Expressing the Big Picture

T he Fourth International Conference on Neuroesthetics was not a large event, but it was an unusual one. Held on a single day in the basement auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California at Berkeley, it brought together a typically motley collection of intellectuals who would willingly give over a sunny Saturday to an opportunity to learn from a panel of distinguished speakers. This was not the unusual part. Nor was it unusual that the meeting was touted as an interdisciplinary event, bringing together the best and brightest of different fi elds. These days, and perhaps it has always been the case, interdisciplinarity is the rule rather than the exception of innovative science. What set this meeting apart was the fl uid progression from art to science, in content as well as in style. The artists were more or less scientifi c, the scientists more or less artistic. The topic was empathy (" Empathy in the Brain and in Art ")—more particularly, man's (and not just man's) ability to recognize and respond to the expressions of others. What do we respond to in an expression and what are the mechanisms in the brain that underlie these responses? And as the primatologist Frans de Waal (Emory University) highlighted, how much of our empathic natures do we share with our ape cousins? In a slide presentation of her work and sources of inspiration, portrait photographer Judy Dater clearly captured with great sensitivity an infi nite variety of poignant expressions. However, when asked, she could not clearly articulate the choices she had made in posing and photographing her subjects, could not give dimensions to the criteria she was using. In contrast, the performance artist Leonard Pitt had clearly made a science out of expression. His physical demonstrations with Balinese masks, carved into iconic images of happiness, sadness, or anger, gave the audience insight into the variety of subtle expression that could be attributed to the mask with simple postural adjustments. Happiness melted into melancholy, sadness into ennui. " It's not about moving, " he observed, " it's about not moving. " The psychologist Paul Ekman (University of California at San Francisco) brought the offi cial stamp of academia to his science of expression, documenting in the language of training-dependent effects on recognition the subtle range of expressions and microexpressions we can identify. For a practical example, he showed a …