Brain scans could one day be used to tell a Dali from a Picasso

Can brain scans help classify art? Well, researchers from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan seem to have found the answer.

Lead researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani insists brain activity patterns can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso.

According to John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, the brain has an "abstract code" for different artistic styles, which could one day be used to classify art.

In the study, 12 students were shown dozens of Picassos and Dali's paintings while the researchers scanned their brains using functional MRI and identified patterns in activity that were unique to each artist.

To identify the artists, the program not only relied on visual aspect, it also looked at the activity in multiple brain regions.

When the brain scans produced by students looking at fresh paintings by the same artists were fed in the program, it could identify the painter better, reports New Scientist.

It was correct 83 per cent of the time among the six students who were art majors and 62 per cent of the time among the others.

The study appears in NeuroReport.