What neural processes underlie the appreciation of painting, music, and dance? How did such processes evolve? This book brings together experts in genetics, psychology, neuroimaging, neuropsychology, art history, and philosophy to explore these questions. It sets the stage for a cognitive neuroscience of art and aesthetics.

The Aesthetic Brain takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey addressing fundamental questions about aesthetics and art. Using neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Chatterjee shows how beauty, pleasure, and art are grounded biologically, and offers explanations for why beauty, pleasure, and art exist at all.

This book analyzes and discusses in detail art therapy, a specific tool used to sustain health in affective developments, rehabilitation, motor skills and cognitive functions. Art therapy is based on the assumption that the process of making art (music, dance, painting) sparks emotions and enhances brain activity. Art therapy is used to encourage personal growth, facilitate particular brain areas or activity patterns, and improve neural connectivity. Treating neurological diseases using artistic strategies offers us a unique option for engaging brain structural networks that enhance the brain’s ability to form new connections. Based on brain plasticity, art therapy has the potential to increase our repertoire for treating neurological diseases. Neural substrates are the basis of complex emotions relative to art experiences, and involve a widespread activation of cognitive and motor systems. Accordingly, art therapy has the capacity to modulate behavior, cognition, attention and movement. In this context, art therapy can offer effective tools for improving general well-being, quality of life and motivation in connection with neurological diseases. The book discusses art therapy as a potential group of techniques for the treatment of neurological disturbances and approaches the relationship between humanistic disciplines and neurology from a holistic perspective, reflecting the growing interest in this interconnection.

Frameworks -- Beauty -- Art -- Music -- Dance -- Architecture.

What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an 'aesthetic' experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye of the beholder? This book addresses the nature of aesthetic experience from the perspectives of philosophy psychology and neuroscience.

How do the arts stack up as a major discipline? What is their effect on the brain, learning, and human development? How might schools best implement and assess an arts program? Eric Jensen answers these questions--and more--in this book. To push for higher standards of learning, many policymakers are eliminating arts programs. To Jensen, that's a mistake. This book presents the definitive case, based on what we know about the brain and learning, for making arts a core part of the basic curriculum and thoughtfully integrating them into every subject. Separate chapters address musical, visual, and kinesthetic arts in ways that reveal their influence on learning. What are the effects of a fully implemented arts program? The evidence points to the following: * Fewer dropouts * Higher attendance * Better team players * An increased love of learning * Greater student dignity * Enhanced creativity * A more prepared citizen for the workplace of tomorrow * Greater cultural awareness as a bonus To Jensen, it's not a matter of choosing, say, the musical arts over the kinesthetic. Rather, ask what kind of art makes sense for what purposes. How much time per day? At what ages? What kind of music? What kind of movement? Should the arts be required? How do we assess arts programs? In answering these real-world questions, Jensen provides dozens of practical, detailed suggestions for incorporating the arts into every classroom. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

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.