The neurophysiological study of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring that identified a triangle of a “sustained attention loop” (Real art in museums stimulates brain much more than reprints, study finds, 3 October) seems to be an affirmation of the power of the “Rembrandt triangle” in portraiture.
The area identified as the sustained attention focus for gallery viewers corresponds to a painted triangle of light formed by the eye, the shadow of the slope of the nose and the shadow of the cheekbone (in fact an inversion of the triangle shown in the article). Rembrandt identified this painterly device in the mid‑17th century and it has been faithfully copied not only by Vermeer, but by portrait painters and photographers to this day.
Dr Keith Snell
Cockermouth, Cumbria
• Neuroscience clearly shows a correlation between perception and brain activity. But correlations are not explanations – for an explanation we still need to turn to the social sciences, in which we explain such links as “emergent social properties”.
It is not the picture that determines the recorded perception, but the status, fame, age and public image of the real picture – as opposed to the reproductions – that stimulate the brain activity. The neuroscience researchers were aware that culture and the picture’s fame were very important.
In Team Leadership: How to Define, Apply, and Measure It, to be published next month, I and my co-authors show the importance of team members’ perceptions in explaining how leadership emerges in teams.
Team leadership is an example of an “emergent social property” that exists in the perception of team members, not in some quality of the leader.
Looking at the leader to understand team leadership is as fruitless as looking at a famous picture to understand brain activity without reference to culture. We see things not as they are, but as culture and society frame them.
Geoff Ribbens
Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire
• Do you have a photograph you’d like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers’ best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
