Computer-generated functional Magnetic Resonance Image of a slice through the human head and brain.
f MRI and Brain Bases of Experience
Computer-generated functional Magnetic Resonance Image of a slice through the human head and brain.
Brain imaging enables us to see what parts of the brain are active when people are engaged in different experiences. Gabrielle Starr used fMRI to study what happens when people engage with poetry, visual art, and music. She suggests that when art moves us, it reaches within to networks that are active when we reflect on others and ourselves. Other researchers such as Samir Zeki have found that influential pieces of art can be ambiguous, with the same image resonating for us in different ways, which can set off different associations within us.
Since the early 1990s, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has become important in psychology. To take an fMRI image, a person lies in a space within a large magnet that can detect localized changes in blood flow in the brain. The process is expensive, so the numbers of people in fMRI studies tend to be small, but it is free of ill-effects on participants. It works because brain regions increase their blood flow when they become active. This can be detected magnetically because oxygenated blood being taken up into neurons has different magnetic properties from blood that has given up its oxygen and is leaving them. A computer then constructs images of the kind you can see at the start of this chapter to show which brain areas have been active.
Among those who have been energetic in this field is Gabrielle Starr who, although she is a professor of English, uses fMRI to study people’s inner experience. Her research is on what she calls the three sister arts of poetry, painting, and music.
Among the most influential statements of what poetry and other arts do was that from the Roman poet Horace in Ars Poetica. He said poetry gives pleasure and instructs. Pleasure? Well, yes, I suppose so. But this does not take us very far. And instruction? Parents may instruct their children, politicians instruct us about how we should vote, advertisers instruct us to dig into our pockets. But does art instruct?
Starr has a better proposal. She writes:
I argue that the arts mediate our knowledge of the world around us by directing attention, shaping perceptions, and creating dissonance or harmony where none had been before, and that what aesthetics thus gives us is a restructuring of value.1
Starr says “value” involves the quality of the emotional response. The significance of experiencing an emotion is central to human meaning because it indicates that something is important. Works of art can prompt transformations in how we see, feel, and think.
The proposal Starr makes is that “aesthetic experience calls on the brain to integrate external perceptions with the inner senses.”2 Art engages our emotions and reorders our perceptions. She argues that motor imagery is a good way of thinking about what goes on with the arts because it can give us the sense of “what would it be like if we actually were to do what we are thinking.”3 In this kind of way Adam Smith said, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, that sympathy starts at first within us, and then moves outward to others, as we imagine ourselves to be in their situation.
But art doesn’t make us do things. A toaster makes a piece of bread turn into toast. That’s not what happens with art. Art doesn’t make things happen; it enables, it invites. In the imaginative activity of a person who engages with a poem, a novel, or a picture, the art can enable the person to experience an emotion as she or he changes a perception. It’s the person who imagines.
In her book, Starr reflects on John Keats’s poem, “Ode on a Grecian urn” which is about the relation of art, which endures, to ordinary life, which is ephemeral.
Here are the last four lines of the ode’s second stanza, addressed to a fair youth depicted on the urn as he approaches a maiden:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
As I read this, I find tears coming to my eyes, an instance of Starr’s proposal. I have read these lines before, five times, maybe ten. So the reordering of perception, the directing of attention, the mental associations that are made, in harmony or dissonance, invited by what Keats has written here don’t just happen once. For some topics that art addresses—and the relation of the eternal to the ephemeral is one—there are more and more things to think about, to reflect upon.
Part of Starr’s discussion is of how art can affect the mind, and of how imagery works in ways that bring the imagined close to the perceived. The most famous lines in the poem are the last two:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
These lines continue the theme of the eternal in relation to the ephemeral, but as I read them, after contemplating Starr’s discussion, I wonder whether Keats, perhaps, was closer to presenting not just “this” is “that”—an identity—but a hypothesis of the kind that Starr is proposing: beauty is beautiful because it can suggest a step that we might take for ourselves, to come closer to truth.
Neuroscience of Experience
Are different experiences associated with activations of different regions of the brain? How about the experience of love? In a study published in 2000, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki asked seventeen participants who said they were deeply in love to be scanned in an fMRI machine while they looked at photographs of their loved ones. Two brain regions of the cortex, the medial insula and the anterior cingulate region, as well as two subcortical regions, were found to have higher activation when the participants looked at pictures of their love partners than when they looked at photographs of other people of similar age. Some other regions underwent deactivation when participants looked at photos of their beloved partners. In a similar study of ten women and seven men who had been married, and in love with their partners for an average of twenty-one years, Bianca Acevedo and colleagues found similar patterns of brain activation, which were distinct from those that occurred when looking at photos of long-term friends, or of acquaintances.
Phrenology was mistaken in its proposal that particular brain regions could be identified with whole propensities, for instance a region called Amativeness, responsible for sexual desire and attraction. We have to be careful that brain imaging does not become the new phrenology, and ask what imaging studies really tell us. At the same time, in a survey of 100,000 Americans, Jonathan Freedman found that it wasn’t money, or worldly success, or health, that most people thought made life meaningful. It was love in marriage. Living happily with a love-partner can be thought of, therefore, as a state of well-being: an opposite of mental illness. The fMRI results may invite us to think that this kind of love is indeed distinctive.
In a study of 2004, Bartels and Zeki had twenty mothers view pictures of their own children and of other children they knew. With their own children the insular and cingulate cortex areas of the mothers were activated in the same way that these areas had been activated in people who viewed pictures of those with whom they were romantically in love. Changes in subcortical activity also showed a similar overlap. A further implication is that romantic love has a relationship with attachment love for infants.
