Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 1, April 2014
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G. Gabrielle Starr. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 978-0262019316. Hardcover. 272 pgs. $25.00US
Reviewed by
St. Francis College (N.Y.)
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. In part drawing from laboratory work Starr conducted with neuroscientists at New York University (as well as deftly culling from and expanding on her previous thought and writing in cognitive studies), this small but potent book promises to become a classic among texts addressing the pressing questions about the relation of emotions to aesthetic experience and how such experience differentiates individuals. Starr makes a bold and convincing analysis in clear and compelling prose (with vivid examples) to chart neuroscientifically the very definition, and explore the parameters, of beauty. Starr is comfortable and competent in explaining the works of the ancients (from Aristotle to Ovid), the eighteenth century (from Addison to Burke), and current neuroscientists and aestheticians (Scarry). Fundamental to Starr’s argument is the brain’s default mode network – the self (inward) and others (outward) – which is geared to a process of emotional movement (pleasure and reward) related to aesthetic experience. Feeling Beauty holds immense value for anyone on any level studying or teaching the arts and is indispensable in light of the indisputable importance of cognitive cultural studies.
The physical properties of the book are good. There is an Introduction followed by three chapters. There are abundant Notes, a full Bibliography, and a concise Index. Two key features of the book are the Figures (nineteen of them, some in color) and an Appendix. The Appendix is an extract from a study by Starr and two neuroscientists, Edward A. Vessel and Nava Rubin – difficult to read since it is laced with technical jargon; but its presence in the book serves to demonstrate how a skilled writer and interpreter such as Starr can make such findings accessible to the common reader. G. Gabrielle Starr is (reading from the dust jacket of the book) Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Professor of English at New York University.
In large part the feeling of beauty means to be moved – emotionally on a neural level. Brain matter, even on the synaptic level, is particulate and moves and connects with other synapses (indeed, creates synaptic connections) when stimulated. Following Elaine Scarry, Starr argues that the “aesthetic value” of literary works (indeed, of other arts) stems from “images of motion” (8) which activate neurons (albeit differently across individuals). By implication Starr raises crucial questions (timely and pertinent) about the nature and role of arts in education. (This reviewer refers readers to, for instance, Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a report by the Dana Foundation, 2008.) The arts enable one to negotiate (in an attempt at coherence) the onslaught of visual and aural stimuli. As Starr puts it, the arts help shape perception (14). Nevertheless, invoking the eighteenth century philosopher Francis Hutcheson, Starr demonstrates how aesthetics is less about externals and more about personal value judgments (16), what Shaftesbury (before Hutcheson) would call one’s feeling of approval or disapproval (and which he relates to moral sensations) – the brain’s default mode network which tends toward introspection.
There is nothing stable or static about aesthetic experience, though. One of Starr’s key points concerns the almost organic, flowing process of how one sees, feels, and contemplates art, what Martha Nussbaum (paraphrased by Starr) calls a paradigm shift (20). For example, the default mode network is implicated in memory, theory of mind, fantasizing, and creativity. On a related note, another recent book, on the neurobiology of reading by Paul B. Armstrong (How Literature Plays with the Brain), explores how literary works are a form of pretense and play in the brain, and Semir Zeki (whom Starr cites) has written about how our brains are not averse to embracing, so as to tackle and accommodate, ambiguity. In other words, Starr claims, an aesthetic experience gives rise to our valuing something (or some occurrence) over something else (21). Using the word twice within a span of six pages, Starr says that when the brain encounters (and is rewarded by) an aesthetic experience, one learns how to qualify likenesses with what at first sight appears “incommensurable” (21, 27).
Although Starr spends time talking about consciousness (and cognition), there is no acknowledgment of the adapted mind, and she delineates what she calls the inadequacy of various evolutionary psychologists in addressing individual differences (27). While there is truth in some of the broad ranging assertions of early writing in evolutionary psychology, at the same time evolutionary psychologists would of course rely on a Darwinian model, and as such variation (along with competition and inheritance) is essential. Human brain processes such as cognition, consciousness, and reason are evolved mechanisms advanced from variation (as well as competition and inheritance). One of the leading authorities on consciousness, Christof Koch, asserts that the physicality of subjective feelings has provided an evolutionary advantage (Consciousness, 2012, pg. 31). Starr also says that with such a deep view of prehistory evolutionary psychologists are short-sighted in terms of historical cultures and nations (27). But Darwinists deliberately look at the evolution of culture (before the rise of nations). Perhaps this line of thought explains why there is no mention of (to name only one) Ellen Dissanayake (who has written extensively on the origins and prehistory of art). Rather than waging a teapot tempest here, we must agree that there is prehistory (as per Stephen Mithen and Richard Klein, e.g.), and then the important neural leap and modular mind (circa 50,000 years ago) that led to the cultural and cognitive flourishing after which Starr and others proceed.
