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You aren't alone in your fear of makeup-clad entertainers; people have been frightened by clowns for centuries

smithsonian.com

There's a word- albeit one not recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary or any psychology manual- for the excessive fear of clowns: Coulrophobia.

Not a lot of people actually suffer from a debilitating phobia of clowns; a lot more people, however, just don't like them. Do a Google search for "I hate clowns" and the first hit is ihateclowns.com, a forum for clown-haters that also offers vanity @ihateclowns.com emails. One "I Hate Clowns" Facebook page has just under 480,000 likes. Some circuses have held workshops to help visitors get over their fear of clowns by letting them watch performers transform into their clown persona. In Sarasota, Florida, in 2006, communal loathing for clowns took a criminal turn when dozens of fiberglass clown statues-part of a public art exhibition called "Clowning Around Town" and a nod to the city's history as a winter haven for traveling circuses- were defaced, their limbs broken, heads lopped off, spray-painted; two were abducted and we can only guess at their sad fates.

Even the people who are supposed to like clowns-children-supposedly don't. In 2008, a widely reported University of Sheffield, England, survey of 250 children between the ages of four and 16 found that most of the children disliked and even feared images of clowns. The BBC's report on the study featured a child psychologist who broadly declared, "Very few children like clowns. They are unfamiliar and come from a different era. They don't look funny, they just look odd."

But most clowns aren't trying to be odd. They're trying to be silly and sweet, fun personified. So the question is, when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?

Maybe they always have been.

Clowns, as pranksters, jesters, jokers, harlequins, and mythologized tricksters have been around for ages. They appear in most cultures-Pygmy clowns made Egyptian pharaohs laugh in 2500 BCE; in ancient imperial China, a court clown called YuSze was, according to the lore, the only guy who could poke holes in Emperor Qin Shih Huang's plan to paint the Great Wall of China; Hopi Native Americans had a tradition of clown-like characters who interrupted serious dance rituals with ludicrous antics. Ancient Rome's clown was a stock fool called the stupidus; the court jesters of medieval Europe were a sanctioned way for people under the feudal thumb to laugh at the guys in charge; and well into the 18th and 19th century, the prevailing clown figure of Western Europe and Britain was the pantomime clown, who was a sort of bumbling buffoon.

But clowns have always had a dark side, says David Kiser, director of talent for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. After all, these were characters who reflected a funhouse mirror back on society; academics note that their comedy was often derived from their voracious appetites for food, sex, and drink, and their manic behavior. "So in one way, the clown has always been an impish spirit... as he's kind of grown up, he's always been about fun, but part of that fun has been a bit of mischief," says Kiser.

"Mischief" is one thing; homicidal urges is certainly another. What's changed about clowns is how that darkness is manifest, argued Andrew McConnell Stott, Dean of Undergraduate Education and an English professor at the University of Buffalo, SUNY.

Stott is the author of several articles on scary clowns and comedy, as well as The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, a much-lauded 2009 biography of the famous comic pantomime player on the Regency London stage. Grimaldi was the first recognizable ancestor of the modern clown, sort of the Homo erectus of clown evolution. He's the reason why clowns are still sometimes called "Joeys"; though his clowning was of a theatrical and not circus tradition, Grimaldi is so identified with modern clowns that a church in east London has conducted a Sunday service in his honor every year since 1959, with congregants all dressed in full clown regalia.

In his day, he was hugely visible: It was claimed that a full eighth of London's population had seen Grimaldi on stage. Grimaldi made the clown the leading character of the pantomime, changing the way he looked and acted. Before him, a clown may have worn make-up, but it was usually just a bit of rouge on the cheeks to heighten the sense of them being florid, funny drunks or rustic yokels. Grimaldi, however, suited up in bizarre, colorful costumes, stark white face paint punctuated by spots of bright red on his cheeks and topped with a blue mohawk. He was a master of physical comedy-he leapt in the air, stood on his head, fought himself in hilarious fisticuffs that had audiences rolling in the aisles-as well as of satire lampooning the absurd fashions of the day, comic impressions, and ribald songs.

But because Grimaldi was such a star, the character he'd invented became closely associated with him. And Grimaldi's real life was anything but comedy-he'd grown up with a tyrant of a stage father; he was prone to bouts of depression; his first wife died during childbirth; his son was an alcoholic clown who'd drank himself to death by age 31; and Grimaldi's physical gyrations, the leaps and tumbles and violent slapstick that had made him famous, left him in constant pain and prematurely disabled. As Grimaldi himself joked, "I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night." That Grimaldi could make a joke about it highlights how well known his tragic real life was to his audiences.

