In some of his works Salvador Dali used a technique called, “Face pareidolia” (Martinez-Conde and Macknik, 2012). This technique refers to our visual system's predisposition to find faces where effects of light and shadow create similarities, even though they appear non-conforming. Martinez-Conde and Macknik, wrote in their essay on Dali, “The brain's ability to fabricate links among things that are in reality unconnected is essential to the ‘paranoiac-critical method’, an artistic method invented by Dali.” (Neuroscience, 2015). For example, his painting titled Paranoia (3) provides a striking example of this illusionary contouring which results from our natural filling-in processes. A battle scene reminiscent of some of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches hovers over a bust set on a pedestal. The bust is headless, yet we perceive a head. In other words, the unconnected images are perceived as one thing even though we know they …show more content…
“At the bottom of his studies for the Christ, Dali wrote: In the first place, in 1950, I had a “cosmic dream” in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the “nucleus of the atom.” This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe, ‘the Christ! In the second place, when, thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross. I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle that aesthetically summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed Christ in the triangle.” (Frisch, Patricia 2) Whereas, Paranoia (3) shows his inventiveness and deeper understanding of Neuropsychology, as discussed in Elizabeth Axel published article titled, Salvador Dali and Surrealism. In comparison is his painting, St. John of the Cross (4), where Dali incorporated his love of scientific geometry at a level even Einstein would have admired, as discussed in Patricia Frisch’s article, An Alternative Paradigm to the Oppression of Nuclear War: Salvador Dali’s Painting of Christ of St. John of the Cross. Thus, Salvador Dali represents his genre of painting, Surrealism, at a level unparalleled by others