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Hardwired
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Littlestone
Littlestone
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Re: Hardwired
Mar 07, 2006, 12:03
>Face recognition in anything.<

Indeed, but how much of that is nature and how much nurture? The point I was trying to make in my opening post was that the West may be conditioned to see 'faces in places' far more than other cultures (past and present) because of the influence of the classical world on us for the last few millennia.

A couple of examples. The West sees the face of a man in the moon - dunno why it should be a man and not a woman but anyway - in the Far East people don't see a face at all, they see a hare pounding rice cakes! <i>Big</i> difference.

We are so obsessed in the West with the human form and the human condition that there's almost no escape from it. I've just got back from the supermarket and checked the magazine racks while there; out of some 200 magazines on sale 99% carry a face on the cover. It has been thus for a long time. While the great masters of European painting were churning out portrait after portrait of some important bod or other their counterparts in the Far East were painting landscapes featuring soaring mountains and crashing waterfalls (and if a figure appeared at all in one of those paintings it was as a tiny insignificant dot somewhere at the bottom). And going back to the beginnings of pictorial art there are the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux - these wonderful creations are predominately of animals with the human figure hardly appearing at all.

Just because we, as modern Westerners, are inclined to see a face in a stone or the trunk of a tree does not mean our ancestors did. Probably what they <i>did</i> see was what was most important to them - and perhaps when we better understand that we will better understand the art and structures those people created.
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