It’s been said that reading is the most complex operation performed by the human brain, and if we could thoroughly understand the mechanisms of reading, few secrets of the brain would remain hidden from us.
For anyone interested in understanding how we read, and how we write, a torrent of recent studies in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology have radically expanded our knowledge of how the human brain performs these infinitely complex tasks.
The most fundamental neuroscientific studies of vision have revealed with astonishing precision how light projected onto the retina is transformed into electro-chemical impulses that are transmitted to an area at the back of the brain known as the primary visual cortex or V1.
From there, signals reach other areas of the brain that respond to color, the orientation of lines, motion, and other constituent elements of the visual world.
Scientists can now demonstrate the high degree of specialization in visual processing through brain imaging techniques that detect increased uptake of oxygen in clusters of neurons activated by specific visual tasks.
Studies of the brain have also shown how monochrome patterns activate most powerfully cells in the visual cortex that are indifferent to color but selective for the orientation of lines and shapes, some firing in response to straight lines, others in response to diagonals.
At this level, neural responses to characters by Dong Qichang are no different from those elicited by an abstract painting by Franz Kline.
Calligraphy, however, is not abstract art. It is writing, and it engages systems within the brain that are essential to the use of language, both spoken and written. Because of this fact, we are fortunate in being able to draw on a body of research that illuminates how the brain processes language and in particular how we read.
Through the use of fMRI imaging, it is possible to know which areas of the brain are activated as readers transform the graphic patterns of script into units of semantic and phonological meaning.
This is all very interesting, but what’s in it for us? Again, we can raise the question of what value does this kind of work hold for art historians or, more generally, for students of the humanities.
Semir Zeki, one of the foremost researchers in the neuroscience of vision, wrote:
[a]ll visual art is expressed through the brain and must therefore obey the laws of the brain, whether in conception, execution or appreciation, and no theory of aesthetics that is not substantially based on the activity of the brain is ever likely to be complete, let alone profound.
I believe Zeki is correct, but his position needs to be defended and its value demonstrated in studies of actual works of art.
I’ll start with Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky or Tianshu, probably the first work by any Chinese artist to reach a truly global audience. First displayed in Beijing in the late 1980s, this work has been shown in various forms all over the world.
In most of the installations, huge scrolls hanging from the gallery ceiling and big wall texts frame stitched volumes lying open on the floor or on big tables. All bear characters printed from thousands of pieces of wooden type carved by Xu Bing.
At first glance, the beautifully designed pages of the books hold out the promise of meaning to anyone who can read Chinese — as Xu Bing has said recently, it is the seriousness with which the work was executed that gives it is power.
But as one draws closer and begins to focus on the characters, everything falls apart. The graphs invented by Xu Bing look like Chinese but are not; they yield no semantic or phonological value, only nonsense.
A Book from the Sky has elicited a torrent of commentary worldwide. Some critics have derided the "formalistic, abstract, subjective, irrational, anti-art, anti-traditional qualities" of Xu Bing’s project. Others have praised it as a sophisticated post-modern critique of the validity of language itself.
Among the responses that I find most interesting are those of confident readers of Chinese who, upon encountering Xu Bing’s invented characters for the first time, report a sensation of discomfort and unease and ask themselves not just "What’s wrong with this writing" but "What’s wrong with me?"
The shock of looking at a text one expects to be able to read and then discovering that it makes no sense recalls the dilemma of patients suffering from the neurological disorder known as alexia, "the acquired inability to comprehend written language as the consequence of brain damage."
How does A Book from the Sky induce this unsettling effect?
Like a computer outfitted with a normally reliable software program, the brain armed with knowledge of Chinese yields to the compulsion to read and goes into action on Xu Bing’s characters. In neurological terms, the visual processing in the right hemisphere probably works fine, but things are disrupted when the area in the left hemisphere identified by Dr. Tan tries to do its work: this area of the brain fails to decode the graphs as it attempts to match them to lexical items stored in memory, and the reason why is clear: there is nothing stored in memory that exactly corresponds to the graphs that Xu Bing invented.
The would-be reader of A Book from the Sky soon realizes that the search for meaning is futile. Expressed in terms of Dr. Tan’s discoveries, this means that the intricate neural choreography that enables reading of real Chinese texts collapses as the all-important area of the left hemisphere that sorts and coordinates visual-spatial information comes close but ultimately fails, again and again, to match what is seen to what is known.
There is real potential for collaborative research between people like us, in the humanities, and colleagues in the sciences, and, as in any courtship or rapprochement, somebody has to make the first move, even at the risk of looking a bit foolish.
This article is adapted from a paper given by Robert E. Harrist, Jr., Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art History at Columbia University.
His comments in full can be heard in the video above.
