Neuroesthetics
Neuroesthetics is a sub-discipline of applied aesthetics. Empirical aesthetics takes a scientific approach to the study of aesthetic experience of art, music, or any object that can give rise to aesthetic judgments. Neuroesthetics is a term coined by Semir Zeki in 1999 and received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists alike have accumulated evidence suggesting that human interest in, and creation of, art evolved as an evolutionarily necessary mechanism for survival across cultures and throughout history. Neuroesthetics uses neuroscience to explain and understand the aesthetic experiences at the neurological level. The topic attracts scholars from many disciplines including neuroscientists, art historians, artists, art therapists and psychologists.
Overview
Neuroaesthetics is a field of experimental science that aims to combine psychological research with aesthetics by investigating the "perception, production, and response to art, as well as interactions with objects and scenes that evoke an intense feeling, often of pleasure." The recently developed field seeks among other things the neural correlates of aesthetic judgment and creativity, and how these help humans communicate and connect. It is argued that visual aesthetics, namely the capacity of assigning different degrees of beauty to certain forms, colors, or movements, is a human trait acquired after the divergence of human and other ape lineages, rendering the experience of beauty a defining characteristic of humankind.One core question for the field is whether art or aesthetic preferences are guided by a set of scientific laws or principles. Additionally, the evolutionary rationale for the formation and characteristics of these principles are sought. It is believed that identification of the brain circuitry involved in aesthetic judgments can help pinpoint the origin of these responses. Many scholars, including neuroscientists, remain skeptical of the reductive approach adopted by neuroaesthetics.
The subfield of Computational Neuroaesthetics has aimed to utilize machine learning algorithms in conjunction with neuroimaging data to predict what humans would find most aesthetically pleasing. This field was pioneered by Fechner and Birkhoff in 1933; however it was years later that technology caught up enough to test, and prove, their hypotheses that aesthetics could be measured in a mathematical way Real world applications of these models include recommending products via online advertisement. However, modeling serves the broader purpose of building scientific understanding and understanding the mechanisms guiding decision making and other cognitive processes by simulating the involved neural architecture.
Approaches of study
Researchers who have been prominent in the field combine principles from perceptual psychology, evolutionary biology, neurological deficits, and functional brain anatomy in order to address the evolutionary meaning of beauty that may be the essence of art. Involvement from both the rewards center of the brain and the Default Mode Network, once believed to only play a part in daydreaming, have been implicated in why humans derive pleasure from viewing and creating art. It is felt that neuroscience is a very promising path for the search for the quantified evaluation of art. With the aim of discovering general rules about aesthetics, one approach is the observation of subjects viewing art and the exploration of the mechanics of vision. It is proposed that pleasing sensations are derived from the repeated activation of neurons due to primitive visual stimuli such as horizontal and vertical lines. In addition to the generation of theories to explain this, such as Ramachandran's set of laws, it is important to use neuroscience to determine and understand the neurological mechanisms involved.Neuroaesthetics approaches can be either descriptive or experimental. Descriptive neuroaesthetics refers to the practice of mapping properties of the brain onto aesthetic experiences. For example, if color is important to the experience of Fauvist art, then it is likely that areas of the brain that process color will be engaged when looking at such art. The claims of descriptive neuroaesthetics are regarded as hypothesis-generating and are typically qualitative in nature. Experimental neuroaesthetics, like any experimental science, produces data that are quantitative and vetted statistically. Experimental neuroaesthetics tests hypotheses, predicts results, and invites replication or falsification. The typical experimental methods used are those of cognitive neuroscience: fMRI, ERP, TMS, TDCS, and neuropsychology. Critics of neuroaesthetics typically target descriptive and not experimental neuroaesthetics.
The link between specific brain areas and artistic activity is of great importance to the field of neuroesthetics. This can be applied both to the ability to create and interpret art. A common approach to uncover the neural mechanisms is through the study of individuals, specifically artists, with neural disorders such as savant syndrome or some form of traumatic injury. The analysis of art created by these patients provides valuable insights to the brain areas responsible for capturing the essence of art.
The aesthetic enjoyment of individuals can be investigated using brain imaging experiments. When subjects are confronted with images of a particular level of aesthetics, the specific brain areas that are activated can be identified. It is argued that the sense of beauty and aesthetic judgment presupposes a change in the activation of the brain's reward system.
In 2004, Helmut Leder has developed a broad research program on the psychology of aesthetics and the arts. This program was introduced as a cognitive model of the appreciation of art in a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology. This model has served to frame many studies on the cognitive foundations of art, neuroaesthetics, product design, and web design, among other fields.
A crucial aspect of research lies in whether aesthetic judgment can be thought of as a bottom-up process driven by neural primitives or as a top-down process with high level cognition. Neurologists have had success researching primitives. However, there is a need to define higher level abstract philosophical concepts objectively with neural correlates. A phenomenon called embodied cognition allows art viewers to mentally place themselves inside the artwork, and feel not only as if they were there but feel how the creator of the art may have felt . Embodied cognition is a theory that suggests sensory experiences, motor actions, and the environment play significant roles in shaping how we think, reason, and understand the world; our material world is just that, not a projection created by the mind. It is suggested that aesthetic experience is a function of the interaction between top-down, intentional orientation of attention and the bottom-up perceptual facilitation of image construction. In other words, because untrained persons automatically apply the object-identification habit to viewing artworks, top-down control to reduce this habit may be necessary to engage aesthetic perception. This suggests that artists would show different levels of activation than non-artists.
