Throughout history, dance has maintained a critical presence across all human cultures, defying barriers of class, race, and status. How dance has synergistically co-evolved with humans has fueled a rich debate on the function of art and the essence of aesthetic experience, engaging numerous artists, historians, philosophers, and scientists. While dance shares many features with other art forms...

Several models of visual aesthetic perception have been proposed in recent years. Such models have drawn on investigations into the neural underpinnings of visual aesthetics, utilizing neurophysiological techniques and brain imaging techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, and electroencephalography. The neural mechanisms underlying the aesthetic perce...

After a great deal of initial promise and enthusiasm, evolutionary art seems to have hit a premature and disappointing plateau. This paper proposes a difficult but necessary program for the advancement of evolutionary art. First two significant problems are discussed. The first is the problem of creating aesthetic fitness functions that would allow evolutionary art systems to execute unattended...

Neuroaesthetics has been searching for the neural bases of the subjective experience of beauty. It has been demonstrated that neural activities in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the left primary motor cortex (lPMC) correlate with the subjective experience of beauty. Although beauty and ugliness seem to be semantically and conceptually opposite, it is still unknown whether these two eva...

A well-known tradition in the study of visual aesthetics holds that the experience of visual beauty is grounded in global computational or statistical properties of the stimulus, for example, scale-invariant Fourier spectrum or self-similarity. Some approaches rely on neural mechanisms, such as efficient computation, processing fluency, or the responsiveness of the cells in the primary visual c...

Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while tho...

The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel is a brutal and beautiful book. Its pages burgeon with beautiful images and beautiful ideas. The ideas are pursued with relentless honesty and diligence for more than 600 pages. There are parts of this book that should only be read in private. I know this after a slightly fraught flight to London, trying to read the book while covering its pictures of masturbat...

How do external stimuli and our internal state coalesce to create the distinctive aesthetic pleasures that give vibrance to human experience? Neuroaesthetics has so far focused on the neural correlates of observing beautiful stimuli compared to neutral or ugly stimuli, or on neural correlates of judging for beauty as opposed to other judgments. Our group questioned whether this approach is suff...

The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel is a brutal and beautiful book. Its pages burgeon with beautiful images and beautiful ideas. The ideas are pursued with relentless honesty and diligence for more than 600 pages. There are parts of this book that should only be read in private. I know this after a slightly fraught flight to London, trying to read the book while covering its pictures of masturbat...

In his seminal book on esthetics, Berlyne (1971) posited an inverted-U relationship between complexity and hedonic tone in arts appreciation, however, converging evidence for his theory is still missing. The disregard of the multidimensionality of complexity may explain some of the divergent results. Here, we argue that definitions of hedonic tone are manifold and systematically examined whethe...