The Brain On Screen

Vortrag von Edward A. Vessel,

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik in Frankfurt

From "Being Moved" to Moving Images: Dynamics of Visual Aesthetic Experience and the Brain’s Default-Mode Network

Aesthetic experiences evolve over time, from fleeting first impressions to the savoring of memories long after the experience has faded from our senses. How is it that such experiences with the external world can reach within to deeply “move” us emotionally?

In this talk, I trace our efforts to understand the mental and neural processes that support aesthetically moving experiences. In early work, we measured static “snapshots” of brain activity while people viewed unchanging visual artworks. We found that when a person finds an artwork to be aesthetically “moving,” parts the brain's “default-mode network" (DMN), typically associated with inwardly directed thought, are surprisingly active even though the focus lies on the outer world — the artwork. In an attempt to expand this static snapshot into an understanding of a dynamic process, we have set first our measurement, and now our stimulus, in motion. In several projects, we are collecting continuous measures of brain, body and behavior as people engage with both static and dynamic art forms (artworks, dance, music, film). The picture that is emerging from this ongoing work is one of a brain in motion: large-scale networks that dynamically reconfigure, allowing moving aesthetic experiences to affect the brain, and perhaps even the self, in ways that other experiences do not.

Filmvorführung

Um 18 Uhr gibt Edward Vessel eine Einführung in den Film "Angst essen Seele auf" (R. W. Fassbinder, 1974) im DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, der dort anschließend gezeigt wird. Die Tickets gibt es beim Kino im Deutschen Filmmuseum.