Aesthetic responses to different types of art and techniques has recently been explored. Cubism is the most radical departure from Western forms of art, with the proposed purpose of forcing the viewer to discover less unstable elements of the object to be represented. It eliminates interferences such as lighting and perspective angle to capture objects as they really are. This may be compared to how the brain maintains an object's identity despite varying conditions. Modern, representational, and impressionistic art has also been studied for the purpose of explaining visual processing systems. Yet aesthetic judgments exists in all domains, not just art.
Subcategories
Neuroarchitecture
It has been proven that architecture surrounding us has the ability to impact our emotions. A study done by Trujillo and colleagues measured stress levels of participants in 20 different waiting rooms showed that the architecture of a waiting room could impact individuals stress response to be either lower or higher. Research such as this can serve the argument that compositions of aesthetics such as architecture have a direct link to our neurophysiology. Evidence for this has been shown in testing different mechanisms in response to different environment, Joel Martínez-Soto and colleagues showed that exposure to restorative environments, such as structures with natural component led to activation of the middle frontal gyrus, middle and inferior temporal gyrus, insula, inferior parietal lobe, and cuneus linking these reactions to increased relaxation. Moreover, a study measuring stress response showed that the waiting room with a window versus without a window triggered less of a stress response, measured by physiological reactions of this stress state consisted of both heightened and prolonged spikes in salivary cortisol. it's unknown what exact components of architecture create more calm or stress responses in participants, or via which mechanisms they may be interacting with the nervous system to either elicit calm or stress responses, however this research serves to show how aspects we already widely accept to be restorative and calming, such as windows, natural light or vegetation can impact us on a neurophysiological level. Research on how this varies from individual to individual along with personal style is where future research is headed in this field.Frameworks
Aesthetic triad
Aesthetic experiences are an emergent property of interactions among a triad of neural systems that involve sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge circuitry. Understanding that much of the research done on neuroaesthetics utilizes the aesthetic triad. The aesthetic triad are the components of the neural system utilized in an aesthetic experience and in research method, these components include sensory-motor, knowledge meaning and emotional valuation. The sensory- motor aspect is our automatic response to the recognition of objects and our engagement with said objects through our natural embodied reactions, while knowledge meaning establishes the understanding that our experience depends on the context and content present within the experience as shown in studies on neuroaesthetics, lastly the emotional valuation of these experiences is the component of our emotional response of either anger, fear, elation, or awe in these settings. Exploring the different subtopics of neuroaesthetics and the research being done aligns with this aesthetic triad.The visual brain segregates visual elements like luminance, color, and motion, as well as higher order objects like faces, bodies, and landscapes. Aesthetic encounters engage these sensory systems. For example, gazing at Van Gogh's dynamic paintings evokes a subjective sense of movement and activates visual motion areas V5/MT+. Portraits activate the face area in the fusiform gyrus and landscape paintings activate the place area in the parahippocampal gyrus. Beyond classifying visual elements, these sensory areas may also be involved in evaluating them. Beautiful faces activate the fusiform face and adjacent areas. The question of how much and what kind of valuation takes place in sensory cortices is an area of active inquiry.
Looking at paintings that depict actions also engages parts of people's motor systems. This engagement taps into the extended mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons, first discovered in monkeys, are neurons that respond to both the execution and perception of actions. A similar system exists in humans. This system resonates when people infer the intent of artistic gestures or observe the consequences of actions such as in Lucio Fontana's cut canvases. This subtle motor engagement may represent an embodied element of our empathetic responses to visual art.
The pleasure that people derive from looking at beautiful objects automatically engages general reward circuitry. For example, attractive faces activate the FFA and parts of the ventral striatum even when people are not thinking explicitly about the attractiveness of these faces. The orbito- and medial-frontal cortex, the ventral striatum, anterior cingulate and insula respond to beautiful visual images and the medial orbitofrontal cortex and adjacent cingulate cortex respond to different sources of pleasures including music and even architectural spaces.
Kirk and colleagues investigated the effects of expectations on neural responses. People rated abstract "art-like" images as more attractive if labeled as being from a museum than labeled as generated by a computer. This preference was accompanied by greater neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Thinking an image was a museum piece also produced activity in the entorhinal cortex, suggesting that people's expectations draw on memories that enhance visual pleasure. Similarly, Lacey and colleagues found that people's ventral striatum and parts of the orbitofrontal cortex were more responsive to the "art status" than to the actual content of visual images. Huang and colleagues found that people have different neural responses when told that they are looking at an authentic or copied Rembrandt portrait. Authentic portraits evoked orbitofrontal activity, whereas copies evoked neural responses in the frontopolar cortex and the right precuneus.
Alternatively, according to the Neo-Kantian approach, "aesthetic pleasure arises from the fitting of predictive representations to sensory experiences". When our predictive representations align well with our sensory experiences, it results in a sense of aesthetic pleasure. This alignment might involve things like finding coherence, harmony, or resonance between what we expected and what we actually perceive.The implication of these studies is that context and knowledge beyond the sensory qualities of visual images demonstrably affects people's neural activity in aesthetic experiences.