What is the Cognitive Neuroscience of Art…and Why Should We Care? The American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter, 31(2), Summer 2011: 1-4. (original) (raw)

Art and Neuroscience: a State of the Union

Mobile Brain-Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity, 2019

In its emphasis on the feedback loops of top-down and bottom-up signal processing in the brain, and the exquisitely muddy area where they meet, the last century of psychology and neuroscience supports a model of aesthetic engagement wherein we meet the world halfway. In its unavoidable mustering of the totality of a person’s taste, expectation, and memory, as well as the social and political forces of the world around them, aesthetic engagement is thus far from a passive act. Yet too often the dialogue between art and neuroscience pulls the analysis of aesthetic engagement into the apolitical, sanitized, averaging language of science—-treating art as an exotic stimulus and the brain as a universalized end-domain for us to plant our flag of understanding. From the pitfalls of neuroaesthetic inquiry to a real-world case study of interdisciplinary dialogue run amok, this chapter examines critical stumbling blocks and possibilities for future engagements.

Art, meaning, and aesthetics: The case for a cognitive neuroscience of art

2020

It is important to note that I am not suggesting that we should directly import the results of empirical psychology to aesthetics. The direct application of empirical results in aesthetics can, and very often does, go terribly wrong. What I suggest is that aesthetics should take some new paradigms of philosophy of perception seriously. The specific paradigm I am interested in here, the paradigm of multimodality, is based on a large body of empirical research. However, my aim is not to urge an empirical turn in aesthetics, but to urge a turn in aesthetics towards philosophy of perception, and this sometimes entails a turn towards empirically informed philosophy of perception.

Art and Neuroscience

Beyond Mimesis and Convention, 2010

1. I want to discuss a new area of scientific research called neuro-aesthetics, which is the study of art by neuroscientists. The most prominent champions of neuro-aesthetics are VS Ramachandran and Semir Zeki, both of whom have both made ambitious claims about their work. ...

Neuroscience and the artist's mind

2010

This paper is a heuristic attempt to put art back into nature by trying to understand the biological basis of mind and its relation to the world. This relationship is negotiated at a physiological level by primary consciousness but, with the development of the human brain over time, higher-level consciousness has evolved symbolic systems to explore the significance of social and cultural experience, as well as to make forays into new ways of thinking about the world through recursive synthesis. The arts-including the visual arts-are an important field within higher-consciousness. Their significance for each of us is constrained by genetic inheritance, somatic and social evolution, and is part of the mental repertoire we utilise to process phenomenological experience within a social context.

Toward an Integrative Approach of Cognitive Neuroscientific and Evolutionary Psychological Studies of Art

This paper examines explanations for human artistic behavior in two reductionist research programs, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Despite their different methodological outlooks, both approaches converge on an explanation of art production and appreciation as byproducts of normal perceptual and motivational cognitive skills that evolved in response to problems originally not related to art, such as the discrimination of salient visual stimuli and speech sounds. The explanatory power of this reductionist framework does not obviate the need for higher-level accounts of art from the humanities, such as aesthetics, art history or anthropology of art.

Art, Meaning, and Perception: A Question of Methods for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Art

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2013

Neuroscience of art might give us traction with aesthetic issues. However it can be seen to have trouble modeling the artistically salient semantic properties of artworks. So if meaning really matters, and it does, even in aesthetic contexts, the prospects for this nascent field are dim. The issue boils down to a question of whether or not we can get a grip on the kinds of constraints present and available to guide interpretive behavior in our engagement with works of fine art. I argue that biased competition models of selective attention can be used to solve this problem, generalize to the affective content of our responses to artworks, and so show that research in cognitive neuroscience is germane to the types of problems of interest within the philosophy of art.

Art and brain: insights from neuropsychology, biology and evolution

Journal of Anatomy, 2010

Art is a uniquely human activity associated fundamentally with symbolic and abstract cognition. Its practice in human societies throughout the world, coupled with seeming non‐functionality, has led to three major brain theories of art. (1) The localized brain regions and pathways theory links art to multiple neural regions. (2) The display of art and its aesthetics theory is tied to the biological motivation of courtship signals and mate selection strategies in animals. (3) The evolutionary theory links the symbolic nature of art to critical pivotal brain changes in Homo sapiens supporting increased development of language and hierarchical social grouping. Collectively, these theories point to art as a multi‐process cognition dependent on diverse brain regions and on redundancy in art‐related functional representation.

Wave of the Future? Reconsidering the Neuroscientific Turn in Art History

This essay examines the much-contested “neuroscientific turn” in art history, taking the cues of the best of the turn while rejecting its false starts. The most promising transdisciplinary encounters spanning the brain sciences and the humanities begin from the premise that human experience is embodied, but the “body” itself is interwoven across biological, ecological, phenomenological, social and cultural planes. Certain media artworks critically engaged with neuroscience productively model such an approach. Taking Mariko Mori’s brainwave interface and multimedia installation Wave UFO (1999–2002) as a case study, the author explores how works of art may complicate and augment brain science research as well as its dissemination into other social and cultural arenas.