A painted street, a painted face, a painted ocean: in brain scanners, these scenes sometimes stir more activity than their photographic twins. The effect puzzles at first glance, since paintings discard optical detail. Yet that very act of curation appears to recruit the visual cortex and limbic circuitry in ways that standard images rarely manage.
When an artist builds a so‑called realistic image, the goal is not optical fidelity but perceptual leverage. Edges grow slightly sharper where attention should land; contrast and color saturation bend toward emotionally salient regions; background noise is compressed. This amounts to a manual hack of predictive coding in the visual system: the painting exaggerates the cues that confirm the brain’s internal model of faces, bodies, landscapes. The match between expectation and input increases neural gain in regions tied to salience detection and episodic memory encoding, including the amygdala and hippocampus.
Photographs, by contrast, obey the optics of a lens, not the priorities of a mind. They preserve irrelevant texture and geometry that raise sensory entropy without adding narrative value. Realistic paintings quietly reverse this ratio, discarding extraneous detail while amplifying gesture, gaze direction, and light gradients that signal intent and mood. Functional imaging studies show that such stylized realism can boost activity in higher‑order association cortices, where meaning and memory traces are integrated, even as early visual areas receive no more raw information than from the original photo. The canvas is poorer in data yet richer in significance, and the brain responds to that surplus of meaning rather than to pixels alone.
