# Thoughts on Thinking: Take an Art Break

Five Renaissance works, the studies that show why several minutes with one of them restores attention and widens thinking, and where to find them online.

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Last modified: 2026-10-15

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By Shayne Heffernan · 2026-10-15
Tags: thinking, art break, attention restoration, creativity, Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio, Holbein, Vatican Museums, Uffizi, National Gallery, Shayne Heffernan, KXCO
Signed: ML-DSA-87, anchored on Armature L1.
Nothing in this article is investment advice.

I have found that the best way to keep complex work in perspective is to step away from it at regular intervals and look at something that required the same order of sustained attention under real constraints. High-resolution images of the major works are online. There is no requirement to travel. What matters is the deliberate act of stopping, looking at the image carefully, learning a small amount about the circumstances of its making, and reflecting on what those circumstances say about the relation between a technical decision, human pressure and durable form. Entertainment is not the point. The break is a short, structured interruption of the task in hand.

This is the third of these notes. In July, in [Thoughts on Thinking](https://www.livetradingnews.com/thoughts-on-thinking), I drew the line between what drives your thinking and what amplifies it. In October, in [Thoughts on Thinking in an AI World](https://www.livetradingnews.com/thoughts-on-thinking-in-an-ai-world), I argued that answers are now cheap and the record is the asset. [Frequencies and Thinking](https://www.livetradingnews.com/frequencies-and-thinking) covered what damages a mind and what can train it. The rest of the series is in the [Thinking Center](https://www.livetradingnews.com/center/thinking) on Live Trading News and under [Thinking](https://www.shayneheffernan.com/thoughts/thinking) on my own site. This note is about the break, and why the break works.

The notes below put the clinical evidence first, then five works from the Renaissance. Each account covers the work, the artist's circumstances and the decision in it that was not the default of its time. The purpose is practical: to supply material that rewards a deliberate pause.

## What the studies show

Controlled studies now measure what a deliberate look at art does to the mind afterwards. Four of them, and one museum's own experiment, carry the argument.

Vasta and Biondi worked within Attention Restoration Theory, the account on which directed attention is a finite resource that effort depletes and certain environments replenish. Their design was within-subject and pre-post: participants completed two computer tasks, one of working memory and one of attentional control, and questionnaires on restoration, emotion and stress, then either visited a museum or walked through an urban environment, then repeated the tasks, with an eye tracker recording blink rate and pupil size throughout. Attentional control improved more after the museum visit, and the visit was rated more restorative than the walk. Working memory, stress and emotion did not differ, per the paper in [Consciousness and Cognition](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939), volume 136, 2025. The authors read the result as evidence that an artistic environment can replenish attention more effectively than a typical urban one.

Gross and Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, randomly assigned nearly 500 participants to watch either a critically acclaimed artistic short film or a humorous home-video compilation, then set them divergent-thinking and story-writing tasks that independent judges scored for originality. The art group came out ahead on every measure of creativity, and reported feeling worse. They rated the films lower and reported more negative emotional states, and still outperformed, per [UC Santa Barbara](https://news.ucsb.edu/2026/022478/watching-art-films-can-make-you-more-creative-thinker). The mechanism the authors identify is a temporary shift to a more receptive and exploratory state, which pushes perception past surface features into broader structural relations, and that operation overlaps with the processes that support creative thought. The paper is in [Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts](https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000852), 2026.

Mikalonytė, Schnall and colleagues at the University of Cambridge ran an experiment at Kettle's Yard during an exhibition of Lucie Rie's ceramics. Of 187 participants, half were asked to consider and rate the beauty of the objects, while the control group looked just as intently to match the objects to a set of line drawings.

