PDF Basket
The EU-funded Art and Brain project developed a new and detailed model of the cognitive processing of art. To do so, it explored how different parts of the brain influence the way we perceive art – a novel approach, says Matthew Pelowski, who led the research as part of a fellowship that brought him to the University of Vienna in Austria.
Earlier research had predominantly focused on the way art engages different parts of our brain, by comparing relative amounts of brain activation in those areas when we look at art or do something else. ‘We tackled the issue from the opposite perspective, which had rarely been done before,' Pelowski explains.
This research at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and aesthetics involved ‘tuning' specific brain areas, raising or reducing the level of activity to observe how this temporary tweak affected test subjects' appreciation of pieces of art. The team used two techniques – transcranial magnetic stimulation or transcranial direct current stimulation – to induce these altered states.
‘You can then ask people to repeat an activity they had carried out earlier and you can look at what changes,' Pelowski notes. ‘This gives you an idea of what this part of the brain is really doing in your actual lived experience.'
The functions involved – emotion and spatial perception, for instance, and the way they connect to our memories and past experience – are crucial to our daily lives, Pelowski adds. ‘Art experience recruits a lot of these functions at the same time.'
Supporting brain function
New insights on the way our brains deal with art could therefore also widen the scope to pick up on situations where these cognitive processes no longer unfold and interact as expected. More specifically, Pelowksi says, there are strong indications that neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease affect individuals' artistic expression or tastes in art. Furthermore, symptoms of these illnesses may well be detectable many years before a diagnosis is typically made.
Thus, art experience could offer scope for early detection of conditions often associated with dementia, and possibly even for treatment supporting brain function, Pelowski notes. Since the end of Art and Brain, which ran until July 2017 with financial support from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions programme, Pelowski and his colleagues at the University of Vienna's Empirical Visual Aesthetics Lab have been examining this link in greater depth.