Brain, Beauty, & Art
Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus
Edited by ANJAN CHATTERJEE AND EILEEN R. CARDILLO
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chatterjee, Anjan, editor. | Cardillo, Eileen R., editor. Title: Brain, beauty, & art : essays bringing neuroaesthetics into focus / Anjan Chatterjee and Eileen R. Cardillo (editors).
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021032376 (print) | LCCN 2021032377 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197513620 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197513644 (epub) | ISBN 9780197513651 (digital online)
Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics—Psychological aspects. | Arts—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC BH301.P 78 B73 2022 (print) | LCC BH301.P 78 (ebook) | DDC 111/.85—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032376
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032377
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197513620.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
1.
SECTION I FRAMEWORKS
2.
3.
10. Beautiful People in the Brain of the Beholder
Anjan Chatterjee
11. The Mark of Villainy: The Connection Between Appearance and Perceived Morality
Franziska Hartung 12. A Quest for Beauty
Thomas Jacobsen
13. Scene Preferences, Aesthetic Appeal, and Curiosity: Revisiting the Neurobiology of the Infovore
Edward A. Vessel, Xiaomin Yue, and Irving Biederman
14. Kinds of Beauty and the Prefrontal Cortex
Teresa Pegors
15. Expertise and Aesthetic Liking
Martin Skov and Ulrich Kirk
16. Social Meaning Brings Beauty: Neural Response to the Beauty of Abstract Chinese Characters
Xianyou He and Wei Zhang
SECTION III
17. The Contributions of Emotion and Reward to Aesthetic Judgment of Visual Art
Oshin Vartanian
18. Embodiment and the Aesthetic Experience of Images
Vittorio Gallese, David Freedberg, and Maria Alessandra Umiltà
19. The Role of Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortices in Aesthetic Valuation
Enric Munar and Camilo J. Cela-Conde
20. Noninvasive Brain Stimulation of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex During Aesthetic Appreciation
Marcos Nadal, Zaira Cattaneo, and Camilo J. Cela-Conde
21. Is Artistic Composition in Abstract Art Detected Automatically?
Claudia Menzel, Gyula Kovács, Gregor U. Hayn-Leichsenring, and Christoph Redies
22. The Contribution of Visual Area V5 to the Perception of Implied Motion in Art and Its Appreciation 107
Marcos Nadal and Zaira Cattaneo
23. Art Is Its Own Reward 112
Simon Lacey and K. Sathian
24. Imaging the Subjective 117
Edward A. Vessel and G. Gabrielle Starr
25. Cultural Neuroaesthetics of Delicate Sadness Induced by Noh Masks 122
Naoyuki Osaka
26. Toward a Computational Understanding of Neuroaesthetics 127
Kiyohito Iigaya and John P. O’Doherty
27. Artists, Artworks, Aesthetics, Cognition 132
William P. Seeley
28. Aesthetic Liking Is Not Only Driven by Object Properties, but Also by Your Expectations 137
Martin Skov and Ulrich Kirk
29. Finding Mutual Interest Between Neuroscience and Aesthetics: A Brush with Reality? 142
Andrew J. Parker
30. What Can We Learn About Art from People with Neurological Disease? 147
Anjan Chatterjee
SECTION IV MUSIC
31. Chills, Bets, and Dopamine: A Journey into Music Reward 155
Laura Ferreri, Jordi Riba, Robert Zatorre, and Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells
32. Why Does Music Evoke Strong Emotions? Testing the Endogenous Opioid Hypothesis 161
Daniel J. Levitin and Lindsay A. Fleming
33. Music in All Its Beauty: Adopting the Naturalistic Paradigm to Uncover Brain Processes During the Aesthetic Musical Experience 166
Elvira Brattico and Vinoo Alluri
34. Investigating Musical Emotions in People with Unilateral Brain Damage 170
Amy M. Belfi, Agathe Pralus, Catherine Hirel, Daniel Tranel, Barbara Tillmann, and Anne Caclin
SECTION V LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
35. The Neurocognitive Poetics Model of Literary Reading 10 Years After 177
Arthur M. Jacobs
36. The Power of Poetry 182
Eugen Wassiliwizky and Winfried Menninghaus
37. Pictograph Portrays What It Is: Neural Response to the Beauty of Concrete Chinese Characters 188 Xianyou He and Wei Zhang
SECTION VI DANCE
38. Movement, Synchronization, and Partnering in Dance 195 Steven Brown
39. Dance, Expertise, and Sensorimotor Aesthetics 199 Beatriz Calvo-Merino
40. An Eye for the Impossible: Exploring the Attraction of Physically Impressive Dance Movements 203 Emily S. Cross
41. The Mind, the Brain, and the Moving Body: Dance as a Topic in Cognitive Neuroscience 208 Bettina Bläsing and Beatriz Calvo-Merino
42. Training Effects on Affective Perception of Body Movements 213 Louise P. Kirsch and Emily S. Cross
SECTION VII ARCHITECTURE
43. The Neuroaesthetics of Architecture 221 Oshin Vartanian
44. Architectural Styles as Subordinate Scene Categories 225
Dirk B. Walther
45. Architectural Affordances: Linking Action, Perception, and Cognition
Zakaria Djebbara and Klaus Gramann
46. Architectural Design and the Mind
Alex Coburn Epilogue: Where Are We Now, and Where Are We Going?
