behind our Drive towards Beauty

An interview with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee

Given their seeming ubiquity, we may take for granted the joy of a rolling landscape or our favorite painting. But why do we seek those experiences in the first place? And—with such a wide-ranging spectrum of art—how can we define “beauty”? Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, is a leading researcher into these neuroaesthetic phenomena. Referring to Duchamp’s Fountain, he says, “Admiring a urinal on a pedestal might be silly, yet all sorts of smart people think it's the most transformative piece of artwork in the 20th century. How do we account for that claim?” In this conversation, he shares the questions pursued—and endlessly generated—around our perceptions and creation of beauty.

Despite its ubiquity across human experiences, how our minds perceive, produce, and process art is an emerging field. As a leader in the discipline, how would you define neuroaesthetics and its primary goals? What drew you to work in this field? 

Neuroaesthetics is the investigation of aesthetic experiences through a biological lens. It’s also a sub-discipline of cognitive neuroscience—the study of human experiences, including perception, attention, emotion, language, and decision-making.

I've always been interested in aesthetics. In the late nineties, I was moving back to UPenn, where I’d been a medical student, from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. My focus on aesthetics as a researcher emerged from a barroom conversation in Birmingham with a few friends. One of them asked a counterfactual question: If you could imagine yourself 10 years into the future, what would you regret not doing? In that moment, though much of my work was on attention, language, and visual perception, I realized if I didn’t somehow work on aesthetics, I would regret it. What I didn’t realize was at the time, there was almost nothing written on the topic.

My focus is on visual aesthetics—I know more about vision and visual art than other fields such as music or poetry. Even with vision as an entree into aesthetic experiences, it’s a huge topic to cover.

Aesthetic experiences are often seen as subjective—“beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” the truism goes. But by nature, your research requires some standardization. What are challenges you’ve faced in conducting neuroaesthetic research? What methods have you found promising? 

This is a longstanding question. Philosophers have pondered this—David Hume famously talked about taste, struggling with the idea that it's a subjective experience, while being convinced that taste has objective parameters.

If we're talking about beauty in particular, we ask, “Beauty of what?” The empirical findings are that for natural kinds of beauty—faces and landscapes—people are more consistent than they're different. However, for human artifacts such as art or architecture, responses become more variable.

You could think that variability is a problem. But if you're an experimentalist, it just alters the nature of the problem. How can we account for variability? If we asked people which pictures of buildings they find most beautiful and the images themselves are hidden from view, for example, that would be a random choice. But that randomness is not what's going on in people’s preferences. Are there principled reasons why, for example, your taste in buildings might be different than my taste in building? Now, the source of variability becomes the scientific question.

Art is not a natural kind. Admiring a urinal on a pedestal might be silly, yet all sorts of smart people think it's the most transformative piece of artwork in the 20th century. How do we account for that claim? One can question the object itself. How many and which attributes of the object are relevant? Another question is about the person: what do they bring to bear in the encounter? Art historian Gombrich talked about the beholder’s gaze, and we all differ in that sense.

Then, there’s the context of culture. If you grew up in in North America, or in Africa, or in Latin America or in China, you have different sensibilities.

All these variables become triggers for research questions. What is it about certain contexts, certain cultures that creates a specific aesthetic experience? Underneath these questions remains a belief that our brains are more similar than they're different. Fundamentally, I think aesthetic experiences are similar across people, but the vehicle by which we enter them might be different.

In the case of visual aesthetics, we've developed a taxonomy of these experiences that precipitate into 11 different dimensions. To organize this, we take a set of artwork and norm each piece. For example, a dimension will address an artwork’s potential to elicit a transformative reaction, or a challenging or a negative one.

As for experimental strategies to explore people’s reactions, putting someone in a brain scanner and showing them a bunch of art tells us nothing. Brain imaging and most neural data are very noisy, and they only make sense if you have a precise question. A mantra in my lab is “the question is the question”: until you really know the question you want to ask, as well as whether there’s a technology tractable for that question, there's no experiment to be done.

One issue that we've been concerned with, however, is the focus of empirical aesthetics on European and North American art. This is problematic for a number of reasons. For starters, if you want to make claims about universality, it is a problem if you’re only working within a narrow sector of art. If you want to understand variability, you've also cut yourself off by not including other cultures. We recently had a meeting with an expert in African art, an expert in South Asian art, and an expert in Latin American art. We also included public street art in the mix with the idea of expanding the set of stimuli on which experimentalists rely.

