Science and Aesthetic Experience

A recent article in the Crimson described a new class in being offered by Harvard Medical School in Neuroaesthetics. Teaching it is Nancy Imhoff, a specialist in the science of happiness, subject of her Ted talk. This connection underscores the fact that we get pleasure from the arts. Art makes us happy. Scientists map locations of mental activity to see what areas are activated at the same time and learn something about why that is. Where the activity is located connects to what is known about those regions. In this case, the circuitry associated with seeing something outside ourselves and the circuitry of thinking inwardly about ourselves two systems that usually operate separately, are both active at once. We’re either observing or thinking about what’s being observed or we’re thinking about something else going on with us. Looking at art got both systems triggers them both together. Art takes us into the experienced emotions of another person, through the viewer’s personal experiences of that feeling, and this is both a connection to the artist, and increased self-awareness in reflecting on what came to mind.

The originator of the field of Neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki, found a place in the frontal lobe, the medial orbital frontal cortex, that always lights up with the experience of beauty. This is the area associated with value and sensitivity to what matters to us, reinforcing those qualities.  Alfred Adler was one psychiatrist that recommended having beautiful things artfully crafted around the home to increase sensitivity to value. Susanne Langer was a philosopher who felt the arts were the only proper mirror of the inner life. Her insights over fifty years ago are validated by recent brain science.

“You will never have a complete theory of aesthetics unless you take account of the organ through which you have the aesthetic experience,” Zeki said.

Referring to what the viewer experiences emphasizes the connection made between artist and self when two normally separate processes operate together. Far from robbing the arts of its mystery, the science behind the aesthetic experience is a powerful argument for re-emphasizing the arts in education. Insight demands response to wholes and arts is the way to educate the untapped potential of visual intelligence, the perceptual understanding of the whole picture. The idea that art creates pleasure signals its usefulness to human survival at a time when academic institutions are devaluing it. The brain rewards what is good for us. Self-awareness and attunement to harmony within the whole build important levels of our mind.

Beauty stimulates what is best in us adding circuitry in the frontal cortex, our most evolved area. The understructure made by the patterns of universal experience are represented by feelings, summarizing overall response. They are the glue that holds ideas together. Understanding the science aids understanding regarding why art has lasted throughout human history.

There is a unifying quality to art that information can’t reach as it itemizes things known. With art we feel together, the artist’s expression of emotion transmitting to the viewer’s experience of that emotion giving that shiver recognizing that underneath it all we are one not many.