Enter the young Charles Dickens. After Grimaldi died penniless and an alcoholic in 1837 (the coroner's verdict: "Died by the visitation of God"), Dickens was charged with editing Grimaldi's memoirs. Dickens had already hit upon the dissipated, drunken clown theme in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers. In the serialized novel, he describes an off-duty clown-reportedly inspired by Grimaldi's son-whose inebriation and ghastly, wasted body contrasted with his white face paint and clown costume. Unsurprisingly, Dickens' version of Grimadli's life was, well, Dickensian, and, Stott says, imposed a "strict economy": For every laugh he wrought from his audiences, Grimaldi suffered commensurate pain.

Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown-he'd even go so far as to say Dickens invented the scary clown-by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the make-up: Says Stott, "It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor." That Dickens's version of Grimaldi's memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.

Meanwhile, on the heels of Grimaldi's fame in Britain, the major clown figure on the Continent was Jean-Gaspard Deburau's Pierrot, a clown with white face paint punctuated by red lips and black eyebrows whose silent gesticulations delighted French audiences. Deburau was as well known on the streets of Paris as Grimaldi was in London, recognized even without his make-up. But where Grimaldi was tragic, Deburau was sinister: In 1836, Deburau killed a boy with a blow from his walking stick after the youth shouted insults at him on the street (he was ultimately acquitted of the murder). So the two biggest clowns of the early modern clowning era were troubled men underneath that face-paint.

After Grimaldi and Deburau's heyday, pantomime and theatrical traditions changed; clowning largely left the theater for the relatively new arena of the circus. The circus got its start in the mid-1760s with British entrepreneur Philip Astley's equestrian shows, exhibitions of "feats of horsemanship" in a circular arena. These trick riding shows soon began attracting other performers; along with the jugglers, trapeze artists, and acrobats, came clowns. By the mid-19th century, clowns had become a sort of "hybrid Grimaldian personality [that] fit in much more with the sort of general, overall less-nuanced style of clowning in the big top," explains Stott.

Clowns were comic relief from the thrills and chills of the daring circus acts, an anarchic presence that complimented the precision of the acrobats or horse riders. At the same time, their humor necessarily became broader-the clowns had more space to fill, so their movements and actions needed to be more obvious. But clowning was still very much tinged with dark hilarity: French literary critic Edmond de Goncourt, writing in 1876, says, "[T]he clown's art is now rather terrifying and full of anxiety and apprehension, their suicidal feats, their monstrous gesticulations and frenzied mimicry reminding one of the courtyard of a lunatic asylum." Then there's the 1892 Italian opera, Pagliacci ( Clowns), in which the cuckolded main character, an actor of the Grimaldian clown mold, murders his cheating wife on stage during a performance. Clowns were unsettling-and a great source for drama.

England exported the circus and its clowns to America, where the genre blossomed; in late 19th century America, the circus went from a one-ring horse act to a three-ring extravaganza that travelled the country on the railways. Venues and humor changed, but images of troubled, sad, tragic clowns remained-Emmett Kelly, for example, was the most famous of the American "hobo" clowns, the sad-faced men with five o'clock shadows and tattered clothes who never smiled, but who were nonetheless hilarious. Kelly's "Weary Willie" was born of actual tragedy: The break-up of his marriage and America's sinking financial situation in the 1930s.

Clowns had a sort of heyday in America with the television age and children's entertainers like Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody's silent partner, and Bozo the Clown. Bozo, by the mid-1960s, was the beloved host of a hugely popular, internationally syndicated children's show - there was a 10-year wait for tickets to his show. In 1963, McDonald's brought out Ronald McDonald, the Hamburger-Happy Clown, who's been a brand ambassador ever since (although heavy is the head that wears the red wig - in 2011, health activists claimed that he, like Joe Camel did for smoking, was promoting an unhealthy lifestyle for children; McDonald's didn't ditch Ronald, but he has been seen playing a lot more soccer).

But this heyday also heralded a real change in what a clown was. Before the early 20th century, there was little expectation that clowns had to be an entirely unadulterated symbol of fun, frivolity, and happiness; pantomime clowns, for example, were characters who had more adult-oriented story lines. But clowns were now almost solely children's entertainment. Once their made-up persona became more associated with children, and therefore an expectation of innocence, it made whatever the make-up might conceal all the more frightening-creating a tremendous mine for artists, filmmakers, writers and creators of popular culture to gleefully exploit to terrifying effect. Says Stott, "Where there is mystery, it's supposed there must be evil, so we think, 'What are you hiding?'"