Anjan Chatterjee and Eileen R. Cardillo
Prologue
Where Have We Been, and Where Are We Now?
Anjan Chatterjee and Eileen R. Cardillo
Seated on a wrought iron chair, enveloped in the sweet scent of magnolias and surrounded by decaying architectural remnants, I (AC) resolved to study the biology of aesthetic experiences. It was early in the spring of 1999. The setting was the courtyard at Garages, my favorite bar in Birmingham, Alabama. I was with two close friends; we often met there on Friday afternoons to talk about life and work. I had just been recruited by the University of Pennsylvania to join the newly forming Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Several drinks in, as the end to our cozy collaborations sunk in, Britt posed the following question to Mark and me. Imagine yourself 10 years into the future. Look back at your professional life. What would you regret not doing? Professionally, my work had focused on attention, spatial representations, and language. Personally, I had always been preoccupied by beauty, and I was obsessed with photography. With alcohol-infused clarity, I realized that my regret would be not making aesthetics an object of scientific inquiry. I was changing institutions, and it seemed an opportune time to tackle new ideas. At the time, neuroaesthetics did not exist. I didn’t know anybody who studied it or had written about it. After arriving at Penn, still a time before internet searches, I explored the old-fashioned way—musty meanderings through the library looking for relevant journals and books that could tether me to the topic. I found the Empirical Studies of the Arts, the flagship journal of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA). In 2002, I traveled to the next biennial meeting of IAEA held in Takarazuka, Japan, and met a small congenial group of people committed to scientific aesthetics. A path forward, although still obscure, seemed possible.
At the same time Anjan was contemplating a future pivot in the trajectory of his academic pursuits, I (EC) was finishing my final semester of college and charting the first steps of my own. I was preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness—what aspects of our biology and minds explained our particular way of being in the world. I’d first taken a comparative biology
approach to this mystery, assisting behavioral research on the symbolic capacities of one of our closest relatives, orangutans. Working so closely with such intelligent beings remains one of the defining, most humbling experiences I’ve had. But I found the pace of rigorous cognitive research with non-human apes to be too slow. By March of 1999, I was peering down a microscope, quantifying properties of hippocampal cells in migratory and nonmigratory juncos and recognizing my own ill-suitedness for bench neuroscience. On perhaps the same glorious spring day that Anjan resolved to investigate aesthetics, I dropped my senior thesis and determined human cognitive neuroscience was the middle way I sought. The extent of my aesthetic investigations at the time consisted of sporting conventionally ugly clothes and hair on purpose (it was the ’90s, after all) and defiantly feeling beautiful. It seems fitting, however, that two decades later my quest has led me to exploring aesthetic experience, one of the most human things we do.
The scientific study of aesthetics traces back to 1876, with Gustav Fechner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preliminaries to Aesthetics). Trained in medicine and physics, and a pioneer of experimental psychology, Fechner proposed the radical idea that aesthetics could be studied “from below.” He meant that it could be an experimental science, which contrasted with the approach “from above”—arguments derived from first principles. His book built on his own earlier work in psychophysics that systematically related properties of the outside world to properties of the mind. He recognized that for this outer psychophysics to be true, there had to be an inner psychophysics. Judgments about the world are, by necessity, mediated by properties of the brain. However, the ability to investigate this inner psychophysics was limited in the 19th century.
