Edward Vessel: One thing that this piece really illustrates is just how rich our ability to interpret a face is.

Narrator: Edward Vessel is a cognitive neuroscientist. He studies how the brain processes aesthetic responses.

Edward Vessel: The pathways that are involved in recognizing and understanding what it is we're looking at have specialized regions that seem to respond primarily or solely to faces. On the other hand, there are brain regions that seem to be more involved in extracting that emotional meaning from a face. In the case of Marsyas, the emotion that is being conveyed and the facial expressions that are being depicted are so extreme that, even without an explicit act of mimicry, most likely our brains are making an analogy to what it would be like to be making these types of facial expressions ourselves. Marsyas's mouth is formed in this shape that clearly should be accompanied by an intense scream or bellow, and I can't help but almost hear that bellow myself when I look at it.

Yet, on the other hand, you're also responding to this particular sculpture as an art object. It is not a real face. We are only beginning to understand what it is that allows us to appreciate an object in an aesthetic context. If you were to take this object and make it more realistic, at a certain point you might cross a line where people would, in fact, have a reaction that would be true terror.