Mona Lisa's Smile Mystery Revealed

What is the meaning behind the Mona Lisa smile full of puzzles? The scientists believe that smile changes depending on where the eye sees first. One appeal of the most famous paintings in the world that is able to look radiant, but then turned serious and cynical. Now scientists claim to have found the answer to these changes, namely our eyes that sends random signals to the brain. They believe that the Mona Lisa's smile can be seen depending on the cells in the retina and what channels to use the image into the brain.

Different cells within the eye is designed to take a variety of colors, contrast, background and foreground. All depends on what cells capture the first time and what channel is used to interpret the brain. This channel codify data based on object size, clarity, brightness and location of the visual field. "Sometimes one wins over other channels, and senuyum visible, but if others take over, the smile will not be seen," said Dr Luis Martinez Otero, a neuroscientist at the Neuroscience Institute of Alicante, Spain to do research. To obtain a more complete picture about the reason behind the smile of the Mona Lisa Dr. Martinez Otero consider various different aspects of the Mona Lisa.

He then process them through a different visual channel, and asked the volunteers whether they saw the smile in the painting or not. Volunteers tend to see the Mona Lisa's smile after dark before they are shown the screen, and make Martinez Otero concluded that at this center cells Mona Lisa smile can be perceived. Did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the audience of his paintings of the brain? Martinez Otero believes. Leonardo wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint a dynamic expression, because that's what he sees on the street. "

This research was originally presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Chicago. This is not the first time for scientists to deconstruct the great works of Leonardo da Vinci's. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, showed that the Mona Lisa's smile is more prominent in the camera than the center of the eye.