Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience

by G. Gabrielle Starr

Overview

A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry.

In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, Starr shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape the varieties of aesthetic experience.

Starr, a scholar of the humanities and a researcher in the neuroscience of aesthetics, proposes that aesthetic experience relies on a distributed neural architecture—a set of brain areas involved in emotion, perception, imagery, memory, and language. More important, it emerges from networked interactions, intricately connected and coordinated brain systems that together form a flexible architecture enabling us to develop new arts and to see the world around us differently. Focusing on the "sister arts" of poetry, painting, and music, Starr builds and tests a neural model of aesthetic experience valid across all the arts. Asking why works that address different senses using different means seem to produce the same set of feelings, she examines particular works of art in a range of media, including a poem by Keats, a painting by van Gogh, a sculpture by Bernini, and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Starr's innovative, interdisciplinary analysis is true to the complexities of both the physical instantiation of aesthetics and the realities of artistic representation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262527446
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/30/2015
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	269,386
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.71(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

G. Gabrielle Starr is Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Professor of English at New York University.

Table of Contents

Figures ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: Aesthetics, Neuroaesthetics, and the Sister Arts 1

Pleasure and Emotion 4

Imagination and Imagery 7

Aesthetic Knowledge 11

What Holds Aesthetic Experiences Together? 17

Toward a Neuroaesthetic Model 21

1 Seen and Heard: A Model for the Sister Arts 33

Emotion and Variation 36

Pleasure, Comparison, and Reward 46

Conceiving of Difference and of Self 54

2 Aesthetics beyond the Mind's Eye: Imagery and the Sister Arts 69

The Imagery of Sense 72

Knowledge and Multisensory Imagery 76

Moving Pictures: Aesthetics and Imagery Networks 81

3 Toward a Dynamic Aesthetics: The Sister Arts and Beyond 101

Invisible Beauty: Keats and the Limits of the Senses 102

Dynamic Knowledge: Ovid, What Is New and What Is Not 118

Music and Temporality: Beethoven and Bluegrass 128

Endings and Rebirth: Van Gogh and Erasure 138

Conclusion: Carmen Perpetuum 144

Appendix: "The Brain on Art" (Excerpt) 151

Notes 159

Bibliography 221

Index 257

What People are Saying About This

Tamar Szabo Gendler

G. Gabrielle Starr exhibits a rare constellation of skills: a fine literary sensitivity coupled with extensive knowledge of recent work in neuroscience. As a result, Feeling Beauty represents a new level of excellence in neuroaesthetics. This groundbreaking field is lucky to count G. Gabrielle Starr among its finest practitioners.

Jesse Prinz

No prior work has so firmly established that neuroscience and aesthetics can be mutually illuminating. Informed by her rich knowledge of art history and literature, Starr deciphers brain scans with unprecedented subtlety, drawing important lessons about the embodied nature of aesthetic experience and the hidden unity of seemingly disparate arts.

Endorsement

G. Gabrielle Starr exhibits a rare constellation of skills: a fine literary sensitivity coupled with extensive knowledge of recent work in neuroscience. As a result, Feeling Beauty represents a new level of excellence in neuroaesthetics. This groundbreaking field is lucky to count G. Gabrielle Starr among its finest practitioners.

—Tamar Szabo Gendler, Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Yale University

From the Publisher

No prior work has so firmly established that neuroscience and aesthetics can be mutually illuminating. Informed by her rich knowledge of art history and literature, Starr deciphers brain scans with unprecedented subtlety, drawing important lessons about the embodied nature of aesthetic experience and the hidden unity of seemingly disparate arts.

—Jesse Prinz, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center; author of The Conscious Brain, Beyond Human Nature, and Furnishing the Mind

G. Gabrielle Starr exhibits a rare constellation of skills: a fine literary sensitivity coupled with extensive knowledge of recent work in neuroscience. As a result, Feeling Beauty represents a new level of excellence in neuroaesthetics. This groundbreaking field is lucky to count G. Gabrielle Starr among its finest practitioners.

—Tamar Szabo Gendler, Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

An ambitious text...exciting as it is timely...Feeling Beauty is at its best when Starr is engaged in close reading leading the reader step by step through a careful explanation and elucidation of a body of text with the aid of her model...clear, legible, and, frankly, a delight to read.—Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism—

Feeling Beauty by G. Gabrielle Starr is an elegantly written (lucid and even literary) examination of the neurobiology of aesthetic experience crossing poetry, visual art, and music.

—Consciousness, Literature and the Arts—

Feeling Beauty, however, is distinctive in both presenting new research on the regions of the brain activated by intense aesthetic responses and suggesting the ways in which this research might open up a new, dynamic understanding of aesthetics.

—Modern Philology—

From the Publisher

Feeling Beauty, however, is distinctive in both presenting new research on the regions of the brain activated by intense aesthetic responses and suggesting the ways in which this research might open up a new, dynamic understanding of aesthetics.

Modern Philology

Feeling Beauty by G. Gabrielle Starr is an elegantly written (lucid and even literary) examination of the neurobiology of aesthetic experience crossing poetry, visual art, and music.

Literature and the Arts Consciousness

An ambitious text...exciting as it is timely... Feeling Beauty is at its best when Starr is engaged in close reading leading the reader step by step through a careful explanation and elucidation of a body of text with the aid of her model...clear, legible, and, frankly, a delight to read.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Feeling Beauty, however, is distinctive in both presenting new research on the regions of the brain activated by intense aesthetic responses and suggesting the ways in which this research might open up a new, dynamic understanding of aesthetics.

—Modern Philology

Reviews