Real Art

A recent study commissioned by an art museum in the Netherlands looked into the difference in brain activity between people viewing an original work of art, and people looking at printed replications of the same works.

Independent researchers used eye-tracking technology, an EEG brain scanner, and MRI scans to track the eye-movement and brain activity of subjects who viewed actual paintings and posters featuring those paintings, to see if there was a difference in terms of their neurological experience, and in terms of where their eyes went (and lingered) while looking at these respective presentations.

They found that the real paintings used in the study evoked a far larger positive stimulus (a pleasant sensation that’s trackable as brain activity and which can lead to the repetition of behaviors that sparked said sensations in the future) in viewers, compared to viewing the same painting in poster form.