Most clowns aren't hiding anything, except maybe a bunch of fake flowers or a balloon animal. But again, just as in Grimaldi and Deburau's day, it was what a real-life clown was concealing that tipped the public perception of clowns. Because this time, rather than a tragic or even troubled figure under the slap and motley, there was something much darker lurking.

Even as Bozo was cavorting on sets across America, a more sinister clown was plying his craft across the Midwest. John Wayne Gacy's public face was a friendly, hard-working guy; he was also a registered clown who entertained at community events under the name Pogo. But between 1972 and 1978, he sexually assaulted and killed more than 35 young men in the Chicago area. "You know... clowns can get away with murder," he told investigating officers, before his arrest.

Gacy didn't get away with it-he was found guilty of 33 counts of murder and was executed in 1994. But he'd become identified as the "Killer Clown," a handy sobriquet for newspaper reports that hinged on the unexpectedness of his killing. And bizarrely, Gacy seemed to revel in his clown persona: While in prison, he began painting; many of his paintings were of clowns, some self-portraits of him as Pogo. What was particularly terrifying was that Gacy, a man who'd already been convicted of a sexual assault on a teenage boy in 1968, was given access to children in his guise as an innocuous clown. This fueled America's already growing fears of "stranger danger" and sexual predation on children, and made clowns a real object of suspicion.

After a real life killer clown shocked America, representations of clowns took a decidedly terrifying turn. Before, films like Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth could toy with the notion of the clown with a tragic past-Jimmy Stewart played Buttons, a circus clown who never removed his make-up and who is later revealed to be a doctor on the lam after "mercy killing" his wife-but now, clowns were really scary.

In 1982, Poltergeist relied on transforming familiar banality-the Californian suburb, a piece of fried chicken, the television-into real terror; but the big moment was when the little boy's clown doll comes to life and tries to drag him under the bed. In 1986, Stephen King wrote It, in which a terrifying demon attacks children in the guise of Pennywise the Clown; in 1990, the book was made into a TV mini-series. In 1988, B-movie hit Killer Klowns from Outer Space featured alien clowns harboring sharp-toothed grins and murderous intentions. The next year saw Clownhouse, a cult horror film about escaped mental patients masquerading as circus clowns who terrorize a rural town. Between the late 1980s and now - when the Saw franchise's mascot is a creepy clown-faced puppet -- dozens of films featuring vicious clowns appeared in movie theatres (or, more often, went straight to video), making the clown as reliable a boogeyman as Freddy Kreuger.

Kiser, Ringling's talent spotter and a former clown himself, acknowledged the damage that scary clown images have done to clowning, though he was inclined to downplay the effect. "It's like, 'Oh man, we're going to have to work hard to overcome that one,'" he says.

But anecdotally at least, negative images of clowns are harming clowning as a profession. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't keep track of professional clowns specifically (they're lumped in with comedians, magicians, and other miscellaneous performers), in the mid-2000s, articles began popping up in newspapers across the country lamenting the decline of attendees at clown conventions or at clowning workshop courses. Stott believes that the clown has been "evacuated as a figure of fun" (notably, Stott is personally uncomfortable with clowns and says he finds them "strange"); psychologists suggest that negative clown images are replacing positive clown images.

"You don't really see clowns in those kinds of safe, fun contexts anymore. You see them in movies and they're scary," says Dr. Martin Antony, a professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of the Anti-Anxiety Work Book. "Kids are not exposed in that kind of safe fun context as much as they used to be and the images in the media, the negative images, are still there."

That's creating a vicious circle of clown fear: More scary images means diminished opportunities to create good associations with clowns, which creates more fear. More fear gives more credence to scary clown images, and more scary clown images end up in circulation. Of course, it's difficult to say whether there has been a real rise in the number of people who have clown phobias since Gacy and It. A phobia is a fear or anxiety that inhibits a person's life and clown fears rarely rate as phobias, psychologists say, because one simply isn't confronted by clowns all that often. But clown fear is, Antony says, exacerbated by clowns' representation in the media. "We also develop fears from what we read and see in the media... There's certainly lots of examples of nasty clowns in movies that potentially puts feet on that kind of fear," he says.

