第1段

An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to stimulate the brain’s amygdala, for instance. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces so moving.

第一段：

一门名为神经美学的新兴学科正试图为艺术研究带来科学客观性，并已经让我们更好地理解了许多杰作。例如，印象派绘画的模糊图像似乎能够刺激大脑的杏仁核。由于杏仁核在我们的情感中起到关键作用，这一发现或许能够解释为什么许多人会觉得这些作品如此感人动人。

第2段

Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from Mondrian’s geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock’s seemingly haphazard arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to like such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an inclination to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that this mentality would have even more impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

第二段：

那么，这种方法是否也能够解释二十世纪抽象艺术的作品，例如蒙德里安的几何色块或者波洛克看似随意的溅洒在画布上的作品呢？怀疑者认为人们声称喜欢这类作品只是因为它们出名。我们确实有一种随波逐流的倾向。例如，当被要求做简单的知觉判断，比如将一个形状与其旋转图像进行匹配时，如果看到其他人做同样的选择，人们经常会选择一个明显错误的答案。可以想象，这种心态在模糊的艺术欣赏这个含糊不清的概念上会有更大的影响，因为在这里没有对错的答案。

第3段

Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings – either the creations of famous abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many were labelled incorrectly – volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp‘s messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense the artist’s vision in paintings, even if they can’t explain why.

第三段：

麻省波士顿学院的安吉丽娜·霍利-道兰对这一辩论做出了回应，她请志愿者观看一对绘画作品，其中包括著名抽象艺术家的作品以及婴儿、黑猩猩和大象的涂鸦。然后他们需要判断他们更喜欢哪个。其中三分之一的绘画作品没有标题，而许多作品的标签被错误地标注，导致志愿者可能会误以为他们正在观看黑猩猩的凌乱笔触，而实际上他们正在看一件备受赞誉的杰作。在每组试验中，志愿者通常更喜欢著名艺术家的作品，即使他们相信它是由动物或孩子创作的。似乎观看者能够感知到绘画作品中艺术家的想法，即使他们无法解释为什么。

第4段

Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works that are neither entirely abstract nor clearly representational. In one study, Pepperell and his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how ‘powerful’ they considered an artwork to be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. The longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny, and the greater their neural activity. It would seem that the brain sees these images as puzzles, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding is the moment of recognition.

第四段：

卡迪夫大学的艺术家罗伯特·佩佩雷尔创作了一些既不完全抽象也不明确再现的模糊作品。在一项研究中，佩佩雷尔和他的合作者请志愿者判断他们认为一个艺术作品有多“有力”并且他们是否在作品中看到了任何熟悉的东西。他们回答这些问题所花的时间越长，他们对被审查的作品评价得越高，大脑活动越强烈。似乎大脑将这些图像视为谜题，解读含义越困难，认知结果越有回报。

第5段

And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour? Mondrian’s works are deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. With the originals, volunteers’ eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the image, but with the altered versions they would flit across a piece more rapidly. As a result, the volunteers considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they later rated the work.

第五段：

那么，蒙德里安这种仅由水平和垂直线条构成、边缘彩块的绘画作品如何呢？通过眼动追踪研究，证明这些作品是经过精心构思的，并且简单地旋转一幅作品会彻底改变我们对它的视角。在原作中，志愿者的目光倾向于停留在图像的某些地方，但在改变后的版本中，他们的目光会更快地穿过整个作品。因此，当他们后来对这些作品进行评价时，志愿者认为改变后的版本不太令人愉悦。

第6段

In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to compare original paintings with ones which he had altered by moving objects around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a Van Gogh still life or an abstract by Miró. Vartanian also found that changing the composition of the paintings reduced activation in those brain areas linked with meaning and interpretation.

第六段：

在一项类似的研究中，多伦多大学的奥辛·瓦尔塔尼安请志愿者比较原始绘画与他通过在画框内移动物体而改变的绘画作品。他发现几乎每个人都更喜欢原始作品，无论是梵高的静物还是米罗的抽象作品。瓦尔塔尼安还发现，改变绘画作品的构图会减弱与意义和解释相关的脑区的活跃度。

第7段

In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analysed the visual intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists use a key level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but too much results in a kind of ‘perceptual overload’, according to Forsythe. What’s more, appealing pieces both abstract and representational, show signs of ‘fractals’- repeated motifs recurring in different scales. Fractals are common throughout nature, for example in the shapes of mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier to process such patterns.

第七段：

在另一个实验中，利物浦大学的亚历克斯·福西思分析了不同艺术作品的视觉复杂性，她的研究结果表明，许多艺术家使用一定水平的细节来取悦大脑。太少会让作品乏味，但太多会导致一种“感知过载”，根据福西思的说法。而且，无论是抽象作品还是具象作品，吸引人的作品都显示出“分形”特征，即在不同尺度上重复出现的图案。分形在自然界中很常见，例如山峰的形状或树枝的分布。可能我们的视觉系统在处理这种模式时更容易。

第8段

It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer’s moment of creation. This has led some to wonder whether Pollock’s works feel so dynamic because the brain reconstructs the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be down to our brain’s ‘mirror neurons’, which are known to mimic others’ actions. The hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular, works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten.

第八段：

令人着迷的是，大脑在看到手写字母时似乎会处理运动，仿佛我们在重新演绎写作者创作的瞬间。这导致一些人猜测波洛克的作品之所以如此有活力，是因为大脑重建了艺术家绘画时所使用的充满活力的动作。这可能归因于我们的大脑中的“镜像神经元”，它们已知会模仿他人的行为。然而，这个假设需要经过彻底的测试。甚至可能有可能通过神经美学研究来理解一些艺术作品的持久性。尽管时代的潮流可能塑造了当前的流行，但最适应我们视觉系统的作品可能最有可能在前几代潮流被遗忘后长存。

第9段

It’s still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics – and these studies are probably only a taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art appreciation to a set of scientific laws. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the style of a particular artist, their place in history and the artistic environment of their time. Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with different interpretations. In some ways, it’s not so different to science, where we are constantly looking for systems and decoding meaning so that we can view and appreciate the world in a new way.

第九段：

神经美学领域仍处于初期阶段 - 这些研究可能只是未来的一点点味道。然而，把艺术欣赏简化为一套科学定律是愚蠢的。我们不应低估特定艺术家的风格、他们在历史上的地位以及其时代的艺术环境的重要性。抽象艺术既具有挑战性，又有自由发挥不同的解释。在某种程度上，它与科学并没有那么不同，我们不断寻找系统并解码意义，以便以新的方式观看和欣赏世界。