Are psychedelics aesthetic?
According to neurologist Anjan Chatterjeea, aesthetic experiences integrate information from a triad of brain systems.
Psychedelics are emotional and evaluative
Creating new reward values
Emotions combine with perceptions, memories and thoughts in various ways, the ‘reward values’ of which allow us to evaluate and compare them. For neuroscientist Gabriella Starr, aesthetic experiences are fundamentally about discovering new reward values by creating new connections between seemingly unrelated emotions, perceptions, memories and thoughts.
Psychedelic experiences meet this criteria since they facilitate new reward values. As the Default Mode Network (DMN) becomes less organised, the brain exerts less top down control on Conscious Contents so that the brain’s best guess predictions are not properly updated by the prediction errors of sensory signals. After all, hallucinations are ‘uncontrolled perceptions’. The brain as a whole becomes less specialised and more globally, functionally interconnected as new connections form across regions of the brain.
Feeling moved
For psychologist Ellen Winner, when people say art affects them emotionally, they tend to mean that they feel moved. This seems to relate to Gabriella Starr’s research that differentiated between liking artworks and feeling moved by them, and concluded that two different brain systems are involved.
Feeling moved involves activation of the DMN that is responsible for self-referential tasks and reinforces the ego so that artworks feel more personally significant. This would seem to conflict with the effects of psychedelics that suppress the activation of the DMN and its integrative functions to dissolve the ego rather than reinforce it.
However, this is based on a narrow framing of the psychedelic experience since its boundaries extend into the hours and days after the most intense effects wear off when the DMN resets and the ego is reinforced, possibly in new ways. It’s during this ‘integration period’ that we try to make sense of the experience and may conclude that ‘I feel moved by it’; the sense of ‘I’ may feel very unclear during the prior period when the experience is most intense. This relates to philosopher Alva Noe’s question about defining art experiences- are they limited to the gallery or do they extend to when we reflect on the artworks when we arrive back home?
Psychedelics are epistemic and semantic
Set and setting an aesthetic attitude
Contextual factors, especially our prior beliefs, knowledge and expectations, affect reward values by framing and modulating aesthetic experiences. This seems to relate to Ellen Winner’s conclusion that anything can be treated as art by adopting an ‘aesthetic attitude’ so that we attend to ‘when is art?’ rather than ‘what is art?’.
For Alva Noe, art is ‘a research practice’ to investigate the world and ourselves’. An artwork forces us to interrogate it- what is this and what’s it for?- thereby illuminating our background of bodily, cultural, social and political assumptions that we use to make sense of it. Psychedelic experiences are framed by many contextual factors before (‘set’), during (‘setting) and afterwards (‘integration’). Artists have the opportunity to interrogate the various models that are emerging to interpret and give meaning to psychedelic experiences, and consider to what extent these models (could) promote an aesthetic attitude towards them.