Niko Tinbergen was born in 1907 in The Hague, the Netherlands. From childhood he was fascinated with nature, and spent much time observing birds and insects along the seashore near his home. He kept backyard aquariums where he studied the behavior of a spiny-backed fish called the stickleback, and was one of a group of students assigned by his high school natural history instructor to maintain the classroom aquariums. Later in his life he developed both a professional interest in animal behavior and a lifelong interest in seagulls.
Within an hour of emerging from its shell, a Herring seagull chick finds its mother’s large yellow beak and begins pecking. The towering mother then spends several seconds positioning herself over the chick — almost as though she is carefully aiming — and then, after waiting a few more seconds, she violently regurgitates food into the waiting chick's mouth. This is how a seagull is fed for the first time. It is both messy and fascinating to watch. Like most things in nature, this process seems to make sense when observed externally: the chick needs food, so it pecks at its mother to receive it. But something very peculiar is actually going on: the chick has had no contact with its mother before it starts pecking at her beak, so how does it know to peck at it?
The seagull chick mother detection system is far more complex than anyone had expected and its discovery in the mid 1940's by Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen led to huge advances in our understanding of human perception. Tinbergen was awarded the Nobel Prize for his findings.
The adult seagull has a long yellow beak with a conspicuous red spot at the base of its lower jaw. When you first see a chick peck at its mother, it appears that it is pecking at this red spot. But when Tinbergen presented fake models without red spots to the chicks, they still pecked in the exact same place-- they only reacted slightly less aggressively. They seemed, and to say this about a bird is very strange, less interested in the spotless beak.
It turns out, the higher the contrast between the spot and the beak, the more aggressively the chicks will peck. Except for red, which causes a 5-10% exaggeration in pecking, the color makes no difference at all. The chick is not specifically looking for a red spot on its mother’s beak, it is actually looking for an area of very high contrast.
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Tinbergen’s research inspired neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran for his own research about neurological phenomenon and the perception of art by humans.
“So Tinbergen took a long yellow stick with three red stripes, which doesn't look anything like a beak - and that's important. And he waved it in front of the chicks and the chicks go berserk. They actually peck at this long thing with the three red stripes more than they would for a real beak. They prefer it to a real beak - even though it doesn't resemble a beak. It's as though he has stumbled on a superbeak or what I call an ultrabeak.
Why does this happen?
We don't know exactly why, but obviously there are neural circuits in the visual pathways of the chick's brain that are specialized for detecting beaks as soon as the chick hatches. They fire when seeing the beak. Perhaps because of the way they are wired up, they may actually respond more powerfully to the stick with the three stripes than to a real beak. Maybe the neurons' receptive field embodies a rule such as "The more red contour the better," and it's more effective in driving the neuron, even though the stick doesn't look like a beak to you and me - or maybe even to the chick. And a message from this beak-detecting neuron now goes to the emotional limbic centres in the chick's brain giving it a big jolt and saying: "Wow, what a super beak!" and the chick is absolutely mesmerized.
Well now what's this got to do with art, you're wondering?
Well this brings me to my punch line of about art. What I'm suggesting is if those seagulls had an art gallery, they would hang this long stick with the three red stripes on the wall, they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why - why am I mesmerized by this damn thing even though it doesn't resemble anything? That's what people are doing when they are buying contemporary art. They are behaving exactly like those gull chicks.
In other words human artists through trial and error, through intuition, through genius have discovered the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar. They are tapping into these and creating for your brain the equivalent of the long stick with the three stripes for the chick's brain. And what you end up with is a Henry Moore or a Picasso. “
