About

This exhibition aims to investigate the science of aesthetic experience. How and why can visual art evoke strong emotions, present satisfying challenges, and help us see things in a new light? What happens in the human brain when we have an aesthetic experience, and how much can the arts change our neural pathways to think about things in a new way?  

Neuroaesthetics is an emerging field that strives to understand the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. It is a subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience, which investigates how our minds are implemented in the brain. Aesthetic experiences involve the valuation of people, places, and things. Because aesthetic encounters occur commonly in everyday life, exploring their biological bases deepens our understanding of human behavior in important areas such as the selection of partners, choices made by consumers, forms of communication, and encounters with art.   

 Aesthetic experiences emerge from an aesthetic triad. This triad refers to the interaction between sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning neural systems. Each component of the triad contributes to our engagement with art, as illustrated in this exhibition. Vivid colors in a painting, for example, activate parts of our visual cortex that process color. When we react with pleasure to intense beauty in a painting, our reward circuitry deep within the frontal lobes is active. For most art, especially conceptual art, our memories and meaning-making systems within temporal lobes are engaged. Each component can be weighed differently for any encounter; aesthetic experiences arise from an orchestration of neural activity within and across these systems and regions of the brain.  

— Anjan Chatterjee 

Director, Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics  

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Laura Ramson Hales, curator of learning and innovation, in collaboration with Anjan Chatterjee, director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics.