Our scientific methods, concepts, and techniques have grown intertwined together with our hermeneutical, phenomenological, or logical-interrogative interpretations of experience. Indeed, scientific research and philosophical enquiry are still gruely (remember Nelson Goodman?) intertwined, even though sometimes this intertwining is not immediately visible, and may require taking some philosophical distance. For example, features of an object that are more easily processed by the brain make that object more likeable with factors like duration of exposure, repetition of exposure, perceptual priming, or artistic expertise modulating the pleasure derived from ease of processing (see, among others, Leder et al., 2019; Reber et al., 2004). The concept of ease of processing, however, may have some of its roots in notions of symmetry. Symmetry has a very long history in both philosophy and science, where it is linked with harmony and invariance, respectively. If symmetry is linked to invariance, asymmetry may be linked to complexity. Perhaps complexity can be linked to creativity? (see Barron, 1963) Adopting the frame of thinking promoted in our lab at the University of Suceava, within the collaborative Romanian-Norwegian project, PoeticA, can we link symmetry, invariance, and ease of processing with more distant concepts such as ‘nationalism’? Conversely, can we link asymmetry, variance, and creativity with concepts of ‘cosmopolitism’? if so, this could be an example of how science and the humanities can grow together as questions in one realm light up questions in the other. Indeed, it may not even be possible to extricate humanities research from science research when studying aesthetic experience. As Marcos Nadal and Anjan Chatterjee point out, aesthetic experience has both universal and variable features: the universality of aesthetic experience stems from the fact that the perception and creation of art require neural systems that are common to all humans, and therefore can be studied by harnessing the generalising and extrapolative power of science (requiring an ‘aesthetics from below’ approach, in Fechner’s terms); however, human neural systems are plastic and adaptable to changing contexts, with many neural records or memories of successful past adaptations preserved for possible future use, making aesthetic experience amenable also to the historical, political, or geographical study of those contexts that enabled or augmented its production (Nadal & Chatterjee, 2019).

Arguably, when speaking of cognitive science, statistical analysis, neurobiology, and neuroscience, nowhere is this intertwining more clearly visible than in the 4E cognition debates. The four E’s of 4E cognition are embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition. Our summative section cannot do justice to this rich debate that discusses what counts as cognition and the limits of what may be called ‘mind’. Is our mental universe bound within our brain, or does it spring from bodily action, embedded in material environments, extended by tools, and always fluidly enacted in interactions with the environment and others? (For an extensive presentation of the debates, see Newen et al., 2018) Without going into too much detail, note that this debate is anchored in both phenomenology, notably in the phenomenology of perception developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and cognitive science. Could this debate provide the elements of an integrative perspective on the dynamic interactions between art objects and perceivers?

Elements of these debates inform the core research direction being implemented at the Neuroaesthetics Lab, University of Suceava. Since the present textbook was initially conceived for this lab’s students, it seems fitting to close by outlining a theory about the origins of art that takes in many of the points raised in the lessons, labs, and overviews you have studied, a theory that I am promoting as the core research direction in the lab. Let us then keep within an embodied cognition and phenomenology framework, while highlighting the wealth of existing research on the role of social relationships in cognitive development (Hinde et al., 1985, is a ‘must read’). A fundamental, even primordial, as one may put it, role in this respect is played by the relationship between carer, usually the mother, and infant. J. P. Changeux (1994), among others, has highlighted that one may legitimately argue that expressive forms are initially produced and recognised in mother–infant non-verbal communication (also see Hobson, 2004, another ‘must read’). On this count, it seems that neural processes cannot be extricated from a phenomenological understanding of human cognition and emotion. Let us take the example of responding to painted portraits. It seems obvious, although arguing it scientifically would take some time, that we react emotionally to portraits because, in previous interactions with other humans, we have learned to understand the emotional expression of real individuals’ faces. In our lab, we are interested in developing research that supports the theory that one has learned to mirror another in one’s own self as an infant gazing at his/her mother’s face, entrained all the while through rhythmic movement, speech, song, regularities in movements of the mother’s face, its shifting symmetries and asymmetries, its resolvable and irresolvable ambiguities. If artistic perception and creation are to be traced to the syncretic experiences first lived in the primary mother–infant dyad, then neuroaesthetic approaches to dance, visual arts (ancient Gr. rhutmos meant both flow and symmetry), or poetry listening, must account for the psychological range developing within the dyad, such as the experience of empathy, or of surprise born out of improvisation (the root of creative acts). Beauty and taste, inasmuch as they can be theorised in a developmental psychology perspective, are perhaps traceable to the pleasure experienced in the dyad: the ‘proper’ aesthetic norms of beauty and taste may have emerged from a need to formalise the experiences of pleasure known to the infant, in order to preserve those feelings in adult life, when they drive pro-social behaviour, and, in their formalisation, stabilise society and culture. The formalisation process will by necessity reflect both biological universals (e.g., preference for symmetry, entrainment to regular rhythm) and cultural patterns (e.g., preference for familiar forms or rhythms, along with enthusiasm for rare, and thus auratic, features in objects or bodies, or, indeed, rhythms). In this view, the traditional dichotomy between culture (the humanities) and nature (the sciences) collapses into nature–culture hybridity, the neuroaesthetic study of which requires both scientific exhaustiveness and humanist depth.

What is, then, neuroaesthetics? At the risk of being a little reductive, let us finally, yet still provisionally, propose that:

Neuroaesthetics is the study of the neural mechanisms involved in the experience of pleasure of various intensities arising from interactions with art and underpinning a wide range of other psychological experiences, such as empathy and surprise, pleasure caused by universal biological mechanisms specific to humans, but modulated by cultural factors, and commensurate with one’s past experiences of the world that can be reported in a language (including artistic languages) validated by consensus.

At the same time, let us not forget that neuroaesthetics is still a young discipline, in search of identity, on the cusp of adulthood. As Eugen Wassiliwizky and Winfried Menninghaus aptly put it:

Over the past two decades, research in empirical aesthetics has been propelled strongly by advances in neuroscientific methods, giving rise to the subfield of neuroaesthetics […] The use of artworks provided insights into general brain functioning, including reward, motor control, neuroplasticity, learning, and embodiment […] At the same time, there is overall little agreement regarding the general conceptualization of empirical aesthetics as a distinct research field, the identification and definition of its key concepts, and a methodological framework for its future advancement. What actually is the agenda and what are the main goals of empirical aesthetics? (Wassiliwizky & Menninghaus, 2021, p. 437, brackets added)

We invite all of you, neuroaesthetics students, to attempt to answer this question in your future academic quests!