Echoing Conway, Livingstone, who studies how art can “reflect and reveal things about what we see,” says that both art and visual neuroscience influence each other.

“Seeing is so easy that we don’t realize that it’s really a bunch of neurons firing away up there,” Livingstone says. “Their whole job is to extract information about the environment, and how these patterns of neurons fire is really a nontrivial thing.”

Artists often use the computations and algorithms performed by the firing of neurons in the brain to produce certain effects in paintings.

For example, a large part of our visual system is color-blind—the parts that are evolutionarily older and are engaged in detecting motion and separation between figure and background, while the more primate-specific areas are color-selective, says Livingstone.

The shimmering in paintings is caused by this very discrepancy between the color-sensitive and color-insensitive parts of the brain. The effect seems magical to the viewer but is based on simple neuroscientific principles.

“Making pictures is something we as viewers consider to be quite a mystical event,” Conway says. “What it underscores is the mystery and the magic of vision itself.”

—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.edu.