14 DAY TRIAL // The famous painting the Mona Lisa has captured for a long time the attention of both art critics and average folks who've seen it. There are numerous features that capture the attention, but, undoubtedly, the most scrutinized has been the woman's facial expression, which appears to be happy to some, while others consider it to be sad. This discrepancy in perception has captured the attention of scientists, who have decided to investigate the mystery. They now believe they may have come up with a conclusion.
According to a team of investigators, the reason why the painting appears to be radiantly happy one moment and then sad the next one is because of the way our brain handles the signals forwarded by the eyes. There are several different types of vision cells in the retina, and each of them sends information to the brain on a specific channel. Traits such as size, clarity, brightness and location are all archived in these channels, and then sent to the visual cortex of the brain for deciphering.
“Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don't see the smile,” neuroscientist Luis Martinez Otero, from the Institute of Neuroscience, in Alicante, Spain, explains. He has been the main investigator on the new study, alongside colleague Diego Alonso Pablos. This is not the first research to focus on Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. In 2004, a researcher proposed that the smile was more clearly visible in the peripheral vision, while, in 2005, other scientists argued that the random noise in the pathways connecting the eyes to the brain might be responsible.
The main question that still remains is whether Leonardo da Vinci, the painter that created the masterpiece, actually intended for it to cause so much confusion in the eyes of the beholders. According to Otero Martinez, the artist knew exactly what he was doing. “He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street,” the expert explains. The team's investigation determined that on-center retinal cells were the most active in identifying Mona Lisa's smile, although cells responsible for peripheral vision also played a role in this, NewScientist reports.