Summary

Ramachandran explains the rest of his rules of aesthetics in Chapter 8. He defines contrast, which he calls “the minimum requirement of art” (219), as a change in luminescence, color or some other property between two contiguous regions. Contrast gets our attention, possibly for reasons relating to our time as tree dwellers. Isolation creates what Ramachandran calls “an attentional bottleneck” (221), forcing us to focus on something that has been made unique simply by being the only thing around. Peekaboo, hiding part of an object, plays into our innate love of solving puzzles to get us to focus our attention on figuring out what whole that part is a part of.

Ramachandran says that we are drawn to a certain degree of orderliness but hate coincidence, like the only tree in a painting appearing exactly in the middle of the picture. Too much order is boring...