Your brain on art
Neuroaesthetics studies the cognitive processes and functional networks of brain regions involved in aesthetic experiences.
The aesthetic experiences of artworks have mainly been studied and the focus has often been on beauty. However, neuroaesthetics extends beyond artworks and includes a wide range of aesthetic experiences.
The aesthetic triad
‘Aesthetics’ derives from the Greek ‘aisthetikos’, meaning ‘of sensory perception’. Aesthetic experiences involve other types of perceptions since they integrate information from a triad of sensory-motor, emotional-evaluative and meaning-knowledge systems.
Emotion and feeling moved
Emotions are appraisals of how well our needs and wants are being met, drawing on external perceptions of the world and internal perceptions about the homeostatic state inside our bodies.
The pleasure (or displeasure) associated with emotions is the reward for meeting (or not) these needs and desires, and represents the motivation for exploring the world.
Reward values
Emotions combine with sensory perceptions, memories and thoughts in various ways, the ‘reward values’ of which allow us to evaluate and compare them. These combinations are dynamic; reward values can change and be transformed by further experiences. For neuroscientist Gabriella Starr in Feeling beauty, aesthetic experiences are fundamentally about discovering new reward values by creating new connections between seemingly unrelated emotions, perceptions, memories and thoughts.
Feeling moved
Artworks involve two types of emotional responses: depicted and evoked. While people tend to agree on what emotions an artwork depicts, they tend to disagree more about how it made them feel. In How art works, psychologist Ellen Winner explains that when people say art affects them emotionally, they tend to mean that they feel moved. For her, ‘feeling moved’ arises from the imagination so that we can be distracted and escape from our problems and troubles; for her, ‘imaginative experience’ could even be a necessary characteristic of artworks.
Liking vs feeling moved
Gabriella Starr was part of a research team that studied people’s responses to different types of artworks. They were placed in a scanner that measured brain activity by detecting associated blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) changes.
When presented with images of different artworks, they were asked to respond how much each image ‘moves you’ and rate it on a score of 1-4. People may have weighted certain feelings differently than each other, so after the scan they viewed each artwork again and rated the degree to which it caused a specific response so that the results could be calibrated and compared fairly.
The results showed two different response patterns, suggesting that two distinct neural systems were triggered.
As scores increased from 1-3, BOLD activation varied linearly in certain brain regions involved in emotional processing and reward, including a large part of the Medial Temporal Lobes (MTLs). The MTLs include the hippocampus, amygdala and parahippocampal regions that are crucial for emotional processing and memory.
As scores increased from 3-4, there was a step change in BOLD activation in several prefrontal regions and regions of the Default Mode Network (DMN), the activity of which had not responded in the same ways for the artworks scored 1-3. The artworks that scored 4, significantly, if not completely, stopped suppressing regions of the DMN (most notably the medial PreFrontal Cortex and Posterior Cingulate Cortex).
Gabriella Starr concludes that artworks that scored 4 involved aesthetic experiences that go beyond ‘mere liking’ to something more intense and personally profound- ‘feeling moved’. She also concludes that the brain regions involved in emotional processing and reward (scores 1-3) provide a gateway to the DMN (score 4), although their interaction needs to be better understood.
Movement and embodied simulation
Our motor systems help to integrate the sensory constituents of an experience. Even vision is rooted in how we move around and navigate the world so Gabriella Starr concludes that ‘the mind’s body is more encompassing than the mind’s eye’.
The same brain areas involved when we move are also active when we perceive other people move. Even when we perceive static images that represent movement, their implied dynamics activate our own motor systems so that we can imagine their movements and experience the feelings associated with them. This ‘embodied simulation’ might explain why people's aesthetic and empathic capacities seem correlated.
Knowledge and aesthetic attitude
Contextual factors, especially the background context of our prior beliefs, knowledge and expectations, frame and modulate aesthetic experiences. Consequently, Ellen Winner concludes that anything can be treated as art by adopting an ‘aesthetic attitude’ so that we attend to it in a special way: the question is not ‘what is art?’ but ‘when is art?’.
Informational integration and aesthetic potential
The DMN describes interconnected regions of the brain that display suppressed activity during cognitively demanding tasks focused on external stimuli but higher activity during internally focused thoughts and self-referential tasks; for example, when thinking about:
oneself (autobiographical memory and emotions about oneself)
others (theory of mind, emotions about others, moral and social reasoning)
past and future (recalling past events, envisioning future events and episodic memory)
The involvement of the DMN might explain why we feel moved by intense artworks when they seem to ‘resonate with’ or 'understand’ us, leading to intensely personal feelings toward our favourite artists despite them being strangers.
The DMN sits at the highest level of the brain’s functional hierarchy so is well positioned to integrate information across multiple brain systems. Regions of the DMN largely map onto the network responsible for motor imagery and the sensorimotor representations that help to integrate the various constituents of an experience and support embodied simulation. For Gabriella Starr, the DMN and motor imagery are key to understanding aesthetic experiences because they underpin how emotions, perceptions, memories and thoughts are combined in dynamic ways to change reward values, redefining and revaluing what we feel and know.
Unifying the arts?
Since the activation of the DMN generalises across visual experiences, including artworks, landscapes and architecture, Gabriella Starr argues that the DMN could unify our experience of the arts. However, it’s unclear what the DMN is supporting during aesthetic experiences activated by non-visual stimuli, such as music; and whether it’s distinctly aesthetic since activity of the same brain regions could also correlate with other types of experiences. Since the participants were shown artworks but not non-art objects, it’s also unclear to what extent the research results were affected by priming and their expectations.