The beauty group scored almost 14 per cent higher on a measure of abstract thinking, and among the roughly half who had an artistic hobby the gap was over 25 per cent. The beauty group also reported 23 per cent higher levels of the feelings the study classes as self-transcendent, being moved, enlightened or inspired, per the [University of Cambridge](https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/artistic-beauty-abstract-thinking). The paper, in [Empirical Studies of the Arts](https://doi.org/10.1177/02762374251337699), 2025, frames the result as support for an old philosophical claim: appreciating beauty involves a psychological distance from practical interest, and that distance shows up as a more abstract way of thinking.

The neuroimaging work agrees on where this happens. Vessel, Starr and Rubin found that the images their subjects found most moving produced a step-like rise in a set of frontal regions belonging to the default-mode network, the network associated with self-referential and introspective processing, alongside the linear response in sensory regions and the striatum, per [Frontiers in Human Neuroscience](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066/full), 2012. The same group showed in 2019 that the default-mode network carries a pattern for aesthetic appeal that is shared across art, architecture and landscape, per [PNAS](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1902650116), volume 116. That pairing of inward processing with sensation and reward is uncommon during ordinary outward attention, and it is the state the Cambridge and Santa Barbara results describe from the outside.

One caution comes from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which commissioned a study of its own paintings. Twenty people wore EEG headsets and eye trackers in front of five originals, among them Girl with a Pearl Earring and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, and again in front of reproductions in the museum library. A second phase put 20 people through fMRI at the University of Amsterdam. The originals had ten times the pull of the reproductions, and the Girl stimulated the precuneus, the region involved in the sense of self and self-reflection, far more than the four benchmark paintings, per the [Mauritshuis](https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/press-releases/girl-with-a-pearl-earring-visually-captivates-the-viewer), 2 October 2024. A screen is a reproduction. Of the studies above, only the Santa Barbara one worked on a screen, and it still moved every measure. So the high-resolution image is the low-cost version of the break, and the museum is the full one.

None of this implies that any image produces the same effect. It indicates that deliberate, somewhat sustained looking at complex visual material can alter subsequent attentional control and the style of thinking. The practical implication is simple: a short, intentional break spent with a high-resolution image, with a few facts about its making, is a low-cost method for interrupting task-specific fatigue. Exhibit 1 draws the process and ties each step to the study that supports it.

![Knowledge graph: sustained work fatigues attention, the five steps of the art break, the measured effects of looking in five studies, and the five works that feed the hunt for the non-default decision](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-7c86f517e6d6e135.svg)

*Exhibit 1. The art break, step by step, and what each step has been shown to do. Each numbered link is a sourced claim, listed under the graph.*

## Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper and Vitruvian Man

![Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1495 to 1498, refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan: Christ at the centre, the twelve apostles in four groups of three along one side of the table](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-1ffdedbf3067bc65.jpg)

*Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1495 to 1498, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Image: Wikimedia Commons.*

The Last Supper occupies the refectory wall of the Dominican convent of [Santa Maria delle Grazie](https://cenacolovinciano.vivaticket.it/en) in Milan. Leonardo was commissioned by Ludovico Sforza around 1495. He did not want the commission. He preferred a large equestrian monument that the outbreak of war made impossible. The subject is the moment at which Christ announces that one of the apostles will betray him. Leonardo's stated aim, recorded in his notes, was that posture and expression should show "the motions of the mind". Each apostle reacts according to a distinct character. Judas sits within the group rather than isolated on the near side of the table, and the vanishing point is placed at Christ's right temple. The architecture of the room is simplified so that the perspective lines reinforce the central figure rather than compete with it.

Leonardo rejected traditional fresco because it required rapid, irreversible work on wet plaster and would not permit the gradual tonal blending he wanted. He prepared a dry wall with layers of pitch, gesso and mastic, then painted in oil and tempera. Contemporaries, among them the novelist Matteo Bandello, recorded that he worked for long periods without eating, then stood for days with his arms folded in contemplation. The experimental ground failed to bond to the thin exterior wall. Flaking was visible within a few years. Antonio de Beatis recorded deterioration as early as 1517, and by the mid-sixteenth century the work was described as ruined.

