Unit 1 Overview: A Critical Assessment of Neuroaesthetics as Experimental Science—Chances, Challenges, Required Commitments

Abstract

This chapter shows how a neuroscientific approach can contribute to understanding aesthetical phenomena We also discuss challenges and clear limitations of neuroscientific approaches. As in most psychologically rooted research questions, we cannot gain a comprehensive picture without taking further layers of analysis into account. Most importantly, every aesthetic phenomenon always has different layers that are linked with sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. Furthermore, these processes are essentially modulated by personality factors and situational and task-dependent demands which are embedded in cultural contexts. If we try to combine information from different levels, we can see the benefit of neuroscientific data in terms of the timing of subprocesses, which parts of the brain are involved in the processing, and, most importantly, how specific brain regions communicate with each other at which time. This will inform aesthetic researchers to identify areas for future research and development and how to combine interdisciplinary forces to create more complex, holistic, and profound insights into deeper aesthetic experiences such as the experience of art.

Preamble: A Late But Sustainable Development of Neuroaesthetics

Neuroaesthetics aims to explore the neural underpinningscited in the text but of aesthetic experience. Due to the reliance on advanced neuroscientific technologies such as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) or invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it was developed as a new branch of aesthetic research only a couple of decades ago. The more systematic research on neuroaesthetics was started around 1999 with a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies where prominent figures of this field published seminal works, including Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (where the field is called “Science of Art”, see Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999) and Semir Zeki (who called the field “Art and Brain”, see Zeki, 1999a). Already in the same year, 1999, Zeki finally coined the term “Neuroaesthetics” (Zeki, 1999b). Noteworthily, these early sources explicitly and foremostly referred to art and artworks when discussing aesthetics. Typically everyday aspects like kitsch and aesthetically pleasing everyday and ordinary design objects are less addressed or mentioned at all (see Ortlieb & Carbon, 2019). Nowadays, neuroaesthetics is an emerging field of different sorts of scientific endeavours covering nearly all phenomena of aesthetics of a great variety of modalities and phenomena—in 2023, just 24 years after establishing this research field already 230+ scientific papers in Web of Science are listed that explicitly use “neuroaesthetics” in the title or abstract.

In the following, we will discuss several chances for neuroaesthetics research. However, we will also call some challenges into the mind and demand specific commitment not to fall into some traps of misinterpreting neuroaesthetics data and to contextualize such data into a meaningful interdisciplinary aesthetic framework.

Chances: What We Can Learn from Neuroaesthetics

Neuroaesthetics adds innovative methods and sophisticated measures to address research questions of empirical aesthetics. It can provide insights into the neural basis of aesthetic experiences and contribute to our understanding of how the brain works to phenomena relevant to this kind of experience. We can learn about universal and default mechanisms (Vessel et al., 2012) involved when processing aesthetically relevant items such as artworks. Moreover, we can identify specific brain regions and neural circuits (Kawabata & Zeki, 2004) involved in such processes. Taken such pieces of evidence together can have far-reaching implications for understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the complex interplay between sensory inputs, affective-cognitive processing of the input, and the triggered or executed behaviour. Due to this complex interplay, interdisciplinary co-working seems to be inevitable; among the most important fields are perceptual sciences, emotional research, and behavioural studies. As such, neuroaesthetics is a potential driver and initiator of the cross-disciplinary dialogue very much needed in today’s science community, where we try to develop new theories of complexly interacting areas in order to understand and cope with these complexities. We should, however, be very cautious about thinking (or even believing) that by observing the neuronal basis of ongoing processes when perceiving an artwork, we have found any key to understanding the phenomenon of art as such (see Hyman, 2010) and the specifics of aesthetic experience (Carbon, 2019a; Kubovy, 2020).

Challenges: Where We Struggle with the Complexities and Specifics of Aesthetics

Despite its inspiring ways to gain knowledge on brain functionality, neuroaesthetics also faces critical challenges in understanding aesthetics. A serious problem: aesthetics inherently contains so many facets and triggers such a variety of different processes that it is unrealistic to understand the entire complexity by focusedly analysing neuronal activities across the brain. But besides this, the really essential problem is that aesthetics and the appeal of aesthetics, the experiencing of aesthetics including feelings and triggered experiences by the activation of the associative network, is a phenomenological issue, and neuroaesthetics cannot address this critical part of aesthetics adequately. We will discuss all these points in the following in more detail to sensitize the reader to these challenges.

