Art and the animal kingdom : Of mice and Manet

/21580132-murine-appreciation-paintings-

  • Et l’expérience esthétique advint chez la souris à la faveur de la.... morphine.

    « Art and the animal kingdom : Of mice and Manet » | The Economist

    http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21580132-murine-appreciation-paintings-mice-and-manet

    Dr Watanabe was curious to see whether his mice had a preference for certain painters. He put them in a chamber, one at a time, and showed each a pair of paintings by different artists. (...) His mice expressed no particular preference between a picture by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian abstract painter, and another by Piet Mondrian (...) But things got more interesting when Dr Watanabe added morphine to the mix. The mice were injected with the drug when viewing one picture, and with an inactive saline solution when viewing another. After a few repetitions, they began to associate one of the paintings with the morphine high, and would spend longer standing next to it. This implies that the mice were able to tell one painting from another, when given an incentive to do so.

    #science #animal #art #morphine #peinture