Modern restoration, the latest campaign of it completed in the 1990s, has recovered what remains of the original paint, which is estimated at roughly a fifth of the surface. Scientific sampling by Matteini and Moles confirmed the panel-painting technique applied to a mural support, per [Studies in Conservation](https://doi.org/10.1179/sic.1979.014), volume 24, 1979.

The technical decision that allowed the psychological observation is the same decision that made the painting fragile. The subject is a crisis of knowledge and trust among men who had shared a purpose. The artist's subject is the same: the attempt to capture internal states under the constraint of a method that could not deliver both durability and the optical effect required. The surviving image records both the success of the observation and the cost of the method. Several minutes with a high-resolution reproduction make the grouping of the apostles into clusters of three, the isolation of Judas by shadow and gesture, and the architectural simplification visible without the distraction of the room's present condition.

![Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, about 1490, pen and ink on paper: a male figure in two superimposed positions inscribed in a circle and a square, with Leonardo's mirror-written notes above and below](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-901a9c821f55fd9b.jpg)

*Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, about 1490, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice. Image: Wikimedia Commons.*

Vitruvian Man is a pen-and-ink drawing on paper, roughly 34 by 24 centimetres, made around 1490 while Leonardo was in Milan, and held by the [Gallerie dell'Accademia](https://www.gallerieaccademia.it/en/) in Venice. It illustrates a passage in Vitruvius in which the ideal human figure can be inscribed in both a circle and a square. Leonardo did not simply copy the ancient proportions. He measured living subjects, offset the square from the circle so that the two shapes meet only at the base, and superimposed two positions of the limbs. The notes around the figure record both Vitruvius's claims and Leonardo's own measurements. The drawing presents the humanist proposition that the human body is a microcosm whose proportions reflect a larger order, and Leonardo treated the proposition as an empirical question rather than a received doctrine.

The same habit of measurement and revision runs through his anatomical notebooks. The drawing stayed largely private in his lifetime and acquired its present standing only in the twentieth century.

Both works reward the same form of looking: find the point at which the available technique or the inherited text was insufficient, and examine the alternative Leonardo built. The pause it takes to notice those points is the pause the studies above associate with better attentional control afterwards.

## Michelangelo: the David and the Creation of Adam, under duress

![Michelangelo, David, 1501 to 1504, marble: the head and left hand in close detail, the gaze fixed to the left, the brow tense](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-90753a35c8d49fcb.jpg)

*Michelangelo, David, 1501 to 1504, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence. Detail of head and hand. Image: public domain.*

David was carved between 1501 and 1504 from a single block of marble that earlier sculptors had abandoned. The finished figure stands more than five metres tall and is in the [Galleria dell'Accademia](https://www.galleriaaccademiafirenze.it/en/artworks/david-michelangelo/) in Florence. It was intended for the roofline of Florence Cathedral. Once finished, it was given a more prominent civic position instead. The pose is the classical contrapposto, but the head is turned sharply and the gaze is fixed. Vasari treated it as the prime statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity. Michelangelo regarded himself first as a sculptor, and the anatomical precision of the figure rests on his documented dissection of cadavers at Santo Spirito in Florence. The work combines the recovery of classical form with direct observation of the body. The block's flaws constrained the design, and the finished statue records both the constraint and the solution.

![Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1508 to 1512, Sistine Chapel ceiling: Adam reclining at left, God borne by figures in a red mantle at right, their fingers almost touching](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-e1f60169d47c4885.jpg)

*Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1508 to 1512, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican. Image: Wikimedia Commons.*

In 1508 Pope Julius II ordered Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the [Sistine Chapel](https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/volta.html). Michelangelo tried to refuse. Vasari records that rivals, Bramante among them, had recommended him for the task expecting him to fail, since he had little experience of fresco. He worked largely alone on the scaffolding for four years. He complained in a sonnet of the distortion the upward position forced on his body and of paint dripping onto his face. Mould appeared on the plaster in the first winter. Giuliano da Sangallo diagnosed the problem and the work went on. The Pope threatened to throw him from the scaffolding if progress did not quicken. The programme grew from the twelve apostles originally requested into a sequence of Genesis scenes flanked by prophets and sibyls.

