Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience

"A lot of people extol the value of interdisciplinary work; ‘interdisciplinarity’ is a big buzzword in academic circles. It turns out, it’s actually quite hard to do and even harder to do well. Gabrielle Starr is a humanist—a literary scholar, by training—but she wanted to understand how neuroscience methods work and if they have anything to teach us about aesthetics. She trained in imaging methods so she would not just be a distant consumer of the technology but would be informed by working knowledge. She collaborated with a neuroscientist named Ed Vessel and they produced a couple of interesting papers. Two ideas underpinning their work are important. One is that, in a lot of cognitive neuroscience right now, rather than thinking about the function of individual parts of the brain, we think of the function of networks. Networks have different nodes with coordinated activity that implement certain functions. The second idea is that their studies introduced a new idea in neuroaesthetic research, particularly by invoking ‘the default mode network.’ This network is activated when people, for example, are daydreaming or their mental orientation is driven inward. They showed that the paintings that people found most moving kicked the default mode network into gear. The idea is that when an image is especially moving we also turn inward rather than outward. It’s a very interesting finding, and whether at the end of the day it turns out to be true remains to be seen. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So Gabrielle Starr is an excellent example of a humanist who takes neuroscience seriously and seriously enough to learn some of the methods and conduct a terrific experiment. In her book, she describes the experiment but also writes as someone from the humanities in her analysis of literature, poetry, and music, and art, all nestled around this experimental work. I find it covers the whole range. I can only speak for my personal experience, but having given talks widely, I find artists typically to be the most interested. Artists themselves, if I can generalise, strike me as most open-minded to this line of inquiry. They are fascinated about what’s going on and, don’t appear to be threatened by neuroscientists asking these questions and worried that we might be too reductionist. People in the scholarly humanities are all over the place. Some philosophers are really interested in neuroscience, and some philosophers think that a neuroscientist studying aesthetics is a category mistake- just fundamentally wrong. There are some art historians who are also interested. John Onians is an art historian, for example, who wrote a book called Neuroarthistory . Other art historians think that either neuroscientists make overly grandiose claims—which in some cases is true—or that we are uninformed about the history and the culture of art in our studies- which is also sometimes true. I don’t know that that means, in principle, neuroscientists can’t be better educated and be in more direct conversation with art historians. I still believe what I believed when I started in the field: there are certain important questions a neuroscientist can ask, there are certain question an art historian or a humanist can ask. They’re not in conflict and they don’t always have to overlap."