Book Notes
The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee — review and summary
Anjan Chatterjee asks why humans make and respond to art at all — and finds that the answer is tangled up with the same neural systems that handle food, sex, and social reward.
Anjan Chatterjee is a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent years studying the neural basis of aesthetic experience. The Aesthetic Brain is his attempt to synthesise what neuroscience and evolutionary biology can tell us about why humans find things beautiful, why we make art, and what the relationship is between aesthetic pleasure and other kinds of pleasure.
The neuroaesthetics frame
The book is an introduction to the emerging field of neuroaesthetics: the study of how the brain processes aesthetic experience. Chatterjee is careful about the limits of the field — he is not claiming that neuroscience reduces art to brain chemistry, but that understanding the neural substrates of aesthetic experience can tell us something interesting about what aesthetic experience is and where it comes from.
The core finding he works with is that aesthetic pleasure — the pleasure of seeing a beautiful face, hearing music you love, standing in front of a painting that moves you — activates reward circuitry that overlaps significantly with the circuitry activated by food, physical pleasure, and social connection. Aesthetic experience is not a separate, elevated category of brain activity; it is continuous with other forms of reward processing.
The evolutionary argument
Chatterjee develops an evolutionary argument for why humans have aesthetic responses at all. The argument has several threads.
Some aesthetic preferences, he argues, are adaptations: responses to features of the environment that were reliably correlated with fitness. The preference for landscapes with certain features (open areas, water, partial cover) is a candidate. So is the preference for facial features correlated with health and reproductive fitness.
But this adaptive account does not explain the full range of aesthetic experience. The pleasure of abstract art, of music with no narrative content, of mathematical elegance — these are harder to explain in direct adaptive terms. Chatterjee suggests that the reward circuitry developed for adaptive purposes is flexible enough to be activated by a wide range of stimuli, including many that were not present in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.
Art and meaning
The book's final section addresses the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and meaning — specifically, the difference between liking something and finding it meaningful. These are dissociable: people can find things beautiful without finding them meaningful, and can find things meaningful that they do not experience as beautiful.
Chatterjee does not fully resolve the question of where meaning comes from. He acknowledges that this is where the neuroscience becomes less explanatory and the philosophical questions become more pressing.
Who this book is for
The Aesthetic Brain is most useful for readers interested in the scientific approach to art and aesthetics — specifically, what brain science and evolutionary biology can and cannot tell us about why we respond to beauty and make art.
It is accessible without a science background, though some sections are more technical than others.
Practical reflection prompts:
- What aesthetic experiences are most significant to you, and what do you think they are doing — pleasure, meaning, or something else?
- How does knowing the evolutionary or neural basis of an aesthetic response change (or not change) your relationship to it?
Bibliographic details
- Author: Anjan Chatterjee
- Published: 2014
- Publisher: Oxford University Press