In the Creation of Adam the two figures are shown at comparable scale, both muscular, their fingers nearly touching. The small gap has been read as the distance between divine perfection and human capacity. Anatomists have noted that the mantle and the figures around God resemble a cross-section of the human brain; whether or not that was intended, it sits with Michelangelo's interest in the body as the seat of both physical and intellectual capacity. The commission was imposed. The physical conditions were adverse. The resulting image puts the human form at the centre of the theological story, and the history of the work records both the pressure and the form the pressure produced.

## Titian: The Assumption of the Virgin

![Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516 to 1518: the Virgin in red and blue rising on a cloud among putti, arms raised, against a golden light](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-757dc66ba3280d2e.jpg)

*Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516 to 1518, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Image: public domain.*

Titian's Assumption occupies the high altar of the Franciscan church of [Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari](https://www.basilicadeifrari.it/en/) in Venice. It is painted on a large wood panel, roughly 6.9 by 3.6 metres, and was installed in 1518. It was Titian's first major public commission in the city. Earlier Venetian altarpieces, in the manner of Giovanni Bellini and his circle, tended toward quieter and more static compositions. Titian's figures are over life-size, arranged in a strong upward spiral, and modelled in saturated colour that stays legible from the far end of the nave. Contemporary accounts note that some viewers found the agitation excessive. Within a short time the work had made Titian the leading painter in Venice.

The technical solution, layered oil, bold scale and colour used to organise both space and emotion, answered the liturgical requirement of a high altar and the competitive need for a visual language distinct from the Florentine emphasis on drawing. The subject is the bodily assumption of the Virgin. The artist's subject is the construction of a public image able to carry both doctrinal and civic meaning inside a specific architectural setting. A few minutes with the image show the points at which Titian departed from local precedent and the optical means by which the departure holds together at a distance. That identification of a departure under constraint is the cognitive operation the Cambridge experiment associates with a shift toward abstract thinking.

## Caravaggio: the Calling of Saint Matthew, by one light

![Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599 to 1600: men in contemporary dress at a table counting coins, lit from the upper right, Christ's pointing hand at the edge](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-37ec5e03d9469d70.jpg)

*Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599 to 1600, Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Image: public domain.*

The Calling of Saint Matthew was Caravaggio's first major public commission, painted for the Contarelli Chapel in [San Luigi dei Francesi](https://saintlouis-rome.net/) in Rome between 1599 and 1600. The subject is the moment Christ enters a tax office and points. Matthew and the other figures wear the clothing of Caravaggio's own time. Light falls from an unseen source and isolates the gesture. There is no halo. The models were ordinary people. Caravaggio worked from life, often without preparatory drawings, and used the extreme contrast between lit form and surrounding darkness later called tenebrism. Several of his altarpieces were rejected or criticised as too raw or indecorous.

His life included repeated arrests for assault and a fatal duel in 1606 that drove him into exile, and he went on producing major works as a fugitive. The Contarelli paintings made his reputation at once and set the direction of much of the Baroque religious painting that followed.

The sacred subject is rendered as an ordinary interior interrupted by a single directed light. The artist's circumstances, poverty, violence and contested commissions, are legible in the unidealised faces and the theatrical staging. The technical means, working from life, extreme lighting and the refusal of idealisation, make that intermingling of circumstance and story visible. A short period spent locating the light source, the contemporary dress and the absence of the usual sacred markers restores attention to the concrete decisions that organise the scene.