From a psychologist's perspective, a fear of clowns often starts in childhood; there's even an entry in the psychologists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, for a fear of clowns, although it's under the umbrella category of a pediatric phobia of costumed characters (sports mascots, Mickey Mouse). "It starts normally in children about the age of two, when they get anxiety about being around strangers, too. At that age, children's minds are still developing, there's a little bit of a blend and they're not always able to separate fantasy from reality," explains Dr. Brenda Wiederhold, a veteran psychologist who runs a phobia and anxiety treatment center in San Diego that uses virtual reality to treat clients.

Most people, she says, grow out of the fear, but not everyone-perhaps as much as 2 percent of the adult population will have a fear of clowns. Adult clown phobics are unsettled by the clown's face-paint and the inability to read genuine emotion on a clown's face, as well as the perception that clowns are able to engage in manic behavior, often without consequences.

But really, what a clown fear comes down to, what it's always come down to, is the person under the make-up. Ringling's Kiser agreed.

"I think we have all experienced wonderful clowns, but we've also all experienced clowns who in their youth or lack of training, they don't realize it, but they go on the attack," Kiser says, explaining that they can become too aggressive in trying to make someone laugh. "One of the things that we stress is that you have to know how to judge and respect people's space." Clowning, he says, is about communicating, not concealing; good clown make-up is reflective of the individual's emotions, not a mask to hide behind-making them actually innocent and not scary.

But have bad, sad, troubled clowns done too much damage? There are two different, conflicting visions of the clown's future.

Stott, for one, sees clowning continuing on its dark path. "I think we'll find that the kind of dark carnival, scary clown will be the dominant mode, that that figure will continue to persist in many different ways," he says, pointing to characters like Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons, who's jaded but funny, or Heath Ledger's version of The Joker in the Batman reboot, who is a terrifying force of unpredictable anarchy. "In many respects, it's not an inversion of what we're used to seeing, it's just teasing out and amplifying those traits we've been seeing for a very long time." Other writers have suggested that the scary clown as a dependable monster under the bed is almost "nostalgically fearful," already bankrupted by overuse.

But there's evidence that, despite the claims of the University of Sheffield study, kids actually do like clowns: Some studies have shown that real clowns have a beneficial affect on the health outcomes of sick children. The January 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Psychology published an Italian study that found that, in a randomized controlled trial, the presence of a therapy clown reduced pre-operative anxiety in children booked for minor surgery. Another Italian study, carried out in 2008 and published in the December 2011 issue of the Natural Medicine Journal found that children hospitalized for respiratory illnesses got better faster after playing with therapeutic clowns.

And Kiser, of course, doesn't see clowning diminishing in the slightest. But good clowns are always in shortage, and it's good clowns who keep the art alive. "If the clown is truly a warm and sympathetic and funny heart, inside of a person who is working hard to let that clown out... I think those battles [with clown fears] are so winnable," he says. "It's not about attacking, it's about loving. It's about approaching from a place of loving and joy and that when you really look at it, you see, that's it really genuine, it's not fake."

About Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

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The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary

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smithsonian.com There's a word- albeit one not recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary or any psychology manual- for the excessive fear of clowns: Coulrophobia. Not a lot of people actually suffer from a debilitating phobia of clowns; a lot more people, however, just don't like them.

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Brothers and sisters, it's that time of year: the season when Halloween pop-up stores appear on every corner. Popular costumes range from the princesses in Frozen to Donald Trump and zombies-which are, I believe, the same outfit.

People go nuts about Halloween. That made me start thinking about the psychology behind the celebration. Halloween is actually an ancient Celtic holiday on which people believed they needed masks to protect themselves from bad spirits that roamed the earth on all Hallows Eve.

Thousands of years later, people are still wearing masks. They hide behind anything from a false smile to Dr. Dre headphones to my personal favorite: people who wear dark glasses in the subway-and these people aren't celebrities.

Then there are the emotional masks, the masks we hide behind because of fear. For example, if we are insecure, we might hide behind the mask of name-dropping. If we are unsure of our power, we can hide behind mask of being a bully. If we don't think the world loves us, we can hide behind mask of anger. We mask the debt we've incurred to pay for lifestyles we can't afford; we pretend things are fine at work, when our jobs are on the line; we pretend things are okay in our marriages when there is distance.

What masks do you wear?

One of the most common reasons we wear masks is what I think of as Imposter Syndrome-the fear that the world is going to find us out. I've heard it described as feeling like a fake, like you don't really belong, or like you aren't really successful, but are just posing as such. It's like my Halloween costume at age seven: I dressed up as a zombie gypsy-something I believed to be terribly scary, until my next door neighbor yanked off my mask and said, "Oh, it's just you."