The first challenge is that aesthetics is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing various forms, styles, and media in terms of the aesthetic object, but there are an infinite number of processes involved and triggered by perceiving and experiencing such an object. The sheer complexity and interdependence of affective and cognitive processes overtax the capability to understand aesthetic experiences. The only chance to gain useful knowledge is to reduce complexity to smaller pieces. This is the typical, and clever, answer of experimental research to overly complex problems. By focusing on a few parameters and changing them systematically, you reclaim scientific land, but you also lose an essential asset and so the key to the treasure island of aesthetics: The emerging Gestalt created by the entire network activity over time will fade out, vanish, and will be ultimately lost. The typical Fechnerian approach to psychophysical research by splitting up the problem into distinct aesthetic qualities and subproblems will self-evidently lead to the so-called Gestalt Nightmare (Makin, 2017). To explain complex aesthetic experiences in terms of isolated neural processes is misleading if we are interested in the complexity and true experience of art. Such a reductionist also ignores the default type of perceptual processing: The emerging percept with which we operate, non-consciously or consciously of quality, is not the sum of its sub-processes, but it is a rather constructive process adding Gestalt and meaning by filling gaps in a fundamental (Carbon, 2014) as well as the creative level (Carbon et al., 2022). As our filling-in mechanisms and the creation of the percept are based not only on universal mechanism but the beholder’s personal learning history, one of the primary challenges in neuroaesthetics is the inherent subjectivity of aesthetic experiences. Subjectivity is a matter of idiosyncratic associations built up by individual lifetime experiences, framed by a cultural associative space in which we live. This makes it difficult to generalize findings across different persons (cf. Honekopp, 2006), diverse cultures (Darda & Cross, 2022; Yang, et al., 2019), or more general-speaking populations (Nadal, 2013). The issue gets even more complex when we include the dynamics of aesthetic processing that come into play by several factors. Dynamics emerge by the beholder elaborating on the aesthetic object (Belke et al., 2015). Suppose a person is well committed to a deeper dive into an artwork, for instance, so not just looking at it for seconds or milliseconds like in a typical experimental setting, but assigning typical time slots of about 30–60 s for each artwork like in art museums (Carbon, 2017; Smith & Smith, 2001) or even much longer due to a lifetime engagement. In that case, humans typically go through different stages of elaboration (see Carbon & Leder, 2005). These stages are not systematically gone through step by step as some models in empirical aesthetics make believe, but are marked by sudden moments of Aesthetic Aha! (Muth & Carbon, 2013), not evidently followed by insights that lead to dissolving riddles in an artwork, but are typically followed by phases of semantic instability (Muth et al., 2016) which are often demanding but enjoyable. We also face long-term dynamics due to familiarity, elaboration, and context factors such as social factors (Bourdieu, 1984) and Zeitgeist (Carbon, 2010). Thus, in certain contexts, we will process aesthetic items very differently depending on our “social class” (Bourdieu, 1984), the situational demands or the way things are needed, produced and presented in a time- and cultural-dependent context. For a model of the complex interplay of all these factors and facets, please look up the MoMo-Model of Aesthetic Experience in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

(Source © Claus-Christian Carbon, 2023)

Model of the interplay of aesthetic processes and relevant factors and facets that modulate and moderate aesthetic experience (MoMo-Model of Aesthetic Experience). Our personality is a significant factor in how we process an aesthetically relevant entity in terms of sensory, cognitive, and affective sub-processes which show dynamic qualities. However, personality is in turn embedded and dependent on the cultural context which has recursive links to other cultures. The current situation, task-dependent requirements, and social interchange will further moderate our aesthetic experience

This means that we probably begin to elaborate on an artwork because we are attracted by more superficial attributes or a guiding system that asks us to attend to the artwork. We will assess the quality of the artwork, but also the potential to appeal to us and give us the chance to gain insights (Muth et al., 2015). Then we will often embark on a journey that is characterized by a non-linear perception process with changing perspectives (Carbon, 2020), discussing with others, and further informing us with contextual information about the artwork (McManus & Furnham, 2006); from time to time, we will even stop the process at a certain time to return and elaborate further (Carbon, 2017).