Neuroaesthetics is the realization of Fechner’s vision that one could study aesthetics empirically and link the brain to behavior. A subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience, neuroaesthetics is concerned with the neural basis of aesthetic experiences. We regard aesthetics broadly to encompass interactions with entities or events that evoke intense feelings and emotions, typically linked to pleasure, including but not limited to engagement with art. Twenty years ago, neuroscience joined the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. Scholarship in neuroaesthetics accelerated in earnest about a decade ago (see Figure P.1). To state the obvious, this is a very young field. These early days make the field ideal for researchers at the start of their careers or for seasoned researchers looking to make a switch in the focus of their inquiry. Big
Figure P.1 Neuroaesthetic publications from 1965 to 2019. PubMed search using the following terms: (neuroaesthetics) OR (neuroscience/ neuropsychology AND art) OR (neuroscience/neuropsychology AND beauty) OR (neuroscience AND aesthetics).
questions remain to be tackled. We are still establishing neuroaesthetics’ conceptual underpinnings, the relevant scientific agenda, the optimal methods for inquiry, and how best to engage with allied disciplines.
One goal of this book is to communicate the growing pains and the burgeoning excitement of this new field. People are often fascinated by the brain and by beauty and art. For many, the idea that the brain and aesthetics could be connected and studied scientifically comes as a surprise. When thinking of this connection between the brain and aesthetics, it is worth distinguishing between descriptive and experimental neuroaesthetics. Descriptive neuroaesthetics maps known properties of the brain onto aesthetic constructs. Experimental neuroaesthetics actually conducts experiments to test hypotheses. For example, one could appreciate that our visual system carves the world into people, places, and things and find an interesting parallel that representational visual art has been preoccupied by portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. One might further postulate that visual artists operate with implicit knowledge of the visual brain. This observation is descriptive, and the postulate is speculative. No hypothesis has been tested, and no experiment has been conducted. By contrast, one could hypothesize that our visual system engages valuation of paintings in a way that respects functional
anatomic segregations. An experimenter might present portrait and landscape paintings to people in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and predict that the parts of the visual cortex that process faces would show greater neural activity to portraits of beautiful than average-looking people, but be mute with respect to beauty in landscapes. They would further predict the converse pattern of neural activity in response to beauty in landscape paintings. In general, descriptive neuroaesthetics invites broad, sweeping claims. Experimental neuroaesthetics, like any experimental science, offers incremental and provisional claims. We believe that while descriptive neuroaesthetics can drive broad interest in the field and generate big hypotheses, a mature neuroaesthetics needs to be grounded in a robust, experimental program.
This volume surveys important work in experimental neuroaesthetics. What principles guided the choice of essays in this book? We wanted each essay to be anchored to a specific peer-reviewed publication and for authors to contextualize and comment on their work. We picked papers that we regard as important in the short history and ongoing development of the field. We also asked several other scientists for a list of papers they, too, regarded as influential. As may seem obvious for a volume on neuroaesthetics, the papers had to address aesthetics and make an explicit link to the brain. Psychology papers with implications for the brain, but without an explicit link, were not considered. Our initial list included 60 papers. The first and senior authors were invited to contribute their essays and add any other authors they saw fit. We asked authors to address three questions and write in the style of a popular science essay: (1) What motivated the original paper? (2) What were the main findings or theoretical claims made?, and (3) How do those findings or claims fit with the current state and anticipated near future of neuroaesthetics? Each essay was to be short and limited to five references. We further requested they be stand-alone contributions designed to be read without need for the original paper (although academics can certainly access them if this collection is used for teaching or to guide future research). Most people we invited accepted graciously and were intrigued by the prospect of writing a popular science essay placing their work in a broader context. A few authors declined, and some were stymied by the pandemic. Our final tally is the 46 essays presented here, designed to bring the history of neuroaesthetics into contemporary focus.
The book is organized into seven sections. Section I addresses conceptual frameworks. These essays represent the field’s ongoing attempts to establish
its identity. How does one organize an empirical program? These attempts at framing vary quite a bit; perhaps not surprising as the field finds its footing. Section II focuses on beauty; the experience of beauty is most commonly associated with the term “aesthetics.” These essays capture different approaches to the biological underpinning of beauty in faces and in landscapes. Section III is about art. We sequester the best of such works in high temples of culture and are preoccupied with adorning our homes and walls with others. How do we think about these desired objects when they lack an obvious link to primary rewards, like food and sex?
