Mona Lisa Smile

Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo da Vinci created almost five hundred years ago, still captivates its uniqueness: Smiling woman is not static, it seems alive. What makes an impression? At various times, we offered different explanations: Here Artist's Model and pregnancy, and her asthma, and even malocclusion. However, perhaps the closest to a solution approached Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. According to her, the smile alive is nothing but as a result of an optical illusion created by the human brain because of the structural features of the visual retseptorov.

In a report published in the journal «Science», tells the story of Margaret spent her experiment. With the help of the special program c digitized image pattern have been removed all the fuzzy details and shadows, then ... smile disappeared. However, the cost to restore some blur, like a smile appeared again. According to the scientist, these are features of human perception of the outside world: for clear details eyes meet some areas, and for the movement, shadows and highlights - other. Leonardo da Vinci once mobilized both areas, which allowed him to create the effect of movement - especially when relaxed scattered look at the picture, when the second group of activated receptors.

Source: log-in.ru/articles/10/