American Scientist

In 2014, I experienced a memorable disconnect between art and science while listening to an audio tour about René Magritte at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Over the years, I have often used the Belgian surrealist’s paintings to introduce my lectures on vision and the brain because many of his works are astute studies in perception and illusion that spark students’ imaginations. The audio tour, which accompanied the exhibition Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938, was full of interesting art-critic insights, but I was struck by what was missing: Even as the experts analyzed Magritte’s aesthetics, they showed little grasp of the neuroscience behind how we perceive his art, or of the rules of perception that Magritte exploited—and cleverly violated—to achieve his surreal effects. As a visual neuroscientist, I felt I could articulate a more nuanced characterization of Magritte’s works, one that would enrich our appreciation of them by including an understanding of visual perception and how the brain constructs rich 3D scenes from daubs of paint on a flat canvas.