In theory, the questions driving neuroaesthetics are approachable; it just takes a lot of work. I think sometimes people in the humanities have a mistaken view of science as being dogmatic, and delivering clear answers. But really, our work is always incremental. Our conclusions are always provisional; our claims always have caveats.

In our conversation with neuroscientist Eugen Wassiliwizky, he says that “Moving poems are always bittersweet,” going off Friedrich Schiller’s standard of “the mixed sentiment of suffering and pleasure.” Has your research suggested any universal aspects of aesthetic taste? What drives us towards certain aesthetic experiences?

I'm glad you brought up Schiller. I've been quite preoccupied in the last few months reading about the romantics and their response to enlightenment science and how aesthetics might bridge a desiccated view of nature and the richness of human experience. Returning to the ways in which art can evoke emotions, neuroaesthetics is very interested in expressive ideas around art.

Here, the concept of more complex and nuanced emotions becomes important. The experience is not simply pleasure—it's not the same as dropping a little sugar on your tongue. That's a pleasurable experience, yet it’s a fairly thin one.

It reminds me of an experience I had in South Africa. I was with a person who was growing oranges. We stopped to pluck and taste them in a grove—I'd never had oranges that fresh. He explained that if the taste of the orange was just sweet without any sour, then it was flat and insipid. So, he strives to find the right balance with a little acidity mixed in with sweetness. Bittersweet is also a taste term, the point being that mixtures of emotions often make for more powerful experiences.

From here we can ask, what are the different impacts art can have? In the same way that wine or bourbon tasters use a set of terms to describe their experiences, can we create a taxonomy to start identifying complex experiences of art? Learning to label the strands of emotional reactions we’re having simultaneously might make for a richer experience.

Throughout cultures, artists have been portrayed as everything from eccentric to tortured to wise. In neuroaesthetic research, what are some traits, events, or dispositions associated with a strong creative drive? 

As far as the relationship between personalities and aesthetics, a robust finding is that people who are open to new experiences are more able to immerse themselves in aesthetic experiences.

Some of the work we've done also looks at people who have neurologic conditions. One finding, called the paradoxical facilitation of art, is that when people undergo certain kinds of brain damage, their artwork is read by others as more appealing than before. As a disclaimer, I'm not saying if you want to be a better artist, you should go get yourself some brain damage. But with Parkinson’s, for example, when individuals who are predisposed to make making art are placed on dopamine agonists, their art can flourish.

The dopamine system does different things in the brain, and there are broadly three different kinds of circuits. One involves the nigrostriatal pathways that have to do with our motor control, and that's what's typically affected early in Parkinson's. But there are two other systems: the mesolimbic system, which has to do with rewards and our emotional lives, and the mesocortical system, which has to do with cognition.

While we give people dopamine agonists to treat their motor symptoms, the emotional system hasn't been affected profoundly by the disease. But suddenly, it’s flooded with dopamine, and maybe that infusion is part of the drive for this flourishing, this compulsion to make art.

As the field of neuroaesthetics expands, what do you see as the next frontiers? In your own research, what questions do you still hope to explore?

As I mentioned earlier, neuroaesthetic research that tends to generate few answers and more questions.

If we look to the future, there are both technological and conceptual issues to explore. With technology, it's hard to not think about AI at this point: what it’s role might be in both visual art and views of intentionality. 

Another technology question involves the nature of our experiments. In a laboratory, they tend to be highly controlled, particularly if we want to get neural data. fMRI, as you know, involves people lying flat on their backs, as still as possible. This setting is not exactly the most ecologically reasonable way to study anything.

So, we can either take our experiments into the field or bring the field into the laboratory. We’re exploring whether virtual reality methods can be used to create immersive experiences while maintaining the control of an experimental lab.

On the conceptual side, one question is the nature of emotions in aesthetic experiences and the whole panoply of nuances that come with them. I think that field is wide open. For the first 10 or 15 years, people doing this work scientifically examined simple preference. But now, we're ready to move beyond that focus to explore how engaging deeply with art can create meaning and have a transformative effect on the viewer.

So much remains to be done. Then there are application questions, like what is art good for? And how do we establish those benefits with rigor?