Perspectives in neuroaesthetics foreword
- PDF / 103,849 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 179 Views
INTERPLAY OF THE TWO CULTURES: NEUROAESTHETICS
Perspectives in neuroaesthetics foreword Ernesto Carafoli • Alfredo Margreth Giovanni Berlucchi
•
Ó Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 2012
Neuroaesthetics is a very young, vigorously expanding area of cognitive neuroscience that deals with the brain correlates of aesthetic experience. The already vast literature now available on Neuroaesthetics refers mostly to the contemplation and aesthetic judgement of works of art: it has so far focused essentially on the visual perception of newly created art products: non-artistic beauty, e.g., that of landscapes, has only rarely been considered. The essential restriction to the area of visual arts could perhaps be expected, considering that neuroaesthetics is only about 10 years old and vision is the sense most studied by neuroscientists. The contemplation and appreciation of works of art, however, is now beginning to be interpreted in a broader sense, to include the perception, and judgement, of other forms of art, like music, literature and poetry, and the performing arts: an obvious dividend of the extension will be the clarification of whether all the aesthetic responses of the brain to specific forms of art share, mechanistically, similar or identical neuronal correlates. So far, the prevailing tendency of Neuroaesthetics has been to deal with the neuronal bases of the perception of artistic beauty. Those of artistic creativity, or of creativity tout court, have been much less taken into consideration, although it seems plausible that the creating artist is unconsciously aiming at E. Carafoli (&) Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine, Padua, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Margreth Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. Berlucchi Department of Neurological Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
arousing the cerebral reactions of aesthetic appreciation, his or her own as well as of others. Hopefully, the focus on the canons of artistic creativity will be one of the future expansions of Neuroaesthetics. About 1 year ago, a Symposium on ‘‘Perspectives in Neuroaesthetics’’ was held at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. It was one of the Golgi Days the Accademia organizes each year to discuss topics related to specific aspects of the broad area of Neuroscience. It scheduled nine presentations that covered basic evolutionary aspects of the aesthetic response and in-depth discussions of the nature of works of art, their appreciation and judgement by human individuals, and the cerebral mechanisms that are likely to underlie and enable such reactions. It also includes a contribution (by L. Fedrizzi) that was submitted to the Rendiconti Lincei at the time of the Golgi Day: the Editors have decided to include it in the Special Issue as it dealt with topics that coincided with those of the other presentations. The first three talks of the Issue set the stage for the more specific coverage of the brain response to aesthetic experi
