People care about origins. A lot. The difference between a baseball used to break a record and an ordinary baseball is millions, an authentic painting and a forgery tens of millions. And your original stuffed animal versus a replacement, well, that’s priceless.
This is why Todd McFarlane paid 3 million dollars for Mark McGwire’s home run ball, why Han van Meegeren’s forgery of Vermeer’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery hangs in a small gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut, and why two-year-olds erupt into tantrums when mom tries convincing them that their new stuffed animal is same as their old one.
It also helps us explain the power of labels. People prefer Perrier and expensive bottles of wine even though studies show that most people cannot identify tap water from Perrier water or 10 dollar wine from 90 dollar wine in blind taste tests. One experiment even showed that kids prefer carrots from McDonald’s bags. How we taste greatly depends on what we think we’re tasting and where we think it came from.
We care about origins because we are essentialists. We pay special attention to the history of an object – who touched it, where it has been, and what its purpose was, its essence. We subscribe to, as Paul Bloom explains, “the notion that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters.”
Bloom tells the dark story of the art collector and Nazi Hermann Goering. Goering’s prized possession was Johannes Vermeer’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, which he acquired in exchange for 137 paintings worth about $10 million (in today’s dollars). Unfortunately, Goering discovered at the Nuremberg trails that his Vermeer was actually a forgery done by Dutch painter Han van Meegeren. Upon hearing the news Goering’s biographer said he looked, “as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.”
This brings me to a new study out of Oxford University by Mengfei Huang, Holly Bridge, Martin Kemp and Andrew Parker. Their experiment was simple enough: 14 subjects were placed in an fMRI machine and given the following instructions:
In this experiment you will see a sequence of 50 Rembrandt paintings. Before each image appears, an audio prompt will announce whether the upcoming painting is ‘authentic’ or a ‘copy’ (Please see background for further information on copies). A blank screen will appear for a few seconds after each image to allow you to relax your gaze.
Here was the catch. Half of the participants were told that the authentic Rembrandts were actually forgeries and vice versa. The swap was designed to give scientists an opportunity to distinguish neural responses generated by the art itself and the attribution of the art.
I’ll leave it to Jonah Lehrer to explain the results:
The first thing the researchers discovered is that there was no detectable difference in the response of visual areas to Rembrandt and “school of Rembrandt” works of art… it’s not exactly surprising that such similar paintings would elicit virtually identical sensory responses. It takes years of training before critics can reliably discern real Rembrandt from copies. And even then there is often extensive disagreement, as the 1995 Metropolitan show demonstrates.
However, the scientists did locate a pattern of activity that appeared whenever a painting was deemed to be authentic, regardless of whether or not it was actually “real.” In such instances, subjects showed a spike in activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a chunk of brain just behind the eyes that is often associated with perceptions of reward, pleasure and monetary gain. (According to the scientists, this activation reflects “the increase in the perceived value of the artwork.”) Interestingly, there was no difference in orbitofrontal response when the stamp of authenticity was applied to a fake Rembrandt, as the brain area responded just as robustly. The quality of art seemed to be irrelevant.
We want to believe, as Lehrer concludes, that pleasure is simple but there is obviously much more to it than that. The brain is a myriad of neural connections, most of which are unconscious, and a full neurological description of how something like a Rembrandt gives us pleasure is a long way off.