## Hans Holbein the Younger: the Ambassadors, a skull in the floor

![Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533: Dinteville and de Selve either side of a table of instruments, a globe, a lute and a hymnal, an anamorphic skull across the floor](https://livetradingnews-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/2026/10/15/cmpgg3-849ba3cf587778fc.jpg)

*Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, National Gallery, London. Image: public domain.*

The Ambassadors is a full-length double portrait of Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, painted in 1533 and held by the [National Gallery](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-the-ambassadors) in London. The two men stand either side of a table covered with instruments of measurement, navigation, music and calculation. A distorted shape in the foreground resolves into a skull when viewed from an oblique angle. A small crucifix is partly visible at the upper left. The floor pattern echoes the Cosmati pavement of Westminster Abbey. A lute with a broken string and a Lutheran hymnal sit among the objects.

Holbein arrived in England after the Reformation had reduced the demand for religious painting in the German-speaking lands. He became court painter to Henry VIII and produced the standard likeness of the king as well as portraits of leading figures on both sides of the religious divide. Holbein painted it during Henry's break with Rome. Dinteville's personal motto was memento mori. The anamorphic skull, the broken string and the hymnal encode the same tension between worldly knowledge and mortality, and between religious unity and division, that the sitters were negotiating. The precision of face, fabric and instrument is the record of an artist working in a court where an error of allegiance could be fatal.

The image requires the viewer to change physical position to resolve the skull. That required change of viewpoint is a concrete demonstration of the operation the experimental literature associates with the shift from immediate to more abstract thought. Kate Bomford's analysis treats the portrait as a structured statement of friendship and hoped-for immortality under the pressure of mortality, per [Renaissance Studies](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2004.00077.x), volume 18, 2004. John North's instrumental reading, in The Ambassadors' Secret, identifies the date the scientific objects indicate as 11 April 1533, Good Friday. Both readings rest on close examination of the objects and their arrangement rather than on later idealisation.

## Where to look

The works above sit in churches and chapels as much as in museums, and the museums that hold the rest of the period publish their collections online at a resolution good enough for the purpose. Six places cover most of what matters.

- The [Vatican Museums](https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni.html), whose collections pages run from the Pinacoteca to the Raphael Rooms, and whose [Sistine Chapel ceiling page](https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/volta.html) sets out Michelangelo's programme panel by panel.
- The [Uffizi](https://www.uffizi.it/en/the-uffizi) in Florence, with Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian in one building and its [artworks](https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks) catalogue online.
- The [Galleria dell'Accademia](https://www.galleriaaccademiafirenze.it/en/artworks/david-michelangelo/) in Florence, home of David.
- The [Gallerie dell'Accademia](https://www.gallerieaccademia.it/en/) in Venice, which holds Vitruvian Man and the Venetian school from Bellini to Titian.
- The [National Gallery](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/) in London, which holds The Ambassadors and publishes its paintings with full catalogue entries.
- The [Louvre](https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore) in Paris, whose online [collections](https://collections.louvre.fr/en/) database includes the Leonardo holdings.

For the works in situ: the Last Supper is booked through the [Cenacolo Vinciano](https://cenacolovinciano.vivaticket.it/en) at Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Assumption is on the high altar of the [Frari](https://www.basilicadeifrari.it/en/), and the Calling is in the Contarelli Chapel of [San Luigi dei Francesi](https://saintlouis-rome.net/). The [Mauritshuis](https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/our-collection/artworks/670-girl-with-a-pearl-earring) in The Hague, which ran the EEG study, keeps the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

## Practice

The recommendation is limited. At intervals, open a high-resolution image of one of these works. Spend several minutes identifying the technical decision that was not the default method of the time, the constraint under which the artist worked, and the point at which the subject's story and the artist's circumstances become legible in the same surface. Note the date, the location and one contemporary reaction. Then return to the task.

For Leonardo, the non-default decision is the dry-wall oil technique that permitted sfumato and revision at the cost of adhesion. For Michelangelo, it is the expansion of a modest ceiling commission into a full narrative cycle under physical duress. For Titian, it is the substitution of dynamic colour and scale for the quieter local tradition. For Caravaggio, it is the refusal of idealisation and preparatory drawing in favour of live models and extreme light. For Holbein, it is the encoding of political and religious fracture inside a portrait that also flatters its sitters. Each decision is visible once the surrounding facts are known.

