On Thursday, 10 December
2015 I attended a debate between G. Gabrielle Starr and Alva Noë who addressed the question, Can
neuroscience help us understand art? The debate was sponsored by the New York
University Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness and held at the Casa
Italiana to a packed, attentive audience. Directors of the Center, Ned Block
and David Chalmers, posed other questions: Can understanding the brain reshape
our conceptions of the arts? Is there a viable field of neuroaesthetics?
In
attendance were my wife and our daughter, who is an artist. The lively and
sometimes humorous debate was more like a conversation that, in spite of
similarities between the perspectives of Starr and Noë, pointed to some sharp
differences in their approaches to defining and understanding the aesthetic
experience. Based on the amount of audience participation after the debate,
those in attendance had strong reactions (both positive and negative) to both
sides of the presentation.
What
follows are notes I took during the talks; any errors in how I might represent
the speakers’ positions are entirely my own. For more clarity and depth, I’d
recommend reading, by Starr, Feeling
Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience; by Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature.
G. Gabrielle Starr, Seryl Kushner Dean of the
College of Arts and Science at NYU and Professor of English, was
the first to speak. On its most basic level in response to the debate question,
her claim is that neuroscience can indeed help us engage with the arts. (In
fact, Starr might use the word arts broadly, since some of her recent work
deals with the neuroscience of aesthetic response to poetics and music.) Starr
says her approach is probabilistic and therefore not necessarily focusing on
one work of art or an individual. She gives us, instead, the story of art about
individuals and cultures. What neuroscience can tell us about art deals with
perception, emotion, and imagery. Especially with imagery, neurons associated
with movement are activated, and Starr quoted William Empson who rightly says
that poetry is a kinetic art.
Important for a neuroscientist would be
delineating what neurons can tell us about art and an aesthetic experience
versus an everyday experience. In art, we value what is unpredictable, Starr
says. The aesthetic response is beyond preference or pleasure, a complex
experience, and “often mixed in valence.” So what neuroscience tries to do is
answer the question about whether or not there is something in common about
experiences of art or what might unify aesthetic experience. Starr emphasizes
that her work it is less about “special qualities” in art and more about “approaches.”
So in lab/research work she does with a team subjects are asked not only what
is liked but how much agreement there is about any object or perception. For
example, most people will agree (in descending order) about facial expressions,
followed by natural scenes, abstract images, paintings, and finally haiku. The
conclusion is that “all visual beauty doesn’t get the same treatment” in the
brain. Visual systems in the brain prioritize consistently, but higher order
processes differentiate later.
Emotions play a part in the perceptual
experience, but there is a difference between perception and feeling, where we
can separate representation from feeling. Both routine and aesthetic emotions
overlap in neural reference space. Concerning individual differences, there is
much disagreement among aesthetic responders and, moreover, the agreement on
art might be more about “the status of the liking” and less about the object
itself. Starr spent some time talking about the brain’s default mode network, a
resting state with few distractions or the focus on a task where the undertaking need not be specific, such as engagement with the arts. Similarly, the default mode network is implicated
in theory of mind, self-reflection, and spontaneous cognition.
For Starr, an aesthetic experience is not
necessarily first order and there is no single profile (a position shared with
Noë). Neuroscience gives us
information about the aesthetic experience so that we can move forward.
Contrary to what some might suggest, the work of art does not disappear in any
neuroscientific study – the participant does indeed experience the art. There
is no natural space to appreciate art – that space can shift. Even with
representations of art in books, we can still appreciate the images and have
some type of aesthetic experience.
Alva Noë
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Noë
opened with a joke about how people mispronounce his name as “No” and how he
does not like to be on the no-side of any debate, including this one. In other
words, he does not epitomize “no” to the investigations of neuroscience in
aesthetic experience, but more emphatically he is on the yes side of art.
Noë
began with a selection from Walt Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass (“I hear the trained soprano”). He used this poem, with a nice
reading of it, to demonstrate how his focus is less about the neuroscientific
explanation of art (the nuts-and-bolts of what happens where in the brain) and
more about the complex experience of art. In this particular poem, for example,
Whitman’s art is engaged with music so that art is engaged with other art. We
need ideas, information, values, and beliefs to experience art. As another
instance, Noë showed a slide of a Rodin sculpture. He followed this quickly with
a slide of a Brâncuşi sculpture. Early in his career, Brâncuşi worked with
Rodin, so the point is that art is in dialogue with art. It just so happens
that these two sculptures were in close proximity in a Texas museum Noë
visited. Noë admits that art has roots in our biology, but “not exclusively and
not exhaustively.” Rather, there is a “cultural space” of practice and
appreciation.
The
reading and the sculptures brought Noë to philosophy and the puzzle of our
being. Art or aesthetic experience is not just a stimulus to a response but
affords us a wide array of experiences. The aesthetic experience is not fixed
data points (as Starr agrees). Instead, an aesthetic experience is changeable
and can wane, as part of the dialogue influenced by cultural experiences and
biases. We can engage in a “dispute” about our disagreements, but the aesthetic
experience has “no clear temporal boundaries.” Noë says that in the aesthetic
experience there is no first order response; the aesthetic experience is
consequent to the art (reflective) and more like an activity or process
dependent on species and individual neural differences. At this point, Noë
tried to make an analogy between the engagement of art and having a good meal,
dependent more on reflection than on ingredients. (In the group discussion,
this analogy, however, was questioned.)
Like
philosophy, Noë says that “art unveils us to ourselves.” He is critical of any
strategy to look for aesthetic experience in neural correlates. That is, he
positions (akin to Starr) thought, intelligence, and understanding over perception
(as in Semir Zeki). What is distinctive about art lies less in the object and
more in the experience, says Noë. While neuroscience seems to hover over the
trigger responses, art represents states like sympathy and empathy. In other
words, the emphasis should not be on the trigger response but what we make of
art and the aesthetic experience – how it helps us understand ourselves.
As
an example, Noë recounted his experience of fully engaging with Andy Warhol’s
soup cans in a museum – being confronted with true art – where others simply
took selfies of themselves with the art as background. Noë was emphatic that
there was a huge difference between standing with the art and years of having
seen those same images represented in books. In this setting, says Noë , “works
of art are problematic for viewers” since they do not know what to expect. He
is therefore critical of neuroscience as “idealistic” in how it suggests that
the world is made in one’s brain. Noë insists that we are looking for art in
the wrong place. Art is not necessarily the object; it has more to do with the
character of the experience (not really addressed by neuroscience). One does
not “get it” just by looking.
All
in all, there was an abundance of ideas and reactions, almost too much for me
to have recorded in these few notes. Someone was filming the event, but I am
not sure where (if at all) that tape might appear. The website for the NYU
Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness is Here – and I do see video links for
some past events.
-- Gregory F. Tague, Professor of English at St. Francis College and editor of
ASEBL. [Information about my book, Art
and Adaptation (noted among books in brief in the December 2015 Art in
America) can be found Here, available from Amazon.]
Copyright©2015 by Gregory F. Tague
