Art appreciation, self-reflection may go together in the brain
April 26, 2012
Courtesy
and World Science staff
A network of brain structures activated during intense aesthetic experiences overlaps with another that’s associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment, researchers have found.
New York University scientists asked 16 paid study subjects, having slight to moderate levels of past exposure or education in art, to examine 109 images of pictures from museums in a database. The artworks were from a wide range of cultures, time periods and styles, including some abstract works; none were particularly famous.
Subjects were asked to rate each work based on how strongly it “moved” them—not focusing necessarily on beauty, but rather on what struck them as “powerful, pleasing, or profound.” During all this, their brain activity was scanned with a technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
There was little agreement among viewers in terms of which artworks received their highest ratings—fours, on a scale from one to four. But one consistent finding was that a specific network of brain regions went into action for viewers as they looked at those artworks that they found special, according to the researchers.
The network consisted of frontal areas of the brain, just behind the forehead, and “subcortical” regions, which are relatively deep in the brain. This activity also included several regions belonging to the brain’s “default mode network,” which had previously been associated with self-referential thinking, the investigators said.
“Aesthetic judgments for paintings are highly individual, in that the paintings experienced as moving differ widely across people,” they wrote, reporting their findings in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. “But the neural systems supporting aesthetic reactions remain largely the same from person to person. Moreover, the most moving paintings produce a selective activation of a network of brain regions which is known to activate when we think about personally relevant matters such as our own personality traits and daydreams, or when we contemplate our future.”
April 26, 2012
Courtesy
and World Science staff
A network of brain structures activated during intense aesthetic experiences overlaps with another that’s associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment, researchers have found.
New York University scientists asked 16 paid study subjects, having slight to moderate levels of past exposure or education in art, to examine 109 images of pictures from museums in a database. The artworks were from a wide range of cultures, time periods and styles, including some abstract works; none were particularly famous.
Subjects were asked to rate each work based on how strongly it “moved” them—not focusing necessarily on beauty, but rather on what struck them as “powerful, pleasing, or profound.” During all this, their brain activity was scanned with a technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
There was little agreement among viewers in terms of which artworks received their highest ratings—fours, on a scale from one to four. But one consistent finding was that a specific network of brain regions went into action for viewers as they looked at those artworks that they found special, according to the researchers.
The network consisted of frontal areas of the brain, just behind the forehead, and “subcortical” regions, which are relatively deep in the brain. This activity also included several regions belonging to the brain’s “default mode network,” which had previously been associated with self-referential thinking, the investigators said.
“Aesthetic judgments for paintings are highly individual, in that the paintings experienced as moving differ widely across people,” they wrote, reporting their findings in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. “But the neural systems supporting aesthetic reactions remain largely the same from person to person. Moreover, the most moving paintings produce a selective activation of a network of brain regions which is known to activate when we think about personally relevant matters such as our own personality traits and daydreams, or when we contemplate our future.”
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