Two vases and three brittle stems can, quite literally, outcompete a packed mantelpiece in your brain. The sparse arrangement hands the visual cortex an easy job, and biology tends to pay bonuses for cheap wins.
The core claim is blunt: your brain likes low-noise images because they cost less in neural computation. In the primary visual cortex, edge detection and figure–ground segregation run on spiking neurons that burn glucose with every volley. When objects present as clean contours against large fields of negative space, pattern recognition and object segmentation complete with fewer iterations of recurrent processing. That reduced metabolic load shows up as perceptual fluency, which experimental psychology links to subtle signals of liking and value.
An even stronger argument comes from predictive coding models. According to this framework, higher visual areas constantly send predictions downward, while lower areas send back only the prediction error. A near-empty still life, organized around two stable shapes and a handful of lines, generates low entropy and quickly shrinking error signals. That drop in prediction error is paired with dopaminergic reward, a kind of success message for efficient inference. A crowded display, with overlapping textures and competing shapes, keeps error signals noisy and expensive, so the same square inch of canvas demands more correction and less reward.
So the apparent richness of minimal still life is not in the objects but in the transaction cost. Your visual system closes the loop quickly, spends little metabolic currency, and receives a chemical nod of approval for the bargain. What looks empty on the table arrives as profit on the cortical ledger.