The subsequent four sections are shorter—covering music (Section IV), literature (Section V), dance (Section VI), and architecture (Section VII)— and reflect the uneven growth of the field. The cognitive neuroscience of music is itself a well-developed domain of inquiry. A section in a book such as this one could not possibly do music scholarship justice. Rather, it aims to highlight work that showcases possible methodological or programmatic paths forward for other, less explored areas. Curiously, some of the music researchers we invited declined because they did not see themselves as conducting neuroaesthetics research. Nonetheless, the essays included capture themes important to music researchers and relevant to the field as a whole. The neuroscience of literature, dance, and architecture are even earlier in their evolution than the study of visual beauty and art. Sections V through VII convey emerging topics that are central to these nascent subfields of neuroasethetics.
What is not covered by this collection is as important to note as what is. As the most rapidly developing subfield of neuroaesthetics, and our own area of expertise, this collection focuses on the study of visual aesthetics. However, to our thinking, eating a delicious meal, inhaling a delicate fragrance, being swathed in diaphanous silk, and immersing oneself in a horror film are as relevant experiences to neuroaesthetic investigations as beholding the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. We regard these gaps as invitations not diminishments, and we hope to inspire enterprising readers.
The collection represents a curated set of essays inviting the reader to journey along with researchers actively shaping neuroaesthetics today. We were relatively activist editors navigating between trying to make each essay readable to a general public while not simplifying its content and, most importantly, not altering the voices of the authors. The diversity in style of expression and opinion has been retained to convey the splendid messiness of a new field in which the received wisdom is yet to be received.
Contributors
Vinoo Alluri, PhD
Assistant Professor
Cognitive Science Lab International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, India
Amy M. Belfi, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychological Science
Missouri University of Science and Technology
USA
Irving Biederman, PhD
Harold W. Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience
Deptartments of Psychology and Computer Science, Program in Neuroscience
University of Southern California USA
Dr. habil. Bettina Bläsing
Faculty of Rehabilitation Sciences
Technical University Dortmund Germany
Elvira Brattico, PhD
Professor, Center for Music in the Brain
Department of Clinical Medicine
Aarhus University and Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg
Denmark
Department of Education, Psychology, Communication
University of Bari Aldo Moro
Italy
Steven Brown, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour
McMaster University Canada
Anne Caclin, PhD
Researcher
Lyon Neuroscience Research Center
INSERM, CNRS, Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University
France
Beatriz Calvo-Merino, PhD
Associate Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Psychology City, University of London UK
Eileen R. Cardillo, DPhil
Associate Director
Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics University of Pennsylvania USA
Zaira Cattaneo, PhD
Associate Professor Department of Psychology University of Milano-Bicocca; IRCCS Mondino Foundation, Italy
Camilo J. Cela-Conde, PhD
Full Professor
Department of Philosophy, Human Evolution and Cognition Group
University of the Balearic Islands
Spain
Contributors
Anjan Chatterjee, MD
Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture
Director, Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics
University of Pennsylvania
USA
Alex Coburn, PhD
Medical Student
Department of Medicine
University of California San Francisco USA
Emily S. Cross, PhD
Professor of Human Neuroscience
Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Australia
Professor of Social Robotics Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology
University of Glasgow UK
Cinzia Di Dio, PhD
Faculty of Educational Science
Department of Psychology, Research Unit on Theory of Mind
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Italy
Zakaria Djebbara, PhD Postdoc
Department of Architecture, Design, Media and Technology
Aalborg University Denmark
Raymond J. Dolan, MD
Max Planck UCL Center for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging
University College London UK
Laura Ferreri, PhD
Laboratoire d’Etude des Mécanismes
Cognitifs
Université Lumière Lyon 2 France
Lindsay A. Fleming, MA
Research Assistant and Project Coordinator
Department of Psychology
McGill University Canada
David Freedberg, PhD
Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art
Department of Art History and Italian Academy for Advanced Studies
Columbia University
USA
Vittorio Gallese, MD Professor of Psychobiology
Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience University of Parma Italy
Klaus Gramann, PhD Professor
Biological Psychology and Neuroergonomics
Technische Universitaet Berlin Germany
Franziska Hartung, PhD Lecturer School of Psychology Newcastle University UK