One of our greatest fears is that if we show our true selves, the world will say, "Oh, it's just you." But being just you is actually the best and most perfect thing you could ever be. As Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself; everyone else is taken." Or if you are interested in the spiritual perspective, the psalmist wrote, "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made".

There are three practical reasons why we should shed our masks. The first is to live into our potential. We have to bring all of who we are to what we do. There are numerous people who have our same skillsets, or maybe an even better one. But none of these people bring the same personality, creativity, and spirit to the job that you do. That's something they can't match. The irony is that we often mask that part of ourselves at work and lose our greatest potential.

The second reason is relief. It is exhausting to live an inauthentic life. You put on a mask or two or ten, then take a few off, then put a couple more on ... It's exhausting! Worst of all, you start forgetting who you really are. As comedian and actress Fanny Brice explained, "Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?"

The third reason is healing. When we wear masks, we carve a piece of ourselves out- withholding parts of ourselves as unworthy. But in relationships, especially in our spiritual relationships, we can't be truly healed unless we offer up all the pieces. It's like handing someone a broken vase and asking him or her to fix it but holding back two or three of the broken pieces. As one of the pastors of Hope City Church in Indianapolis, Indiana explained, "Masks make shallow what God has intended to be deep...Everything in our lives get cheated when we choose to hide ourselves behind our masks."

We weren't born with masks. We put them on, so we can take them off. Start with this simple exercise: Think about a negative messages you have held onto. Ask yourself whether it is true? More than likely, the answer is no. And if it is not, then you have to ask these questions: Why am I carrying that message? If I put it down, what would happen? Probably nothing. The main risk we face is the world's reaction. Opening yourself up threatens others; it invites them reevaluate their own lives. Many times, it forces them to realize that they too have the power to change, but they haven't.

Don't let that stop you. Don't pull your mask partially off then let the world scare you into putting it back on. As the poet E. E. Cummings wrote, "The greatest battle we face as human beings is the battle to protect our true selves from the self the world wants us to become."

Think about the masks you wear and commit to taking them off. Hold your gifts out to the world-no apology, no shame, no regrets. As the old saying goes, every creature has its rightful place, and in that place it becomes beautiful.

This blog was also delivered as a sermon at the historic Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City.

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Brothers and sisters, it's that time of year: the season when Halloween pop-up stores appear on every corner. Popular costumes range from the princesses in Frozen to Donald Trump and zombies-which are, I believe, the same outfit. People go nuts about Halloween. That made me start thinking about the psychology behind the celebration.

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Consider the flightless fluffs of brown otherwise known as herring gull chicks. Since they're entirely dependent on their mothers for food, they're born with a powerful instinct. Whenever they see a bird beak, they frantically peck at it, begging for their favorite food: a regurgitated meal.

But this reflex can be manipulated. Expose the chicks to a fake beak-say, a wooden stick with a red dot that looks like the one on the end of an adult herring gull's beak-and they peck vigorously at that, too. Should the chicks see a wood stick with three red dots, they peck even faster. Abstracting and exaggerating the salient characteristics of a mother gull's beak strengthens the response. The phenomenon is known as the "peak-shift effect," since a peak pecking response comes from a shifted stimulus. In it lies one of the core principles of visual art.

The Truth in the Lie

In 1906, Pablo Picasso was determined to reinvent the portrait and push the boundaries of realism, and one of his early subjects was Gertrude Stein. After months in his Paris studio, carefully reworking the paint on the canvas, Picasso still wasn't satisfied. He didn't finish the painting until after a trip to Spain.

What Picasso saw there that affected him so deeply has been debated-the ancient Iberian art, the weathered faces of Spanish peasants-but his style changed forever. When he returned to Paris, he gave Stein the head of a primitive mask. The perspective was flattened and her face became a series of dramatic angles. Picasso had intentionally misrepresented various aspects of her appearance, turning the portrait into an early work of cubist caricature.

Despite the artistic license, the painting is still recognizable as Stein. Picasso took her most distinctive features-those heavy, lidded eyes and long, aquiline nose-and exaggerated them. Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."

What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people-like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon-faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a "super-stimulus."

The sly connection between the instincts of baby gulls and abstract art is the work of V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. Ramachandran believes the peak-shift effect explains a wide variety of art, from abstract expressionist paintings to ancient religious sculptures like a 12th-century Indian sculpture of the goddess Parvathi with exaggerated feminine features. These creations are all examples of the "deliberate hyperbole" that defines the artistic process, says Ramachandran.