Starr’s point (not evolutionary) is that the arts have the ability to alter human perception and emotion (28), but she does not admit that art (culture and humanistic ideas) is a human creation and provides an adaptive function, otherwise natural selection would have eliminated it many thousands of years ago. In South America, Darwin marveled at what he saw and says, “It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose” (quoted in Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, pg. 216). Remarkably, Darwin, at this early time, says the beauty is created, and only later does he come to realize that the forms, spectacles, sounds, movements, and colors are all a matter of natural and especially sexual selection. As others, including this reviewer, like to put it: A humanist will ask, What is art? while an evolutionist will ask, Why make art?
Starr’s argument is well taken, for she and others in exploring (indeed, in measuring) subjective aesthetic experiences are on a new frontier in helping us understand what art is (and the complex emotional responses to art) by considering how it is differently evaluated across individuals (ch. 1). Koch asserts that consciousness is exclusively physical (neuronal connections across brain areas) and surely evolutionary (echoing Zeki and Armstrong’s views above). Besides, consciousness is not all it is stacked up to be. Walter J. Freeman has described consciousness as a hurricane, and Zeki has characterized consciousness as disunity. In spite of how well the human mind has evolved, there are very old rudiments to the complex networks that give rise to consciousness (or what Darwin called descent with modification). In other words, individual variables in aesthetic experience could perhaps be correlated to other temperamental differences.
Starr’s thrust (broadly speaking) seems to be that while the brain can generate the ability for consciousness, how such consciousness manifests itself and changes is determined by the individual experiencing something aesthetically. Aesthetic experience seems to matter to our neurobiology in our willingness to be absorbed by art and abstracted out of the world, Starr says (59, 63). Note, though, that in terms of learning, recent studies demonstrate that academic accomplishment (flowering from one’s entire personality) is genetic. (See, for example, Shakeshaft et al., “Strong Genetic Influence,” PLOS One, 8.12, 2013). Starr suggests that brain reward response to some visual (aesthetic) stimuli need not be evolutionary (survival and reproduction), and she is probably correct based on what we are increasingly learning about epigenetics (i.e., how the epigenome is in effect nuclear DNA in the environment).
In her readings of Keats and Ovid, Starr is particularly brilliant when analyzing and explaining movement and motion through imagery (since the visual as imaginative, via philosopher Alva Noë, involves movement) (81). Central to her thesis of the potential of aesthetic experience to energize a revaluation of ideas is the metaphor of motion. Mirror neurons, of course, are implied not only in the motor imagery in arts but also in sympathy (83-84). Again drawing from Scarry (and others), Starr notes how some critics have gone as far as suggesting that when one observes visual (or is engaged in literary) art there is a sensation of the artist’s creative movements. Some art that moves us triggers mirror neurons and therefore “offers a promising route for modeling . . . aesthetic pleasures . . .” (101).
In ch. 3 Starr expands on the notion of pleasure (cognitive reward) by saying that in perception there is a competition among “ideas, emotions, and sensations” (113). Starr takes these notions further by explaining that by its nature beauty “is necessarily about comparison, contrast, integration, and competition . . .” (117) in how it surprises us (and supersedes another thought or image). There is, then, motion involved here, too; hence variant readings of a text (even by the same person over time). Such movement is especially evident in music, and Starr provides a compelling analysis of music (Bluegrass and Beethoven) in this respect. In a final example about movement and reappraisal, Starr shows how “beauty is always necessarily a momentary event . . .” (139) as she examines work (painted over) by Van Gogh.
Feeling Beauty by G. Gabrielle Starr is highly recommended as its author masterfully touches on all of the important issues (problems, questions, controversies, findings, and directions) melded into the experience and teaching of the arts. In view of the recent barrage of news stories bemoaning the death of the humanities, Starr’s work provides a much-needed and refreshing salve, and we look forward to her future work.
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