Perceptual Aesthetics: Transcendent Emotion, Neurological Image

Abstract

This article outlines major neurological factors driving human aesthetic response and offers an integrative model of the interaction of brain systems that forms that response. Having evolved as a matter of survival, these systems allow for advanced cognitive capabilities, and with them, aesthetic appreciation. Included in the discussion are symmetry and the nature of aesthetics, the neurology of images, the role of the left and right hemispheres in understanding art, the role of emotion in aesthetics, and bottom-up versus top-down neural processing as aesthetic functions. A concluding model addresses the complementary relationship between the apparent dichotomies of left and right brain, of conscious and unconscious processing, and of verbal and visual processing. Bilateral symmetry and tension resolution are used to explain a graduating scale of meaning and pleasure from simple to complex, and from archetypal to idiosyncratic within the range of neural aesthetic response.