| Music, Art, Physiology, Neuroscience: The Latest |
Art & the Senses: Body & Mind |
| New Understandings of Art Appreciation , Science and Culture , January 30, 2025 |
Adam Scott-Rowley, who uses the term theatre-maker, wrote an article for the Stage in April 2024 on what he termed “The Sensitised Theatre”. “In a creatively stifling era”, the article ran, “I find myself yearning for theatre that can break free from the confines of conventional story-telling and engage with audiences on a profoundly emotional level.” It is a provocative assertion. A lot of audiences are going out each day in appreciation of performers. A reason might well be that they are doing so because they are being touched at that profoundly emotional level which Scott-Rowley asserts to be absent. He promises much of his own performance. “It's an invitation to explore the depths of human experience, prioritising emotion, physicality, and a direct engagement with the audience's senses. Its' about grounding the performance in elements that are universally human and deeply relatable.” Humanity is profoundly, essentially social. Scott-Rowley on stage dispenses with other people along with clothing. As an aesthetic proposition it is flawed. * * * * Aesthetics, the enquiry into the nature of art, has a pedigree going back, in written form, 2360 years. The latest addition, opened up by medical and technological advance, is neuroesthetics. Whereas previous aestheticians developed their understanding via insight and observation their modern equivalents can see directly what is happening across the brain when art and the senses meet. The brain was first scanned in 1990. By 2010 the machines were ubiquitous in research centres. Music is the most researched, thousands of papers now on the subject. The knowledge that music impacted goes back millennia. Song and dance, in many languages linguistically inseparable, were used for children, for ailments, for the imminence of death. The oldest written account is biblical, David playing the lyre to lift Saul from depression. Leonard Cohen used it for a lyric. The subject in our century has a first entry point on Wikipedia. The article on neuro-aesthetics is not an easy read for the lay-person. The term itself dates from 1999 and was given its formal definition in 2002. That is “the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art.” The article closes with sixty-eight references and fifteen books or dissertations of further reading. The tone is firmly set in the opening. “Aesthetic experiences are an emergent property of interactions among a triad of neural systems that involve sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge circuitry.” That multiple effect seems correct. It also shows up Scott-Rowley's limitation that sensual impact is sole and foremost. The human mind is a meaning-making mechanism. Back at Wikipedia the subject quickly runs into medical precision. “The orbito- and medial-frontal cortex, the ventral striatum, anterior cingulate and insula respond to beautiful visual images and the medial orbitofrontal cortex and adjacent cingulate cortex respond to different sources of pleasures including music and even architectural spaces.” That “even” is a give-away that the particular author comes from a medical rather than art-absorbed perspective. The encompassing, three-dimensional nature of architecture can have a profound effect, not least when it is also occupies the fourth dimension of time. Buildings come within accretions of historical experience. A research paper, Lacey and colleagues, looked at this aspect beyond the mere content of an art-work, that of perception of the here-and-now. The ventral striatum and parts of the orbitofrontal cortex responded to what they called "art status". Zeki and Kawabata located judgement over an art-work, whether it be beautiful or not, in the medial orbito-frontal cortex. * * * * This is clearly a burgeoning field of knowledge that complements other areas of research. The arts have some difficulties with scientific knowledge. The Coliseum in London this last winter was a source of ribald comment. The doors held content warnings for the ticket-holders of the production they were to see. Those eager for aesthetic experience had bought their tickets for Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance." Research has been carried out on art and its ability to create perceptual reactions of discomfort or distress. The meta-conclusion: “empirical studies on trigger warnings suggest that they are functionally inert or cause small adverse side effects...We found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content. “We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings counter-therapeutically reinforce survivors’ view of their trauma as central to their identity. "Regarding replication hypotheses, the evidence was either ambiguous or substantially favoured the hypothesis that trigger warnings have no effect. In summary, we found that trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors. "..People who view trauma as a core part of their identity have worse symptoms. Therefore, trigger warnings might iatrogenically reinforce the importance of past traumatic events for the very people they were originally designed to help.” The reference papers are Berntsen & Rubin, 2006; Brown, Antonius, Kramer, Root, & Hirst, 2010; Robinaugh & McNally, 2011; Bellet, Jones, and McNally 2018, covered in Payton J. Jones. Benjamin W. Bellet, Richard J. McNally- Psychological Science June 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702620921341 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005791618301137 It is not likely that the science will make an impact. Once a social meme is embedded it is ineradicable. But this accretion of work and knowledge calls for an author to collate it and render it explicable for a general audience. Susan Magsamen is cited in the Wikipedia article and is co-author of such an intended book. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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