Neuroesthetics seeks to identify the neural basis of aesthetic experience - how does the brain give rise to the perception of beauty? A new paper in Network indicates that artists consistently create works which contain the same statistical properties as natural scenes, even when the objects being depicted do not themselves contain such statistics when photographed.
Redies, Hanisch, Blickhan and Denzler review previous work demonstrating that the "spatial frequencies" of natural scenes (essentially, their spatial complexity) follow a 1/f power spectrum, where increased spatial complexity is increasingly restricted to smaller portions of the scene. This property is sometimes referred to as "scale invariance" and is reflected in a variety of natural data, including human reaction time data, spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity, and perhaps in the connectivity of biological networks - neural and social alike.
clipped from scienceblogs.com
Developing Intelligence : Beauty in the Brain: Fractal Scene Statistics and Ease of Processing
