Rebuilding Neuroaesthetics from the Ground Up

Introduction One of the most remarkable features of the human mind is its capacity for aesthetic appreciation. In the visual modality, aesthetics can be defined as the ability to derive pleasure from arrangements of colors, forms and patterns. This piece of our psychology acts in subtle ways, but it nonetheless plays an extremely consequential role in many people's lives. The sense of aesthetics is a product of activity in our brains, and it follows that it can be studied using empirical methods. The goal of neuroaesthetics is to apply techniques from experimental psychology to the study of aesthetic appreciation. Philosophical aestheticians have long puzzled over the exact connection between the sense of aesthetics and works of art. Historically, these two subjects have almost always been discussed together, but this has not lead to a consensus regarding their relationship, or even their individual definitions (Tolstoy, 1896). The experience of looking at an artwork results from the contributions of many component processes, and our sense of aesthetics operates on many percepts that are not works of art. In this paper, I will argue that neuroscientists are well equipped to study simple visual aesthetics, but that they should carry out this research program without using artworks as stimuli. In order to argue this point convincingly, I will attempt to integrate perspectives from evolutionary psychology, art history, philosophical aesthetics and cognitive neuroscience. The Evolution of Artistic Behaviors Recently, a number of authors have argued for the existence of an " art instinct " (Dutton, 2009; Dissanayake, 1998). These scholars suggest that tendency to make art, be it music, or paintings, or theatrical productions, is biologically ingrained in the human psyche as the result of the survival advantage that these behaviors brought our Pleistocene ancestors. According to them, each of the many behaviors that we now call " the Arts " was originally used in socially important situations. Individuals who 3 derived pleasure from these activities were more likely to participate in communal rituals, and this ultimately led to the spread of their genetic material within the group (Dissanayake, 1998). In What is Art For, Ellen Dissanayake writes that early humans thus created an environment that favored the evolution of an elaborate sense of aesthetics, and that this was the origin of our universal preference for decorative colors, forms and patterns. Her argument accounts for the fact most societies make use of art objects in …