In this sense, the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality-whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit-and make those forms irresistible to the human brain. As Ramachandran puts it, "If herring gulls had an art gallery, they would hang a long stick with three red strips on the wall; they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why they are mesmerized by it. That's all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks."

Ramachandran is a leader in neuroaesthetics, a new scientific field that uses the tools of modern neuroscience, like brain imaging, to unravel the mysteries of art. While much of this research focuses on modern art-it's easier to study visual "hyperbole" in a Picasso than a Vermeer-the scientists believe their findings apply to all artists, even so-called realists. "A Martian who came to earth would be very curious about why all these people go to museums and look at 2D representations," Ramachandran says. "Why does art work? That's the question we're trying to answer."

Reverse-Engineering the Mind

At first glance, the premise of neuroaesthetics seems bizarre: Scientists are using artists to learn about the mind. They're looking for objective facts in the most subjective of places, using paintings and sculptures as sources of experimental data. Sometimes, it seems as if the scientists are simply trying to catch up with insights long ago "discovered" by artists.

"The artist is, in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools," observes Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London and director of the Institute of Neuroesthetics. Picasso had an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of vision-which he expressed in his paintings. Likewise, the power of a Rembrandt self-portrait is not an accident: The Old Masters knew how to captivate the eye and the mind, which is why we still gaze at their canvases in museums. Scientists can learn about the mind by reverse-engineering art.

But neuroaesthetics is also trying to bring precision to the study of art. Unlike traditional approaches, which treat the artwork as a product of historical and cultural forces, neuroaesthetics looks at art through the lens of neuroscience. Neuroaesthetics researchers want to decipher the power of a Picasso or a Rembrandt, to explain the sublime in terms of the visual cortex. All the adjectives we use to describe art-vague words like " beauty" and "elegance"-should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing inherently mysterious about art. Its visual tricks can be decoded. Neuroaestheticians hope to reveal "the universal laws" of painting and sculpture, to find the underlying principles shared by every great work of visual art.

Blame it all on an astonishing set of experiments conducted by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1950s. Scientists long assumed the eye was like a camera, and that our visual reality was composed of dots of light, neatly arranged in time and space. Just as a photograph is made up of a quilt of pixels, so must our eyes create a two-dimensional representation of reflected light, which scientists thought was then seamlessly transmitted to the brain.

But Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated that the brain is much stranger than that. Instead of responding to pixels, cells in the visual cortex respond to straight lines and angles of light. The neurons prefer contrast over brightness, straight edges over curves; contrasts allow us to more efficiently pick out objects. Hubel and Wiesel became the first scientists to describe what reality looks like before it has been perceived, when our mind is still creating our sense of sight.

The findings wowed the scientific community and won Hubel and Wiesel the Nobel Prize. It turns out that the raw material of vision is incomprehensibly bizarre, that all of our visual perceptions begin as a jigsaw puzzle of lines, edges, and angles. The experimental results help explain the aesthetic appeal of abstract paintings.

Giving the Mind a Break

When Hubel and Wiesel were still in diapers, Dutch artist Piet Mondrian was painting works in an attempt to show, as he put it, that every visual form is ultimately reducible to "the plurality of straight lines in rectangular opposition." Hoping to reveal the "constant truths regarding forms," Mondrian turned his paintings into minimalist arrangements of rectangles and primary colors. As Zeki, author of Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, notes, the geometrical art of painters like Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich is remarkably similar to the geometry of lines sensed by the visual cortex-as if these painters broke apart the brain and saw how seeing itself occurs.

Mondrian wasn't consciously trying to imitate the receptive fields of our brain cells. He was just trying to create a visually arresting image. But it was precisely that aesthetic impulse, that desire to captivate the eye, that led Mondrian to create such neurologically "accurate" art.

We may enjoy such paintings because the mind is naturally drawn to the kind of visual stimuli that are easier for it to interpret, suggests Ramachandran. It prefers pictures that accommodate its peculiar way of seeing. "It may not be coincidental," write Ramachandran and philosopher William Hirstein, "that what the cells find interesting is also what the organism as a whole finds interesting. And perhaps, in some circumstances, 'interesting' translates into 'pleasing.'"

In other words, the strange beauty of a Mondrian is rooted in the strange habits of visual neurons, obsessed as they are with straight lines. Abstract art seems so bizarre-so unrepresentative of anything at all-but it takes advantage of the innate properties of the brain. The geometric brushstrokes are a nod to the quirks of our visual neurons, which prefer straight lines. As Zeki notes, "If cells in the brain did not respond to this kind of stimulus, then this kind of art would not exist."

