Secrets of the Mona Lisa is no more!

[Eriksson]

Those who are still puzzled by the mysterious smile of Mona Lisa, looking at us through the centuries from the famous paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, New Scientist magazine offers relaxing. According to journalists, no mystery no more, science is finally it opened.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote this portrait between 1503 and 1506 year. Supposedly it was a picture of Florentine wife of Francesco del Giocondo, after which painting got its name. Gioconda all the time seems different: only that her face luchilos fun - and now the next moment she looks absolutely serious. This happens because our eyes send conflicting signals to the brain. Different cells of the retina responsible for the transmission of different types of information to the brain as it were, through various "channels". Each "channel" can encode data, for example, about the size of the object, the picture clarity, brightness, or its location in the field of view. "Sometimes one channel is" winning "over another, and then you see the smile, but when the benefits of being a channel, a smile goes out," - said Luis Martinez Otero (Luis Martinez Otero), a neuroscientist at the Spanish Institute of Neurology in Alicante (Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante), who conducted the study along with Diego Alonso Pablosom (Diego Alonso Pablos). Results presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week.

This is not the first attempt of scientists to explain the impact of a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci on the human psyche. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone (Margaret Livingstone), a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School, is actively interested in the history of art, showed that the Mona Lisa's smile appears more clearly in the perception of paintings peripheral vision. But when observed through the so-called "blind spot", located in the center of the eye, the effect almost disappears. And in 2005, the American group suggested that the ability to overlook or ignore the Mona Lisa smile affects random noise on the path from the retina to the visual cortex.

To get a better understanding of the causes of the disappearance of Mona Lisa's smile, and Alonso Martinez Otero Pablos studied the work of different visual channels by placing volunteers in various conditions, and each time interviewing, see whether they smile or not. First they asked to look at the picture from different distances (at different magnification). Naturally, the subjects were issued a little noticed, but when approaching the scene (or be read with its larger copies) smile is likely to become visible. This means that the cells of the retina, located near the "blind spot", just as successfully transmit information about a smile, as the cells responsible for peripheral vision.

Group then Martinez Otero concentrated on the influence of brightness on our perception of the Mona Lisa's smile. There are two types of cells responsible for comparing the brightness of the object from its surroundings: those that are excited only when their coverage of the central part (that allows us to see. For example, bright stars on a dark night), and those cells that are activated only when their Centers blurred (this allows us to highlight individual words printed text). Martinez Otero has activated a particular channel, showing already the next group of volunteers black or white screen, well, then within 30 seconds - Mona Lisa. Volunteers often seen smiling after looking at the white screen. So, at this point has been the second type of cells, and it was the first type is responsible for the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa.

Another group used special software to keep track of places in the picture, where 20 volunteers looked at a moment when they have seen and not seen a smile. It turns out that when it detects a smile, volunteers tend to focus on the left side of his mouth depicted in women.

22.10.2009 07:00
Maxim Borisov

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