by Celia Andreu-Sanchez & Miguel Angel Martin-Pascual
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Neuro-Com Research Group. Neuroscience & Communication
We introduce the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) as an important tool from the field of neuroscience to study and analyze artistic work. It explains empathy and understanding in the artistic perception.
The Mirror Neuron System
The discovery of the mirror neuron system (MNS) in 1996 came to change the panorama of the debate between nature and education (nature vs nurture). Giacomo Rizzolati and his team, studying the control of the hands of the macaque in seizing objects, serendipitously discovered the systematic effort in the way a macaque neuron reacted to an investigator seizing a banana in the same way that the animal seized its favourite fruit. The neuron was activated when one of the investigators, Fogassi, seized the food. It was deactivated when the food was moved towards the macaque and was reactivated when the animal seized the banana. If the experimenter seized the food with a tool and fed it to the macaque, there was no reaction in the above mentioned neuron. The neuron was only activated when the macaque seized the food or saw others doing the same (Rizzolati et al. 1996).
After laborious revision, one researcher noted that the movement, in this case to seize the food, had a meaning, ‘taking hold’, and the most revolutionary aspect was that this meaning was represented by a specific command of cortical activation. The mirror neurons show that this knowledge of movement can also be attributed to the actions of others. If an external stimulus evokes a similar neuronal activity to the one that is produced inside an individual when representing or initiating an action, the meaning of an action is presented as the similarity between both reactions: the internal, when we get into action, and the external, which reproduces the same stimulus (Rizzolati et al. 1996).
As human beings and monkeys are very social species, it is plain to see the advantage for survival of such a mechanism as the MNS, which assigns motor acts to a wide network of meanings and which enables immediate understanding without elaborated reasoning of the behavior of others. (Rizzolati et al. 2004).
It is common sense, in humanity’s educational concerns, that imitation, or watching another when executing some skill, helps to reproduce or learn this action. But the importance of the MNS does not only reside in this. This system provides a biological topography for the above mentioned activity. What is important and new about this system is the independent process from the classic reasoning and the implications that it has, which are frequently not very well clarified. Empathy, putting oneself in the place of another, has a scientific explanation. As Rizzolatti says, when people think or use the expression ‘it is as if I was feeling your pain’, they do not know how literal and real these phrases are (Rizzolati et al. 2004).
The amazing and rapid jump from primitive humanity to our civilization, 40,000 years ago, can be based neither on slow genetic change, nor on an improbable explosion of innovation that arose from one day to the next, from nothing. It was a symbiosis between the brain and social culture. According to Ramachandran, it was the increase in the mirror neuron system in a social environment that favored learning. Specifically, language, through simulated potentiating of the MNS. The increase in the skill to imitate, to learn and, therefore, to teach, is what might explain the so called great step forward or Big Bang of human evolution (Ramachandran 2000). Without humankind’s special learning capacity through simulation, but also without this dip into a social culture, this jump would not have been possible. From there comes symbiosis and the debate between nature and education, human brain and culture, as mutual parasites without which we do not obtain a human being. Using imitation, discoveries are rapidly propagated around the population and hence civilization advances. The interesting thing is that when we see someone perform an action, apart from the activation of the visual areas of the brain, an activation of the same motive circuits is also activated if we realize the action takes place. It is, in a certain way, 'as if' we perform the same action that we observe. And something similar happens with our emotions (Gallese et al. 2004).
In the movie field there is an evident explanatory importance of the MNS mechanism: the spectator cries when the character cries onscreen, the spectator laughs and feels the happiness, when the character finds his happiness, the spectator experiences the same emotions. This, in psychological terms, might clearly be explained as empathy. The spectators feel empathy for the prominent figures. The complexity of MNS enables us to experience what we perceive that our neighbor experiences. And this, in cinema, is fundamental. But, does this only happen in cinema? The answer is no. This activation of the MNS mechanism also seems to happen in any kind of artistic perception process.
Freedberg and Gallese propose that a crucial element of the aesthetic response consists of the activation of one’s own and of universal mechanisms, which include the simulation of actions, emotions and even corporal sensations. The discovery of the mirror neurons explains several perceptive phenomena that have been studied to date, in terms of behavior and reception. They help to understand the relation between the perception of movement in works of art and the emotions that these provoke in the spectator. One of the most important discoveries concerning mirror neurons is the demonstration that the observation of an action directs the activation of the same neuron networks that would be active if the above mentioned action was realized. This is the neurological explanation of empathy. When one observes an action in a movie and the brain reproduces the activity, empathy occurs, whereby the spectator feels what the character feels. This response has already been studied and analyzed in the pictorial and sculptural area (Freedberg and Gallese, 2007).
Recent studies demonstrate that in macaques and in human beings the mirror neurons are capable of being involved in the understanding of the existing intentions after a certain action (Fogassi et al. 2005). We know that this tool is crucial for the screenplay writer, who plays with the spectator’s ideas about what is going to happen. The spectator produces a hypothesis in the Borwellian sense and the scriptwriter can confirm it or produce a surprise by showing something unexpected.
