Neuroesthetics

thumb| Researchers are looking to neuroscience for answers behind why the human brain finds artistic works like [[DaVinci's Mona Lisa so alluring.]]

Neuroesthetics (or neuroaesthetics) 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 (neuro-)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,

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 (e.g., by using through the use of brain imaging) 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. 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. 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 [1a]. 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. 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. Portraits activate the face area in the fusiform gyrus (FFA) and landscape paintings activate the place area in the parahippocampal gyrus (PPA). 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 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 (or probably also diminish) 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.

Semir Zeki's laws of the visual brain

Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics at the University College of London, views art as an example of the variability of the brain. Thus a neurological approach to the source of this variability may explain particular subjective experiences as well as the ranges of abilities to create and experience art. Zeki theorizes that artists unconsciously use techniques to create visual art to study the brain. Zeki suggests that

"...the artist is in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach."</blockquote>He proposes two supreme laws of the visual brain:

Constancy

Despite the changes that occur when processing visual stimuli (distance, viewing angle, illumination, etc.), the brain has the unique ability to retain knowledge of constant and essential properties of an object and discard irrelevant dynamic properties. This applies not only to the ability to, for example, always see a banana as the color yellow but also the recognition of faces at varying angles.

Comparatively, a work of art captures the essence of an object. The creation of art itself may be modeled off of this primitive neural function. The process of painting for example involves distilling an object down to represent it as it really is, which differs from the way the eyes see it. Zeki also tried to represent the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Concept through the statement: forms do not have an existence without a brain and the ability for stored memory, referring to how artists such as Monet could paint without knowing what the objects are in order to capture their true form. This may hold evolutionary significance since regions of contrast are information rich requiring reinforcement and the allocation of attention. In contrast to the principle of grouping, contrasting features are typically in close proximity eliminating the need to link distant, but similar features.

Perceptual problem solving

Tied to the detection of contrast and grouping is the concept that discovery of an object after a struggle is more pleasing than one which is instantaneously obvious. The mechanism ensures that the struggle is reinforcing so that the viewer continues to look until the discovery. From a survival point of view, this may be important for the continued search for predators. Ramachandran suggests for the same reason that a model whose hips and breasts are about to be revealed is more provocative than one who is already completely naked. including musical beauty and moral beauty, and even mathematical beauty. Experience of the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful, results in a different pattern of brain activity; moreover, where it comes to judgment, although aesthetic and perceptual judgments leads t activity in the same brain areas, the pattern of activity is also different between the two, one of the most marked differences being the involvement of mOFC in aesthetic, but not in perceptual, judgments. Surprisingly, when a person views a painting which they consider ugly, no separate structures are activated. Therefore, it is proposed that changes in the intensity of activation in the orbito-frontal cortex correlate with the determination of beauty (higher activation) or ugliness (lower activation).

Conversely, activity in the motor cortex showed the opposite pattern. Additionally, the medial OFC has been found to respond aesthetics in terms of the context of which it is presented, such as text or other descriptions about the artwork. The current evidence linking the OFC to attributed hedonistic values across gustatory, olfactory, and visual modalities, suggests that the OFC is a common center for the assessment of a stimulus's value. The prefrontal cortex may be generally activated for directing the attention of the cognitive and perceptual mechanisms towards aesthetic perception in viewers untrained in visual arts. Directing attention towards aesthetics may have evolutionary significance.

Additional areas

Emotions play a large role in aesthetic processing. Experiments designed specifically to force the subjects to view the artwork subjectively (by inquiring of its aesthetic appeal) rather than simply with the visual systems, revealed a higher activation in the brain's emotional circuitry. Results from these experiments revealed high activation in the bilateral insula which can be attributed to the emotional experience of viewing art. Also, the left superior parietal lobule, Brodmann's area 7, has been shown to play a role in active image construction during the viewing of art specifically containing indeterminate forms such as soft edge paintings. It is questionable whether the theories can capture the evocativeness or originality of individual works of art.

Additional research carries the assumption that our emotions are engaged when viewing or interacting with something related to aesthetics such as architecture, fashion or art however, the argument has been made by Alexis Makin, a researcher on visual neuroscience, that we can not yet encapsulate the neuroscience and psychological experience that occurs when having an aesthetic experience. Thus insinuating that we can not attribute our experience of aesthetics to that of something on the neurophysiological level. In negation to this, Skov and his colleagues make the argument that he emotional response elicited and the perceptual cues engaged in aesthetic experiences is enough evidence to ascertain the existence of empirical aesthetics. and others have developed extensive bodies of work mapping the convergence of brain science and painting. Smith's work explores fundamental visual analogies between neural function and self-expression in abstract art. The past decade has also seen a corresponding growth in the aesthetics of music studied from neuroscientific approaches. Psychological and social approaches to art help provide other theories of experience.

Art and music therapy are two proposed clinical applications for neuroaesthetics. Individuals with a variety of conditions including, but not limited to, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinsons, have shown symptom improvement after many types of art therapy and art exposure.

The advancements of biotechnology over time should allow neurophysiological responses to be recorded outside of the laboratory setting[4a]. Future directions should measure these responses while participants take part in immersive exhibits, especially those involving immersive multimedia exhibits such as TeamLab Planets TOKYO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamLab_(art_collective)

Interior design represents another applied direction for neuroaesthetics research. Environmental psychology research suggests that interior elements such as spatial scale, color, and the presence of natural light can produce measurable effects on mood, stress, and cognitive performance in occupants.

Neuroesthetics

Overview

Approaches of study

Frameworks

Aesthetic triad

Semir Zeki's laws of the visual brain

Constancy

Perceptual problem solving

Additional areas

See also

References

Further reading

External links