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  • Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience by G. Gabrielle Starr
  • Natalie Phillips (bio) and Kristina Persenaire (bio)
Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience by G. Gabrielle Starr
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. xx+260pp. US$25. ISBN 978-0-262-01931-6.

What does it mean to feel beauty when we engage with a work of art? Is the pleasure of reading a sonnet similar to the chills we experience while listening to a sonata; that is, does aesthetic pleasure cross artistic domains? Do aesthetic experiences (the cognitive engagements and emotions we have while looking at a painting, listening to music, viewing a brilliantly crafted film, getting caught up in a piece of modern dance, or reading our favourite novel) mirror the feelings and perceptions we experience in everyday life—a beautiful sunset, a gorgeous face, waves lapping against the sand—or are they in a class of their own? As Feeling Beauty explores such challenging questions in aesthetics and cognition, it raises a broader methodological question: how can humanist and neuroscientific approaches best unite to provide the richest understanding of our intricate, personally variable experiences with art and how they are processed in the brain? In her well-written, carefully researched exploration of the history and neuroscience of aesthetics, Starr forwards two main arguments: First, that vibrant imagery—defined as imaginative, energetic, and multisensory—forms the core of powerful aesthetic experience and thus serves as “a primary model for the ways aesthetic pleasure is enacted in the brain” (8). Second, she proposes that the presence of aesthetic emotion is the common force uniting the arts: “We do in fact have genuine emotional responses to art,” Starr argues, and “all aesthetic experiences involve pleasure or displeasure and some [End Page 583] degree of emotional response” (7). Feeling Beauty theorizes something that, simple as it may sound, is quite complex: “Beauty matters in life and in art, but it also matters in the architecture of the brain itself” (xi).

At an academic moment that has seen a surge of work in cognitive approaches to literature, Feeling Beauty breaks new ground. Rather than taking up two centrepieces in the field, empathy and Theory of Mind, Starr introduces audiences to a distinctive body of research: neuroaesthetics. This multidisciplinary field considers how we experience art—subjectively, physiologically, emotionally, and neurobiologically—and, in particular, how the brain and body process the feeling of aesthetic beauty. As in Lyric Generations (2004), her monograph on eighteenth-century poetry, for Starr this means thinking about art beyond a traditional eighteenth-century focus on the novel. In Feeling Beauty, she argues for the ongoing power of a specific aesthetic configuration that emerged in full force in the Enlightenment: the Sister Arts of poetry, painting, and music. Starr’s ultimate aim is to reframe historical debates over the imagery, vividness, and aesthetic power of these three genres as a way “to build and test a neural model of aesthetic experience” (2).

In laying out this model, Starr organizes her book around the following themes: aesthetic pleasure and emotion; imagery and the imagination; aesthetic knowledge; and the unity of aesthetic experience. Beginning with eighteenth-century and Romantic debates around the Sister Arts, the introduction and first chapter lay the historical foundation for Starr’s neuroaesthetic model, invoking the idea that the “default [mode] network”—involved in everything from daydreaming and introspection to the basic regulation of heart rate, respiration, and digestion, and which typically shows the highest neural activation in the resting state—is involved in profound aesthetic experience. Starr builds on experiments at NYU showing activation of the default mode network (DMN) in response to highly enjoyed works of art to suggest that “powerful aesthetic experience calls on the brain to integrate external perceptions with the inner senses, and ultimately, that imagery may be a key component of powerful aesthetic response” (23). This theorization of aesthetic pleasure seems to privilege imagery more than we would expect based on the default mode network’s involvement in such a wide range of inwardly directed cognitive functions. However, in most fMRI studies, decreased activation of the DMN from resting state is observed while increased activation of the Executive Control Network...

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