Food for Thought: Creating Edible Illusions--and Great Art [Slide Show]
This is the 10th article in the Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions.
![Food for Thought: Creating Edible Illusions--and Great Art [Slide Show]](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/751877CD-B2A2-4256-B1E8DE290D948132.jpg?w=590&h=393)
Food for Thought: Creating Edible Illusions--and Great Art [Slide Show]
- Edible pointillism Pointillist painters such as Seurat and Signac juxtaposed multiple individual points to create color blends that were very different from the colors in the original dots. But in a very real sense, all art is pointillism. In fact, all visual perception is pointillism. Our retinas are sheets of photoreceptors, each sampling a finite circular area of visual space. Each photoreceptor then connects to downstream neural circuits that build our perception of objects, faces, loved ones and everything else. Thus, vision itself is largely a pointillist illusion, colored by a huge amount of guesstimation and filling in on the part of our brains. It doesn't matter that the painter uses brushstrokes versus fields of dots to define surfaces.
The dots that compose the accompanying images are multicolored jelly beans, which is clever—and delicious. Eat your heart out, Seurat. Jelly Belly Candy Co. - Chicken and egg Spanish artist Din Matamoro provides a unique perspective on developmental biology's most fundamental question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In Matamoro's fried eggs, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in an unusual and slightly unsettling fashion: the shape of each fried egg resembles the chicken that the egg would have become—or, perhaps, the hen that laid the egg in the first place.
Ambiguity illusions such as these recapitulate visual perception as a type of ontogeny in and of itself. Objects, in this case chickens, are built in the henhouses of our minds from nuggets of visual information sent from the retina. These little visual giblets activate circuits that process animal shapes (birds, in this case) as well as circuits that process food data. This kind of multichannel processing is at the heart of all ambiguity: The neural basis of ambiguous perception is two or more brain circuits that compete for dominance in our awareness. Din Matamoro - Medusa Marinara Brazilian-origin artist Vik Muniz also likes to play with his food. His "Medusa Marinara" is a visual pun on Caravaggio's Medusa, and it portrays an illusion of ambiguity that works at multiple levels. The red marinara sauce in Muniz's Medusa reminds the viewer of the blood sprouting from Medusa's severed neck in Caravaggio's version, and the spaghetti noodles around Medusa's head can be perceived as Caravaggio's Medusa's snakes-for-hair (an ambiguity illusion in and of itself). Art copyright Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
- Foodscape 2 Here's another example of how the brain puts together information from multiple streams. Visual data from each point of the image is transduced from light to electrochemical signals in the retina, and then transmitted to the brain where individual features are constructed from the information in the image. Those discrete features are broadcast to multiple high-level visual circuits at once; circuits that recognize faces, circuits that detect and characterize motion, circuits for landscapes and places, and circuits for recognizing and processing food are just a few of the brain paths that receive this basic information. In Warner's art both the landscape/place and food-processing circuits are activated. (The other circuits receive the information but ignore it as irrelevant because there are no faces, motion, etcetera in the image.) And voilà! We see a delicious plate of cold cuts as well as an overcast sky from exactly the same data. http://www.carlwarner.com
- Foodscapes Art can be more than just a feast for your eyes. The images in the accompanying slide look, at first sight, like paintings of regular landscapes. But look closer: these are actual photographs of food stuffs laid out to re-create various types of scenery and terrains. London photographer Carl Warner arranges the meats and vegetables to create each environment as if in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and then photographs the scene in layers from foreground to background.
By using solely meats and breads in the bottom row images, for example, Warner captures the feel of old sepia postcards from the turn-of-the-century American prairie, complete with a breadstick log cabin, serrano ham skies and a prosciutto river. Please wait while we get something to eat…. Okay, we're back. http://www.carlwarner.com - A lot to digest Arcimboldo's composite heads demonstrate that, neuroscientifically speaking, the whole can be much more than the sum of the parts. Clever arrangements of individual fruits, flowers, legumes and roots become exquisite portraiture in their entirety, such as in the likeness of Rodolfo II of Hapsburg [left], here depicted as Vertunno, the god of transformations, or in the artist's self-portraits as Summer and Autumn [middle and right].
The brain builds representations of objects from individual features, like line segments and tiny patches of color. You detect an eyeball in the Summer portrait not because there is a retinal cell that perceives eyeballs but because the thousands of retinal photoreceptors that overlay the area of the painting that depicts an eye react to the various shades of color and luminance in such a way that high-level neuronal circuits later integrate the information and match it to the brain's template of an eye. The output from those same photoreceptors also activates the high-level object-tuned neurons that recognize turnips, figs and pickles, which makes images like these so fun to look at.
Last but not least, Arcimboldo's masterpieces also bring to mind the old adage that you are what you eat. So you should avoid fruits and nuts (at least, according to Jim Davis' Garfield the cat). "Rudolf II" : Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY; "Summer" : Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria/ The Bridgeman Art Library; "Autumn: Louvre, Paris, France/ Lauros / Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library - Same ordinary bowl of veggies--or is it? Turned upside down, the bowl of vegetables from the previous slide becomes a whimsical portrait of a man's head, replete with bowler hat.
There are several interesting aspects to this illusion. First, why do we see a face in the arrangement when we know that it really is just a bunch of vegetables? The answer, as we explain in more detail in our previous Mind Matters article "Illusions: What's in a face?," is that 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 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 much more clearly when we flip the image vertically? The answer is that the same brain mechanisms that make face processing fast and effortless are optimized to process right-side-up faces, so upside-down faces are much harder to see and recognize. "Vegetable Gardener" : Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona, Italy/ The Bridgeman Art Library - An ordinary bowl of veggies This still life by Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo includes the ingredients for his favorite minestrone soup, and the bowl in which to serve it. But look again: there is something else hidden in the veggies. Turn to the next slide to find out. "Vegetable Gardener" : Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona, Italy/ The Bridgeman Art Library
