Neuroaesthetics: Between Art, Philosophy and the Brain

In recent years my research has shifted from dance to more general questions regarding art, aesthetics and the brain. My research grew out of a dissatisfaction with contemporary aesthetics on the one hand and with the work of the handful of neuroscientists who have written about art on the other. Whereas the former ignores recent insights from cognitive neuroscience, the latter ignore much of what is and has been happening in contemporary art. My current research focuses on ugliness and the avant-garde.

Summary

• Why are we startled and aroused when we watch a thriller, even though we know it is only a movie?

• Why are we sometimes brought to tears when we hear a particular song and why do other songs give us the chills even after hearing it 20 times or more?

• Why are we filled with awe when we walk into an immense space?

• Why did more than 2 million people visit the Tate Modern to see The Weather Project, an installation by the Danish Icelandish artist Olafur Eliasson?

• What is interesting about conceptual art?

Questions such as these, once the exclusive domain of philosophical speculation, have now come within reach of scientific inquiry.

In recent years significant advances have been made in our understanding of the brain. Neuroimaging techniques have revealed what goes on inside the brain when we are taken by surprise, learn a novel movement sequence, fall in love, understand a joke or recall an unhappy event. These findings also hold the promise of offering novel insights into the nature of aesthetic experience.

A psychologist might observe that the majority of people prefer this or that when given the choice or that at a given moment in a piece of music some people feel shivers running down their spine. A cognitive neuroscientist may analyse the associated brain areas in a neuroimaging experiment by asking people to perform the same task while lying in a scanner. He or she may then try to map all the relevant neural mechanisms and investigate their properties.

Cognitive neuroscience studies the neural mechanisms associated with human behaviour. It is concerned with empirical questions. The answers it provides may tell us more about the conditions that make human capacities such as thinking and feeling possible. It relies on numerous background assumptions and concepts. Philosophy brings these assumptions to light. It clarifies the conceptual schemes that structure our thinking, by mapping out the relationships between existing concepts or coining new concepts. My own references in this respect are Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, Kant, Thierry de Duve, Slavoj Zizek and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Even a synthesis of psychology, philosophy and neurobiology will only tell part of the story. A sociologist might point out that whatever an individual thinks is always a function of the group to which he or she belongs or wants to belong to. An anthropologist might comment that although people are the same in their basic propensities, when it comes to art and aesthetic judgement differences in language and culture cannot be discounted. Still, I believe that such a synthesis will have more explanatory power than each of these disciplines alone.

Neuroscientists who write about art tend to confine their analysis to beauty. This is the majority view of art. Even art and dance critics often praise a work when it is beautiful and denounce it when it isn’t. But art does not have to be beautiful. It doesn’t have to entertain either. It doesn’t have to be anything as long as it is something. It can be boring to watch, yet interesting to see. Such is the paradoxical logic of aesthetic judgement. I believe that a lot can be said about the avant garde, ugliness and the no longer fine arts from the brain's point of view. This is what I'm working on at the moment.

Publications

Hagendoorn, IG (2009). Towards a Neurocritique of Art. (forthcoming).

References

General

Crick, F. and Koch, C. (2003), A framework for consciousness. Nature Neuroscience 6 (2), 119-126.

Tsuchiya, N. and Adolphs, R. (2007), Emotion and consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (4), 158-67.

Bennett, M.R. and Hacker, P.M. (2005), Emotion and cortical-subcortical function: conceptual developments. Progress in Neurobiology 75 (1), 29-52.

Leder, H., Belke, B., Oeberst, A. and Augustin, D. (2004) A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology 95 (Pt 4), 489-508.

Michael O'Shea: The Brain: A Very Short Introduction, 2003 or here.

Margaret Livingstone: Vision and Art. The Biology of Seeing, 2002.

Thierry de Duve: Kant after Duchamp, 1996.

Jerrold Levinson [ed.]: The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, 2003.

M.R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker: Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2003.

Visual Art

Ramachandran, V.S. and Hirstein, W. (1999), The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, 15-51.

Silvia, P. J. (2005). Emotional responses to art: From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion. Review of General Psychology, 9, 342-357.

Cavanagh, P. (2005), The artist as neuroscientist. Nature, 434, 301-307.

Reber, R., Schwarz, N. & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 364-382.

Latto, R., Brain, D. & Kelly. B. (2000), An oblique effect in aesthetics. Homage to Mondrian (1872-1944). Perception, 29, 981-987.

Freedberg D. and Gallese V. (2007), Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11: 197-203.

Tyler, C.W. (1999), Is Art Lawful? Science 285, 673-674.

Latto, R. (1995), The brain of the beholder. In: R.L. Gregory, J. Harris, P. Heard, & D. Rose [Eds.], The Artful Eye, Oxford University Press, pp. 66-94.

Miall, R.C. and Tchalenko, J. (2001), The painter’s eye movements: A study of eye and hand movement during portrait painting. Leonardo, 34: 35-40.

Pelli, D. G. (1999), Close Encounters. An Artist Shows that Size Affects Shape. Science 285, 844-846.

Film

Hasson, U., Nir, Y., Levy, I., Fuhrmann, G. and Malach, R. (2004), Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision. Science Vol. 303, Issue 5664, 1634-1640.

Music

Koelsch, S. (2005), Investigating Emotion with Music: Neuroscientific Approaches. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1060: 412-418.

Koelsch, S. and Siebel, W.A. (2005), Towards a Neural Basis of Music Perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 9 no 12, 578-584.

Jackendoff, R. and Lerdahl F. (2006), The capacity for music: What is it, and what's special about it?. Cognition, 100: 33-72.

Zatorre, R.J., Chen, J.L. and Penhune, V.B. (2007), When the brain plays music: Auditory-motor interactions in music perception and production. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8: 547-558.

Peretz, I. and Zatorre, R.J. (2005), Brain organization for music processing. Annual Review of Psychology 56: 89-114.

Links