Posts Tagged by neuroaesthetics

“What is art?” “What does art reveal about human nature?” Alva Noë, a philosopher at CUNY’s Graduate Center, posed these rhetorical giants among several others in a New York Times Opinionator blog, “Art and the Limits of Neuroscience,” in December, 2011.[1] With a critical eye toward theorizing these questions and their answers “in the key of neuroscience,” Noë hammers in particular on the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, that is, “the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience.” At issue for Noë is the fundamental assumption, promoted by neuroscientists such as Semir Zeki of University College London and historians of art such as John Onians, that the laws of the brain play a role in governing artistic production. In other words, what’s fundamentally at issue here is the notion that biology can and does affect the processes and expressions of culture, and that such influence may be measurable. As… more