In Ramachandran's exemplar case for many of his laws, the Chola bronze sculpture of Parvathi is a metaphor for live, human women. She represents the appearance and virtues that mortal women may have, by virtue of her appearance being shifted away from that of the average woman; her appearance is a metaphor for her divine perfection.

The scientific basis for Ramachandran's claims comes from behavioral studies of rats and herring-gull chicks, and from neural recordings of monkeys. In the case of herring-gull chicks, his description of the connection between peak shift in newborn herring-gulls towards an extreme visual exemplar of their food source and the aesthetic response to representational peak shifts in human art is a bit lacking. Gulls, he claims, have "hard-wired" neural circuitry that predisposes them to peck at elongated yellow objects with focal red spots when they are young. Presumably, this circuitry does not decay when gulls...
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