Teasing the Brain's Limits

Artists have learned to exploit other features of the visual system, too. The brain is an evolved machine, subject to all sorts of biological constraints. All of our color perception, for example, is wrangled from the responses of three different photoreceptors in the eye. Great art manages to translate these "limitations" into riveting creations.

When Mark Rothko painted an entire canvas in three shades of maroon, or Josef Albers painted his intensely colorful Homage to the Square in five slightly different shades of yellow, these abstract artists were tickling the parts of our visual cortex concerned with the processing of color. The visual cortex excels at perceiving contrasts between different colors, such as blue and yellow, but these paintings deliberately avoided sharp contrasts of color. The result is that the subtly distinct shades seem to shimmer and shift before our very eyes. We are riveted by these stimuli we can't understand.

The strategy of taking advantage of the brain's imperfections isn't confined to modern art. Consider Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting in the world. The smile is notoriously enigmatic, a precise summary of an ambiguous emotion. But what is it about those slyly upturned lips that make the portrait so intriguing?

Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard and author of Vision and Art, argues that da Vinci exploits the peculiar structure of the retina. The facial expression of the Mona Lisa fluctuates depending on which part of our retina we are using to look at her mouth, she explains. When we first look at the painting, our eyes are automatically drawn to her eyes, which means our peripheral vision perceives her smile. This part of the retina naturally focuses on the shadows cast by her cheekbones, which serve to exaggerate the curvature of her lips. As a result, our peripheral vision concludes that the Mona Lisa is smiling. Livingstone demonstrated this by blurring the entire painting with Adobe Photoshop to replicate what we would see if we were relying solely on peripheral vision. The end result: a much happier Mona Lisa.

But when we focus on her mouth, the retina ignores the shadows-the blurriness disappears. Instead, we fixate on the lips of the Mona Lisa, which are virtually expressionless. All of a sudden, she is no longer happy: The painting has literally changed before our eyes. This ambiguity is intriguing, Livingstone argues, as we keep staring at the painting to figure out what she's actually feeling. "I do not mean to take away the mystery of Leonardo," Livingstone told the New York Times. "It took the rest of us 500 years to figure out what he was up to."

Bare Spots and the Peekaboo Principle

While much of neuroaesthetics focuses on the most elemental aspects of vision-the sensations detected by the retina and visual cortex-the field is also trying to explain art that engages higher levels of cognition. Look, for example, at a late Cézanne painting. As Cézanne aged, his landscapes became filled by more and more naked canvas. No one had ever done this before. The painting is clearly incomplete, complained critics; how could it be art? Cézanne was unfazed. He knew his paintings were only literally blank.

The incompleteness effect is most apparent in Cézanne's watercolors of Mont Sainte-Victoire and the surrounding Provencal landscape. In these pieces, Cézanne wanted to paint only the essential elements, the necessary skeleton of form. He summarized the river in the foreground as a single swerve of blue. The groves of chestnut trees are little more than dabs of dull green, interrupted occasionally by a subtle stroke of umber. And then there is the mountain. Cézanne often condensed the foreboding mass of Mont Sainte-Victoire into a thin line of dilute paint, just a jagged silhouette. The painting is defined by its voids.

And yet when you look at the painting, the mountain is there, an implacable presence. Our mind easily invents the form that Cézanne's paint barely insinuates. Although the mountain is literally invisible-Cézanne has only implied its presence-its looming gravity anchors the painting. The brain has seamlessly filled in the empty spaces of the canvas.

According to Ramachandran, "Mont Sainte-Victoire" is pleasurable precisely because it is so spare. Cézanne's blank spots force the brain to engage in perceptual problem-solving, as it struggles to find meaning in the brushstrokes. "A puzzle picture (or one in which meaning is implied rather than explicit) may paradoxically be more alluring than one in which the message is obvious," observe Ramachandran and Hirstein. "There appears to be an element of 'peekaboo' in some types of art-thereby ensuring that the visual system 'struggles' for a solution and does not give up too easily." In other words, the search for meaning is itself rewarding: The brain likes to solve problems. We actually enjoy looking for Cézanne's missing mountain.

The "peekaboo" principle explains why subtle erotica (a supermodel shrouded in lingerie) is not only more alluring than hardcore pornography but also has much in common with the fractured forms of cubism. Both compel the mind to assemble reality out of its shards. In both cases, the effectiveness of the pictures depends on their ability to inspire our imagination, to create a sensory problem that our brain wants to solve.

