Changes in artistic style as a result of brain damage or dementia make the case that art can serve as a window into the workings of the human brain.© EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGESWillem de Kooning, the famous Dutch-American abstract expressionist painter, continued to paint for several years after developing Alzheimer’s disease. But his paintings were different somehow, more deeply expressing his abstract style, according to some art critics. De Kooning’s change in style explicitly makes the case that art can serve as a window into the workings of the human brain, that when the brain changes, so too do artistic expression and perception.
But what in the brain triggers aesthetic experiences? And how does knowledge of basic brain mechanisms inform our understanding of these experiences? These questions are at the heart of an emerging discipline dedicated to exploring the neural processes underlying our appreciation and production of beautiful objects and artwork, experiences that include perception, interpretation, emotion, and action. This new field represents a convergence of neuroscience and empirical aesthetics—the study of aesthetics rooted in observation—and is dubbed neuroaesthetics, a term coined in the 1990s by vision neuroscientist Semir Zeki of University College London.
Neuroaesthetics is both descriptive and experimental, with qualitative observations and quantitative tests of hypotheses, aimed at advancing our understanding of how humans process beauty and art. While the field is still young, interest is ...
