoma 18 years ago, and subsequently needed to retrain my brain to process information in a new way. One mental task that became slightly loopy and less than reliable was facial recognition.
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