Art and the Brain

Image: Jean Arp's "The Woman of Delos"

This week the exhibition “Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics" will open at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore as part of a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University that, with the cooperation of museum visitors, will look at why certain artwork attracts the human brain, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Equipped with 3-D glasses and clipboards, participants will be asked to view altered 3-D versions of sculptures by the abstract artist Jean Arp and indicate which versions they found most and least attractive.

Gary Vikan, director of the Walters and curator of the show, hopes that this study will provide insight into the unique brain activity produced in response to compelling works of art, the idea that successful artists have an inherent understanding of the brain and what aesthetic qualities please the areas that process visual cues.

Professor of neuroscience at the Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins Ed Connor is overseeing this study. The findings from the Walters will be combined with results from another experiment that measures participants’ reactions to the same works of art using magnetic brain-imaging scanners.

Connor and Vikan are hopeful that the findings from these studies and others like them could be used to make exhibitions more engaging and aesthetically pleasing to visitors.