Art + Neuroscience: How the brain interprets beauty
By hola | Published | No Comments
Ever since he was a boy, Shahin Shikhaliyev found it fascinating to watch his father, an accomplished Azerbaijani painter, turn blank canvass into works of art. So perhaps its only natural that the son became an artist too. But the younger Shikhaliyev also developed a curiosity about how people react to artwork. And that interest led to last Friday’s arts management colloquium, “Beauty and the Brain,” at American University, where Shikhaliyev and two neuroscience professors explored how our brains process art—how we know when we are looking at something beautiful.
“Vision works in a very simple manner. First, it is fuzzy, but then it slowly gets clearer as time goes on. We first perceive light, then we slowly perceive lines, then shapes, then objects,” according to Shikaliyev, who used his own paintings, which draw on neuroscience as artistic inspiration, as well as Botticelli’s classic painting “Venus and Mars,” to demonstrate how the dorsal (bottom) part of the brain processes the composition of a painting so quickly that most people do not even realize it.
A.U. professors Dr. Terry Davidson and Dr. Arthur Shapiro then took the discussion deeper into the scientific realm. Davidson referred to research showing that the human brain has an immediate reaction to beautiful things, though we don’t all agree on what’s beautiful (because a person’s brain creates specific ideas of beauty depending on a variety of factors).
Nevertheless, people respond to that which they consider beautiful, Davidson said, backing up this assertion by showing a group of images and asking the audience to judge the “beauty,” “roughness,” or “ugliness” of each image. On the next slide, he showed brain scan images illustrating the different areas of brain that lit up when people were asked to rate the beauty or ugliness of particular images.
“If you’re in an arts organization, you’re in the meaning business. You promote focused and intentional human expressions, and encourage meaningful experiences with those expressions. All of that begins and ends and begins again in the human brain,” said Andrew Taylor, a member of A.U.’s arts management faculty, who writes about neuroesthetics, or brain science in art, on his blog, The Artful Manager.
— Radhika Raman
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