Dr. med. dent. habil. Gregor U. HaynLeichsenring, BA
Experimental Aesthetics Group, Institute of Anatomy I
Jena University Hospital, University of Jena School of Medicine
Germany
Xianyou He, PhD Professor of Psychology School of Psychology
South China Normal University China
Catherine Hirel, MD Neurologist
Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM, CNRS, Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University; Hopital Neurologique Pierre Wertheimer France
Kiyohito Iigaya, PhD
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
California Institute of Technology USA
Arthur M. Jacobs Freie Universität Berlin Germany
Thomas Jacobsen, PhD Professor of Psychology
Experimental Psychology Unit
Helmut Schmidt University / University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Germany
Ulrich Kirk, PhD
Associate Professor Department of Psychology University of Southern Denmark Denmark
Louise P. Kirsch, PhD Research Associate Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics
Sorbonne Université France
Prof. Dr. Gyula Kovács
Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neurosciences
Friedrich-Schiller University Jena Germany
Simon Lacey, PhD
Assistant Professor Departments of Neurology and Neural & Behavioral Sciences
Pennsylvania State University USA
Helmut Leder, PhD Professor of Empirical Aesthetics
Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Research Hub University of Vienna Austria
Daniel J. Levitin, PhD
Founding Dean of Arts and Humanities
Minerva Schools at KGI USA
Winfried Menninghaus, Dr. Director
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Department of Language and Literature Germany
Dr. Claudia Menzel
Social, Environmental, and Economic Psychology University of Koblenz-Landau Germany
Enric Munar, PhD Full Professor
Human Evolution and Cognition Group University of the Balearic Islands Spain
Marcos Nadal, PhD
Associate Professor Department of Psychology University of the Balearic Islands Spain
John P. O’Doherty, DPhil Professor
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
California Institute of Technology USA
Naoyuki Osaka, PhD
Professor Emeritus
Kyoto University
Visiting Professor
CiNet Osaka University and Japan
Academy Japan
Andrew J. Parker, MA, PhD, ScD
Professor of Neuroscience
Department of Physiology, Anatomy, & Genetics
University of Oxford UK
Marcus Pearce, BA, MSc, PhD
Senior Lecturer in Sound & Music Processing
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London
UK
Teresa Pegors, PhD Manassas Virginia USA
Dr. Matthew Pelowski
Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics
Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Research Hub University of Vienna Austria
Agathe Pralus, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM, CNRS
Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University France
Christoph Redies, MD, PhD
Experimental Aesthetics Group
Institute of Anatomy I
Jena University Hospital, University of Jena School of Medicine Germany
Jordi Riba, PhD
Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology
Maastricht University
The Netherlands
Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, PhD
Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit
Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute
L’Hospitalet de Llobregat
Department of Cognition, Development and Education Psychology
University of Barcelona Spain
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis
Avançats
Spain
K. Sathian, MBBS, PhD
Chair of Neurology
Penn State Health
Director, Neuroscience Institute
Professor of Neurology, Neural & Behavioral Sciences, and Psychology
Pennsylvania State University USA
William P. Seeley, MFA (Sculpture), PhD (Philosophy)
Adjunct Faculty
Department of Humanities
University of New Hampshire at Manchester USA
Martin Skov, PhD
Senior Researcher
Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance
Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre & Center for Decision Neuroscience, Copenhagen Business School
Denmark
G. Gabrielle Starr, PhD President Professor of English and Neuroscience Pomona College USA
Barbara Tillmann, PhD CNRS Research Director Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM, CNRS
Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University France
Daniel Tranel, PhD Professor Departments of Neurology and Psychological and Brain Sciences University of Iowa USA
Maria Alessandra Umiltà, PhD Professor of Physiology Department of Food and Drug University of Parma Italy
Oshin Vartanian, PhD Associate Professor Department of Psychology University of Toronto Canada
Edward A. Vessel, PhD Research Scientist Department of Neuroscience
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Germany
Dirk B. Walther, PhD Associate Professor Department of Psychology University of Toronto Canada
Eugen Wassiliwizky, Dr. Senior Researcher
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Department of Language and Literature Germany
Xiaomin Yue, PhD Research Fellow
The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition
National Institute of Mental Health USA
Robert Zatorre, PhD
Montreal Neurological Institute
McGill University and International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research Canada
Wei Zhang, PhD Assistant Professor School of Psychology
South China Normal University China
