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Based on an article by Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian

Neuroaesthetics: An Overview

What is Neuroaesthetics?

Neuroaesthetics

Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that is concerned with understanding

the biological bases of aesthetic experiences.

Beginnings

term coined by Semir Zeki in 1999

received its formal definition in 2002

Researchers from a broad range of fields became

interested in the topic

Semir Zeki

British neurobiologist who has specialized in studying the primate visual brain and more recently the neural correlates of affective states, such as the experience of love, desire and beauty that are generated by sensory inputs within the field of neuroesthetics.

Some Fun Examples!

Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh

Gazing at Van Gogh’s dynamic paintings evokes a subjective sense of movement and activates visual motion areas V5/MT+

The middle temporal visual area (MT or V5) is a region of extrastriate visual cortex. In several species of both New World monkeys and Old World monkeys the MT area contains a high concentration of direction-selective neurons. The MT in primates is thought to play a major role in the perception of motion, the integration of local motion signals into global percepts, and the guidance of some eye movements.

Portraits activate the face area in the fusiform gyrus (FFA) and landscape paintings activate the place area in the parahippocampal gyrus (PPA)

Similarly...

Motor Systems and Rewards

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.

Lucio Fontana

Reward Activation

The pleasure that people derive from looking at beautiful objects automatically engages general reward circuitry. For example, attractive faces activate the (fusiform Face Area) 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, 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.

The brain's reward pathways

Impact of Expectation and Environment

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 the

ventral striatum and parts of the orbitofrontal cortex were

more responsive to ‘art status’ than to the actual content of

visual images.

In addition, knowing the title of an

artwork can facilitate greater engagement with and deepening of aesthetic experiences

Conclusion &

Questions

Aesthetic experiences are emergent states, arising from interactions

between sensory–motor, emotion–valuation, and meaning–knowledge neural

systems.

Of the three systems, we know least about the contribution of the meaning–

knowledge system to aesthetic experiences, partly because its manifestations are

widely distributed throughout the brain and it varies substantially across individuals,

cultures, and historic epochs

and that is just scratching the surface...

The Aesthetic

Triad

Questions?

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