The Aesthetic Brain
How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The Aesthetic Brain takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Chatterjee uses neuroscience to probe how an aesthetic sense is etched in our minds and evolutionary psychology to explain why aesthetic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses fundamental questions: What is beauty? Is beauty universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art? Chatterjee starts by probing the reasons that we find people, places, and even numbers beautiful. At the root of beauty, he finds, is pleasure. He then examines our pleasures by dissecting why we want and why we like food, sex, and money and how these rewards relate to aesthetic encounters. His ruminations on beauty and pleasure prepare him and the reader to face art. He wanders through the problems of defining art, understanding contemporary art, and interpreting ancient art. He explores why art, something that seems so useless, also feels fundamental to our humanity. Replete with facts, anecdotes, and analogies, this empirical guide to aesthetics offers scientific answers without deflating the wonders of beauty and art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Is the appreciation of art instinctual in humans or is it socially determined? That's the underlying question posed by University of Pennsylvania professor of neurology Chatterjee in his short and uneven book. While addressing that question, he presents some of the basics of neuroscience and investigates how we can define and observe the difference between pleasure and desire. He also describes how the brain responds to beauty, asking if there are some universal patterns that all humans agree are beautiful. Throughout, his analysis is consistent, for as he says, "I will gaze at beauty, pleasure, and art through the bifocal spectacle of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology." The work is not fully satisfying, however, because Chatterjee is unable to give a comprehensive definition of art, and his discussion of natural selection is misleading, placing too much emphasis on survival and not enough on reproduction. He makes it clear that there "is no art module in the brain," and that art, however it is defined, is free to vary in response to environmental constraints. His main conclusion, though, is as simplistic as it is obvious: "The more the arts are released from selective pressures, whether they are state oppression or economic deprivation, the more the arts in that culture are free to vary."