It is essential to realize that these genuine aesthetic processing complexities cannot be ecologically validly (for a critical reflection on this concept, see Holleman et al., 2020) researched by simple lab-oriented experimental approaches (Kubovy, 2020). We will also lack an understanding of the bodily components triggered by aesthetic processing (Nummenmaa & Hari, 2023). We might fall into the trap that experimentally rigorous approaches will always lead to highly complex and large datasets to address certain research questions. Undoubtedly, experimental research in a lab will primarily produce reliable data, often also highly objective data, but it misses the point that people perceive and behave differently in social contexts where typically deeper aesthetic experiences are made. Factors such as the physical setting, the presence of others, and the viewer’s prior knowledge and expectations (Muth et al., 2017) can all modulate our perception and appreciation of art (Pelowski et al., 2017). The often-found reductionism in neuroaesthetic research to ignore those factors may also overlook the potential interactions between different levels of analysis when experiencing art (Shapiro, 2011). As long as we do not know the context-specific and context-generic principles of cognition and behaviour, it is wise to simulate at least some typical ingredients used to trigger such experiences, which is done in the so-called path#2-approach (Carbon, 2019a). In contrast, mostly a path#3-approach is employed where participants are exposed to decontextualized and normed artistic stimuli. As testing participants with neuroaesthetic methods in a real-world context (path#1-approach), e.g. a museum, is often extremely challenging as mobile versions of the needed equipment are hardly available or not reliable enough, it is an excellent strategy to balance out experimental control and ecological validity as illustrated in Fig. 2. Such a balanced strategy will definitely not capture the full range of art processing experienced in a museum, but it will capture essential facets of this experience at least.

Fig. 2

(Source © Claus-Christian Carbon, 2023)

Different ways of gaining insights into the processing of art. Whereas path#1-approaches are conducted on-site (for instance, in an art museum or gallery) and where participants are, e.g. museum visitors, and so perceive and behave naturally, and so we gain high levels of ecological validity, we have a minimum of experimental control (e.g. randomization of trials and randomized assignment to conditions is hardly achievable), a path#3-approach conducted in the lab offers all commodities of experimental control but lacks true art experience and so can only classified as measuring art-related processes. Path#2 is often the golden path to understanding sub-processes involved in the art experience, as conditions emulate typical context factors but still allow experimental control to a large extent. See more details in Carbon (2019a)

The most important challenge we will face with the neuroaesthetic approach is to understand that many aesthetic experience, but especially experiences of art, triggers strong, extraordinary responses. These are not only cognitively rooted but often show very expressive affective (Fingerhut & Prinz, 2018) and enactive (Fingerhut, 2018) components. When perceiving the depicted face in Fig. 3, we instantly feel empathy, and we experience a mixture of emotional responses like pain, anxiety, and grief. We will probably have associations with Jesus Christ and his story of woe; it deeply touches us, it might even frighten us, and will increase our arousal level. Maybe we will find some stylistic and contentwise parallels to Edvard Munch’s scream picture series he painted at the fin-de-siecle (when we are trained in this part of Western art history), but it could also be that we remember a crying person when having attended a recent traffic accident. Anyhow, as said before, these responses might be idiosyncratic or culturally dependent (Hodgson, 2004), but they are real, strong, and personal. We cannot discuss or relativize them: The respective beholders will experience them as they are. With neuroscientific measures, we might identify neural correlates of these responses, but we will never be able to describe the emerging qualia validly. One reason for this is that we never will know all “levels of experience” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. XVI), but also because we can never adequately describe and experience another’s perception and experience when processing an artwork.