Like Gallese, Keysers and Rizolatti, we believe that the mirror neuron system is the mechanism that can shed more light on how we understand the actions and emotions of others. Therefore, understanding our neighbor is not a fruit of conceptual reasoning, but of the direct simulation of the events that we observe, through the mirror neurons (Gallese et al. 2004).
Neuroesthetics
Recently, a new field of investigation has been developing: neuroesthetics, a term coined by Semir Zeki. Midway between neuroscientific knowledge and aesthetic studies, this new field of research aspires to discover the universal laws of aesthetics, and particularly, of visual art.
Among the pioneers in this field are such renowned neurologists as Semir Zeki, Vilayanur Ramachandran or William Hirstein, among others. In the search for knowledge of the biology of aesthetics, beauty or creativity, neuroesthetics offers a new field of study.
In 1999, V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein published ‘The Science of Art. To Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience’. In this article the authors propose eight Universal Laws of the artistic experience, based on neuroesthetic knowledge, that plead for some new foundations for art theory. According to these authors, any theory related to the creation or the perception of art must contain three components: the logic of art, the rational evolution of art and the cerebral circuit. If we are beginning to understand how the human brain works when it creates, perceives, thinks or imagines art, then why not focus on theories regarding creation, perception, thought and imagination in art and cinema?
That there are universal rules or principles for art does not mean that culture no longer plays an important role in artistic creation, which is something neuroscientists supporting this term want to clarify. But culture is not enough. Demonstrating the existence of universal art is synonymous with investigating the laws or neuronal procedures that human beings respond to when they are in touch with art or audio-visual communication in general. The study of these laws, with neuroscientific aspirations, cannot ignore the psychological perception of knowledge promoted by the Gestalt School, for example. In fact, Ramachandran and Hirstein have unquestionably based their work on the psychology of the Gestalt when referring to the universal laws of art (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999). Today the bridges and coincidences between both approaches are recognized, as supported by Max Wertheimer's original investigations (Ehrenstein et al. 2003; Wertheimer 1999).
As for artistic analyses, an example of current neuroesthetics research is the well-known comparative experiment, between the cerebral activity of a professional musician and a layman, in the perception of musical sounds. When, by means of technologies of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we analyze a person without major musical knowledge and observe the cortical activity, we verify that the main parts of the brain that are activated by listening to music are the managers of sonorous decoding, i.e. the auditory cortex and the parabelt of auditory polymodal analysis in the temporary parietal zone. If we repeat the experiment with a professional musician, the parts of his brain that are activated are much broader, implying, surprisingly, that there are deep systems of memory and premotor cortex. In a certain, very real way, the professional musician executes the piece intentionally. Leaving aside the interesting example of neuronal plasticity in London taxi drivers shown by Maguire et al. (2000), we observe the different experiences and perceptions of music, in this case, between the subject that knows and one who recognizes (lat. cognoscĕre vs recognoscĕre) (Pantev et al. 1998, Krings et al. 1999, Gaser et al. 2003, Bermudez et al. 2008).
Neuroesthetics seek common lines in the brain to understand creation and artistic perception. Beauty is determined as much by biological influences as cultural ones (Zeki 2009), and these neurobiological biological influences are what we investigate in this recent field. There is a subjective side to beauty that is related to the cultural aspects of the individual, and targets one that is present in the anatomy and functionality of the human brain. Neuroesthetics is in the position to ask such questions as What is art? How do we perceive beauty? Or what is beautiful from a scientific point of view? (Andreu-Sánchez 2009).
Mirror Neuron System & Artistic Perception
In neurological terms, the existence of MNS demonstrates that it is possible for this Universal Laws to exists. The activation of MNS mechanism whenever we, spectators, are perceiving an artwork produces an empathic feeling with the creation. And this has a neurobiological explanation, not a cultural one.
But notice that this is intimately related to an art recipient’s culture. From the ideas that we have described, it is evident that the spectator must have a previous knowledge of the cultural connections in order to be able to recognize it in the artistic work. That is why we have supported since the outset the idea that neuroesthetical study does not imply discrediting the weight of culture in the artistic creation and perception. Nevertheless, this cultural knowledge is not what we want to emphasize. Our interest is in making it clear that, regardless of culture, there is a universal brain system called Mirror Neuron System that makes it possible, for example, for spectators to feel what the movie characters feel. Its existence can be explained in neuroscientific terms. This way, it is our aim to make a proposal of understanding in artistic perception taking on account MNS.
If we go back to Ramachandran and Hirstein’s proposal (1999) for the three components had to feature in any theory related to the creation or the perception of art (the logic of art, the rational evolution of art and the cerebral circuit), we understand that this new offer of art criticism bears all of those in mind. The logic of art and its rational evolution are protagonists in terms of both cultural and art history. The cerebral circuit becomes important when the mirror neuron system and the networks of cerebral memory are responsible for explaining our theoretical proposal.
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References
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Neuro-Com is a Research Group from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona that connects neuroscientific research with communication. It was created in 2009 under the idea of that Communicacion Sciences must participate in current Neuroscience as a discipline whose object of study is the audiovisual. This connection is crucial for the understanding of the perception of the world.