Perhaps, however, we shouldn’t yet jump to this conclusion, because the activations may occur in a more general way, by means of a system that mediates reward in the brain. Consistent with this idea was that at the same time as there was activation in some areas when mothers viewed their children, there was suppression of activity in areas known to be associated with critical assessment of other people. At the end of their paper on romantic and maternal love, Bartels and Zeki say modestly:
These results have thus brought us a little, but not much, closer to understanding the neural basis of one of the most formidable instruments of evolution, which makes the procreation of the species and its maintenance a deeply rewarding and pleasurable experience.4
A neuroscience of engagement with art is beginning to develop.5 Hideaki Kawabata in collaboration with Zeki studied the brain’s response to beauty. They had ten participants look at 192 paintings—abstracts, still life pictures, portraits, and landscapes—and rate them on a scale of 1 (ugly) to 10 (beautiful). A few days later in an fMRI machine, participants were shown pictures that had been rated as ugly (1 and 2), neutral (5 and 6), and beautiful (9 and 10). As compared with pictures that had been rated as ugly, those that had been rated as beautiful strongly activated areas of the visual cortex and areas of the orbitofrontal cortex that are associated with reward and with emotional engagement. Ugly paintings tended to activate the motor cortex, and this perhaps was associated with actions of avoidance and rejection. Once again, therefore, the brain seems to be holding on to its secrets. We are reminded once more that some things are rewarding, and we want to approach them, while others are aversive, but we still do not know why. In a study of the experience of literary works, Adam Zeman and colleagues found that passages of poetry and prose that people found moving not only activated areas associated with reading, but also those associated with music.
Studies of brain imaging in relation to consciousness and experience are on the increase. Most are correlational. Georg Northoff and colleagues review imaging studies and conclude that experience of the self is mediated by medial regions of cortex and mid-brain that are densely connected to other brain regions. Such studies do not tell us in what ways brain regions that are active may be responsible for certain psychological states. A newer kind of study is, however, under way. Julie Yoo and colleagues have investigated a causal relationship. They have found that when some parts of the brain, but not others, are active, people can learn better. In this way, researchers are coming closer to understanding which brain areas have some responsibility for some kinds of psychological functions.
Ambiguity
Art is not just beauty. In a paper published in 2004, Semir Zeki hypothesized that great art tends to be ambiguous. To look into the idea further, he studied what happens when people in an fMRI machine view ambiguous figures, such as shown in figure 17, which looks like a duck but then seems to look like a rabbit. As the interpretation of such images changes, so does fMRI activation in different parts of the brain.
Figure 17. Duck-rabbit, ambiguous figure, after Joseph Jastrow. Source: Drawn by Keith Oatley after Jastrow, J. (1900). Fact and fable in psychology. New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Zeki goes on to discuss not visual ambiguity of this kind, but cognitive ambiguity: how one’s interpretation can change as one thinks deeply on some subject, or on a work of art. He offers an example of Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with the pearl earring.” The picture itself, he says, is not itself ambiguous. It is a single, stable image. All the same the girl’s face can be seen in several ways:
She is at once inviting, yet distant, erotically charged but chaste, resentful and yet pleased. These interpretations must all involve memory and experience, of what a face that is expressing these sentiments would look like. The genius of Vermeer is that he does not provide an answer but, by a brilliant subtlety, manages to convey all the expressions, although the viewer is only conscious of one interpretation at any given moment. Because there is no correct solution, the work of art itself becomes a problem that engages the mind.6
Zeki points out that Michelangelo left two-thirds of his works unfinished. Cezanne, too, left paintings unfinished, and said that he was not interested in finishing them because a painting only becomes finished in the mind of the beholder. To be art, a painting must both engage the mind and suggest something that is not in the painting itself, but invites the mind to do something: to offer meaning to the work.
Art Reaches Within
Ed Vessel, with Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin, asked how the workings of the brain could inform us of how art affects experience. They used fMRIs to study people as they looked at 109 paintings in randomized order. The works were from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, Western and Eastern, in different genres, representational and abstract. The works were chosen because they were not commonly reproduced in art books so they would be unfamiliar to the participants. The participants were told: “The paintings may cover the entire range from ‘beautiful’ to ‘strange’ or even ‘ugly.’ Respond on the basis of how much this image moves you.” Participants were asked to rate each painting on a scale of how moving they found each one, from being the least moving to the most moving. The rating of most moving was given to 16.7 percent of the paintings.
There was, however, very little agreement among observers as to which paintings were the most moving. This indicates that being moved by an unfamiliar painting is personal and idiosyncratic. To start with, as the participants followed the instruction to look at each picture, a network called the default mode network was deactivated. This kind of deactivation happens when people perform a specific task in the outside world, for instance one that they have been asked to do. But with pictures people found most moving, activation began to occur in this network. This network has been found to come alive when a person is not concentrating on anything in the outside world, but when she or he is thinking about her- or himself, alone or with close others, or musing, or reflecting.
The implication is that with art that is moving to us in a personal way, we think for ourselves, in reflection. The paintings that participants had rated as most moving for them had reached within, and touched the self. Vessel and his colleagues say:
[C]ertain artworks can “resonate” with an individual’s sense of self in a manner that has well-defined physiological correlates and consequences: the neural representations of those external stimuli obtain access to the neural substrates and processes concerned with the self.7