Fig. 3

(Source © Claus-Christian Carbon, 2023)

Illustration of the expressive affective component often triggered by artworks

New technology will develop more sophisticated devices to capture parts of these experiences in the field, for instance, at an art vernissage, within a concert at the philharmonic, or when attending a dance performance at the opera or a sophisticatedly cooked dish at a food festival. Additional observations of the behaviour in time, qualitative data about feelings and interpretations, and information about the personality, situation, and further context seem inevitable to create a comprehensive picture of a person experiencing aesthetics.

Commitments: Contextualize Neuroaesthetic Research

After having introduced the reader to the promising opportunities and great chances neuroaesthetics research offers and discussing typical challenges of neuroscientific approaches in aesthetics, we have to sum up which commitments we have to make to use neuroaesthetics as a valuable means to advance empirical aesthetics.

Aesthetic experience is a highly complex, multifaceted process leading to personal affective and cognitive responses and body-specific somatic reactions and actions. We have to understand that deep aesthetic experience can only evolve when participants are sensitively contextualized. Just exposing them to aesthetic material within an fMRT tube will hardly ever be able to trigger the complex network of neural activities usually to be expected in a real-life scenario where we sometimes observe people strongly reacting to excellent pieces of design or art, for instance (Konecni, 2015). It is also a fallacy to think that we can neatly carve independent ingredients from an aesthetic piece which can then be separately experimentally researched without losing the Gestalt and the essence of that entity (Carbon, 2019b; Makin, 2017). We should also not forget that such a complex process is not finished after having inspected the target piece but can endure sustainably. Sometimes, people return to pieces that initially raised their interest, in other cases, they feel the urge to discuss their feelings and impressions with other beholders, with friends, or with experts to get new input and to re-evaluate the work. Therefore, we have to create the conditions for such possibilities in an experimental neuroscientific setting in order not to treat the participants artificially (Carbon, 2019a). Due to the multifaceted character of aesthetic experiences, we also have to extend our repertoire of measures and data that we take into account when researching our participants’ experiences. This starts with the core concept of aesthetic experience which should not be just equalized with a rudimentary set of variables such as liking or preference (Faerber et al., 2010). Although liking and preference seem to be promising candidates for a part of the needed construct of aesthetic experience many other influential facets are obviously missing, e.g. interest (Silvia, 2008), understanding (Leder et al., 2006), affective reactions (Reber et al., 1998) and associations (Ortlieb et al., 2020). This also implies that we should intensely discuss with the participants their experiences. We should also systematically observe their behaviour and capture context factors when testing the participants, including environmental specifications and personality factors.

All these considerations must be part of a theoretical framework about aesthetic experience in order to configure an experimental design precisely and to set the required conditions and context factors we need to optimally trigger deep aesthetic experiences that are beyond simple standardized and mechanical questions about aesthetic entities.

Conclusion

In the present chapter, we have critically assessed the field of neuroaesthetics as an experimental science to understand the experience of aesthetic phenomena. We have explored the chances and challenges of neuroaesthetics research and have generated important issues requiring clear commitments to be addressed to create goal-leading research. The interdisciplinary nature of neuroaesthetics (including research fields concerning perception, cognition, and emotion, but also art history, cultural, material, and communication sciences, and biological as well as physiological sciences) holds great promise for providing insights into the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experiences, fostering collaboration among diverse researchers with different expertise and cultural backgrounds. However, the field faces several challenges, including the subjectivity of aesthetic experiences, the multifaceted nature of art, and the significant role of contextual factors. Furthermore, neuroaesthetics is inherently limited by its reductionist approach, methodological constraints, especially when applied to the field where most aesthetic experience occurs, and the explanatory gap between neural and phenomenological aspects of aesthetic experiences.

Outlook

Despite the severe challenges and limitations of neuroaesthetics, the future of the field appears promising and inspiring. By making the commitments mentioned above, expanding the scope of research to encompass a more diverse range of art forms and cultural perspectives, and developing mature theoretical frameworks of aesthetic experience, neuroaesthetics can advance our understanding of the complex interplay between aesthetic items, the mind and the underlying neuronal structure and activities responsible for the sustainable processing of aesthetically relevant entities that surround and fascinate us.