The studies cited above indicate that such looking can improve subsequent attentional control and raise scores on measures of abstract and creative thinking. The historical record of the works supplies the material that makes the looking non-arbitrary. Together they are a low-cost method for interrupting the narrowing of attention that comes with sustained technical or commercial work. High-resolution images remove the barrier of travel. The only requirement is the decision to stop, to look long enough to notice the non-default decision, and to return. I have found that the interruption is enough to restore a usable sense of scale and to keep the immediate problems of any project in proportion to the longer record of what sustained attention under constraint can produce.

The next of these notes will take the same method to a different period. Until then, the test is simple: open one of the six links above, pick one work, find its non-default decision, and go back to work.

## Sources and links

- Bomford, K. (2004). Friendship and immortality: Holbein's Ambassadors revisited. [Renaissance Studies, 18(4), 544 to 581](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2004.00077.x).
- Gross, M. E., and Schooler, J. W. (2026). Expanding minds: artistic film promotes conceptual expansion and verbal creativity. [Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts](https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000852); summarised by [UC Santa Barbara](https://news.ucsb.edu/2026/022478/watching-art-films-can-make-you-more-creative-thinker).
- Matteini, M., and Moles, A. (1979). A preliminary investigation of the unusual technique of Leonardo's mural The Last Supper. [Studies in Conservation, 24(3), 125 to 133](https://doi.org/10.1179/sic.1979.014).
- Mikalonytė, E. S., Stevanov, J., Doran, R., Symons, A., and Schnall, S. (2025). Transformed by beauty: aesthetic appreciation increases abstract thinking and self-transcendent emotions. [Empirical Studies of the Arts, 44, 171 to 194](https://doi.org/10.1177/02762374251337699); summarised by the [University of Cambridge](https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/artistic-beauty-abstract-thinking).
- Mauritshuis (2024). Girl with a Pearl Earring visually captivates the viewer. [Press release, 2 October 2024](https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/press-releases/girl-with-a-pearl-earring-visually-captivates-the-viewer).
- North, J. (2002). The Ambassadors' Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance. Hambledon and London.
- Vasari, G. (1550 and 1568). Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. The lives of Michelangelo and Leonardo.
- Vasta, N., and Biondi, F. N. (2025). Art immersion: evidence for attention restoration in museums. [Consciousness and Cognition, 136, 103939](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939).
- Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., and Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. [Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 66](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066/full).
- Vessel, E. A., Isik, A. I., Belfi, A. M., Stahl, J. L., and Starr, G. G. (2019). The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains. [PNAS, 116(38), 19155 to 19164](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1902650116).
- Further reading: King, R. (2012). Leonardo and The Last Supper. Marani, P. C., conservation studies of the Last Supper.
- Earlier notes in this series: [Thoughts on Thinking](https://www.livetradingnews.com/thoughts-on-thinking), [Thoughts on Thinking in an AI World](https://www.livetradingnews.com/thoughts-on-thinking-in-an-ai-world), [Frequencies and Thinking](https://www.livetradingnews.com/frequencies-and-thinking), [AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate](https://www.livetradingnews.com/ai-is-the-neat-handwriting-of-the-illiterate) and [KXCO is Enhanced Intelligence, Not Artificial](https://www.livetradingnews.com/kxco-is-enhanced-intelligence-not-artificial); the full set is in the [Thinking Center](https://www.livetradingnews.com/center/thinking) and at [shayneheffernan.com](https://www.shayneheffernan.com/thoughts/thinking).

Shayne Heffernan, Ph.D., is the founder of Live Trading News, the KnightsBridge Group, Knightsbridge Law and the KXCO.ai ecosystem spanning post-quantum cryptography, identity, attestation and enterprise ontology.

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