Neuroaesthetics: A Summary

In my list of approaches to art criticism I neglected to mention neuroaesthetics. Neuroaesthetics is a new and still somewhat controversial approach to unraveling the mysteriousness of art. It uses neuroscience to understand the physical process of making aesthetic judgements.

The goal of neuroaesthetics is to replace our half-formed outer psychophysical understanding of the relationship between a stimulus and the psychology it provokes with an inner psychophysical understanding of the relationship between psychology and physiological properties of the brain.

Neuroaesthetics is offensive to some traditional aestheticians and art historians because it seems reductive. I doubt most fans of art, for instace, would appreciate VS Ramachandran's list of 10 universal laws of art:

1. Peak shift
2. Grouping
3. Contrast
4. Isolation
5. Perception problem solving
6. Symmetry
7. Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
8. Repetition, rhythm, and orderliness
9. Balance
10. Metaphor

There are different kinds of viewing, however, and one would expect them to involve different neural processes. For example, one study draws such a distinction between "objective and detached" viewing and "subjective and engaged" viewing.

Brown and Dissayanake offer three serious criticisms:

1. Neuroaesthetics is based on a class emotions that applies to much more than just art
2. Art appreciation and production uses more than just aesthetic emotions
3. The basic emotion theory (BET) first proposed by Darwin is oversimple

They also bring up that a neuroscientific theory of art must be able to account for all kinds of art, not just Eurocentric visual art, which is what the pioneers of the field such as Zeki and Ramachandran have focused on.

The second criticism in particular needs to be taken seriously. Art is a complex viewing experience that involves many factors: self-awareness, mood, environment, cultural context, body positioning, almost too many elements to count. Aesthetic judgements alone seem to tell us very little about how people actually engage with works of art.

They take Clore/Ortony's three-part categorization of kinds of emotions, and add a fourth group:

1. Outcomes: Emotions involved in the consequences of actions, often goal-motivated
2. Objects: Emotions involved in responses to objects (e.g. aesthetic emotions)
3. Agency: Emotions involved in making moral judgements of people
4. Social interactions: Emotions involved in self- and situation-conscious social interactions

This alternate approach to understanding emotions is less simplistic and doesn't reduce art to aesthetics.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) seems to be a place where there is an interplay of various classes of emotions. For example, the medial OFC has been shown to play a role in making aesthetic judgments when subjects are asked to express their reaction to paintings as either "beautiful", "neutral", or "ugly." It is unclear, however, whether the activity in the OFC during aesthetic experience is primarily an aspect of perception or primarily an emotional response to the artwork.

Useful as such experiments may be as the first building blocks of a one-day fully developed understanding of the inner psychophysics of appreciating art, the correlations drawn in neuroaesthetic experiments to date are the equivalent of taking a snapshot of the view outside your window and showing it to your friend, saying: "Look at this map I made of North America."

That Ramachandran predicts a galvanic skin response will be activated by a particular technique (multiple viewpoints of faces) used by a particular group of artists (Cubists) from a particular culture (European) using a particular medium (painting) seems to tell us almost nothing about how people actually engage with art.

This is why Brown and Dissayanake propose that neuroaesthetics be replaced with "neuroartsology," a field that tries to account for all the varied neurological processes involved in the viewing of art, rather than merely aesthetic judgements. It would likely take several decades for such a field to become useful, however.

For the most part, neuroaestheticians are aware of the shortcomings of their findings and their limitations in describing art. But their field is a legitimate one - after all, there is nothing theoretically impossible about an inner psychophysics of aesthetics (or artsology) - and their experiments bring us a tiny step closer to an understanding of aesthetics that surpasses what we can do with rationality alone.