Unweaving the Rainbow

If Playboy and Picasso can be explained by the same principle, is neuroaesthetics really dealing with art? Or is it just revealing the perceptual machinery activated by any complex visual stimulus? After all, it's easy to make the mind engage in problem-solving: Just look at the haphazard lines drawn by a 3-year-old. Are they equivalent to a Cézanne watercolor?

Attempts to define art are nothing new. But Ramachandran is seeking to define it from the perspective of the brain, and he's in the midst of a brain-imaging experiment he believes will help. Subjects lie in an fMRI machine and view examples of kitsch-art objects ridiculed for their shallowness or sentimentality-as well as fine art, like the canvases that hang in museums. A Christmas lawn ornament of Santa Claus might be juxtaposed with a Michelangelo sculpture; an image from a Hallmark card might be compared to a Rembrandt painting. By measuring brain activity, Ramachandran hopes to find out why visual stimuli that seem so superficially similar can generate such different aesthetic reactions.

"The interesting thing about kitsch is that it often looks like art," explains Ramachandran. "But it's not art, because it doesn't trigger the same intensity of feeling." He suggests that while kitsch often relies on the same tricks as great art-universal principles such as the peak-shift effect and the peekaboo principle-these tricks aren't as well executed. "Anybody can learn these visual rules," he says. "But you still need talent and training in order to turn them into fine art."

There will always be something mysterious about the visceral power of a Picasso or the perplexing smile of the Mona Lisa -but that doesn't mean the mystery can't be probed. By articulating the universals of painting and sculpture, the neuroaestheticians allow us to better understand what transforms a mass of brushstrokes into a masterpiece.

And if the brain scanner can't detect any reliable differences between kitsch and art, well, sometimes the failed experiments are the most instructive. It's possible, after all, that art has no universal definition: Perhaps each work of art activates the brain in its own peculiar way. Perhaps there is no lowest common denominator of aesthetic experience that can be detected in an fMRI machine.

The poet John Keats worried that Newton's investigations into color had "unwoven the rainbow," that scientist had destroyed the beauty of light by investigating it. But beauty is not so fragile. Neuroaesthetics doesn't diminish the impact of art or puncture the power of the imagination. Instead, it leaves us with an even more profound appreciation for the intuitive wisdom of great artists. These are the geniuses who captivate us with nothing but a flat surface and some pigment.

"I've always loved art, but now I'm in awe of it," Ramachandran says. "These guys understood the mind in a very deep way. All I'm trying to do is figure out what artists figured out a long time ago."

This is Your Brain on Picasso

10 Perceptual Principles of Great Art

PEAK SHIFT: We find deliberate distortions of a stimulus even more exciting than the stimulus itself-which is why cartoon caricatures grab our attention.

GROUPING: It feels nice when the distinct parts of a picture can be grouped into a pattern or form. The brain likes to find the signal amid the noise.

BALANCE: Successful art makes use of its entire representational space, and spreads its information across the entire canvas.

CONTRAST: Because of how the visual cortex works, it's particularly pleasing for the brain to gaze at images rich in contrast, like thick black outlines or sharp angles-or, as in the geometric art of Mondrian, both at once.

ISOLATION: Sometimes less is more. By reducing reality to its most essential features-think a Matisse that's all bright color and sharp silhouettes-artists amplify the sensory signals we normally have to search for.

PERCEPTUAL PROBLEM SOLVING: Just as we love solving crossword puzzles, we love to "solve" abstract paintings such as cubist still lifes or Cézanne landscapes.

SYMMETRY: Symmetrical things, from human faces to Roman arches, are more attractive than asymmetrical ones.

REPETITION, RHYTHM, ORDERLINESS: Beauty is inseparable from the appearance of order. Consider the garden paintings of Monet. Pictures filled with patterns, be it subtle color repetitions or formal rhythms, appear more elegant and composed.

GENERIC PERSPECTIVE: We prefer things that can be observed from multiple viewpoints, such as still lifes and pastoral landscapes, to the fragmentary perspective of a single person. They contain more information, making it easier for the brain to deduce what's going on.

METAPHOR: Metaphor encourages us to see the world in a new way: Two unrelated objects are directly compared, giving birth to a new idea. Picasso did this all the time-he portrayed the bombing of Guernica, for example, with the imagery of a bull, a horse, and a lightbulb.

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Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind

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