Can we really 'read' art to see the changing brain? A review and empirical assessment of clinical case reports and published artworks for systematic evidence of quality and style changes linked to damage or neurodegenerative disease.

The past three decades have seen multiple reports of people with neurodegenerative disorders, or other forms of changes in their brains, who also show putative changes in how they approach and produce visual art. Authors argue that these cases may provide a unique body of evidence, so-called 'artistic signatures' of neurodegenerative diseases, that might be used to understand disorders, provide diagnoses, be employed in treatment, create patterns of testable hypotheses for causative study, and also provide unique insight into the neurobiological linkages between the mind, brain, body, and the human penchant for art-making itself. However-before we can begin to meaningfully build from such emerging findings, much less formulate applications-not only is such evidence currently quite disparate and in need of systematic review, almost all case reports and artwork ratings are entirely subjective, based on authors' personal observations or a sparse collection of methods that may not best fit underlying research aims.

The differential power of extraneous influences to modify aesthetic judgments of biological and artifactual stimuli.

We addressed the question of the extent to which external information is capable of modifying aesthetic ratings given to two different categories of stimuli-images of faces (which belong to the biological category) and those of abstract paintings with no recognizable objects (which sit in the artifactual category). A total of 51 participants of different national origins rated the beauty of both sets of stimuli, indicating the certainty of their rating; they then re-rated them after being exposed to the opinions of others on their aesthetic status. Of these 51 participants, 42 who met our criteria were selected to complete the experiment.

Parkinson's disease and changes in the appreciation of art: A comparison of aesthetic and formal evaluations of paintings between PD patients and healthy controls.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressing neurodegenerative disease predominantly involving the loss of dopamine producing neurons with hallmark symptoms of motor disorders and cognitive, motivational, emotional, and perceptual impairments. Intriguingly, PD can also be connected-often anecdotally-with a sudden burst of artistic creativity, motivation, or changed quality/style of produced art. This has led to growing empirical interest, promising a window into brain function and the unique neurological signature of artists.

Why would Parkinson's disease lead to sudden changes in creativity, motivation, or style with visual art?: A review of case evidence and new neurobiological, contextual, and genetic hypotheses.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a devastating diagnosis with, however, potential for an extremely intriguing aesthetic component. Despite motor and cognitive deficits, an emerging collection of studies report a burst of visual artistic output and alterations in produced art in a subgroup of patients. This provides a unique window into the neurophysiological bases for why and how we might create and enjoy visual art, as well as into general brain function and the nature of PD or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Does priming negative emotions really contribute to more positive aesthetic judgments? A comparative study of emotion priming paradigms using emotional faces versus emotional scenes and multiple negative emotions with fEMG.

An outstanding question in empirical aesthetics concerns whether negative emotions (e.g., fear, disgust) can improve aesthetic judgments of liking.

Neuropsychopharmacological aesthetics: A theoretical consideration of pharmacological approaches to causative brain study in aesthetics and art.

Recent developments in neuroaesthetics have heightened the need for causative approaches to more deeply understand the mechanism underlying perception, emotion, and aesthetic experiences. This has recently been the topic for empirical work, employing several causative methods for changing brain activity, as well as comparative assessments of individuals with brain damage or disease. However, one area of study with high potential, and indeed a long history of often nonscientific use in the area of aesthetics and art, employing psychopharmacological chemicals as means of changing brain function, has not been systematically utilized.

Empathy as a guide for understanding the balancing of Distancing-Embracing with negative art.

We connect the Distancing-Embracing model to theoretical and empirical evidence regarding empathy, which raises questions about the ordering and modulation of distancing in particular. Namely, distancing may not be a binary, continuously on/off process. Rather we suggest that changes in distancing as actualized via the relation between the individual and art (e.

The experience of beauty derived from sorrow.

We studied the neural mechanisms that are engaged during the experience of beauty derived from sorrow and from joy, two experiences that share a common denominator (beauty) but are linked to opposite emotional valences. Twenty subjects viewed and rerated, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, 120 images which each had classified into the following four categories: beautiful and sad; beautiful and joyful; neutral; ugly. The medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC) was active during the experience of both types of beauty.

A neurobiological enquiry into the origins of our experience of the sublime and beautiful.

Philosophies of aesthetics have posited that experience of the sublime-commonly but not exclusively derived from scenes of natural grandeur-is distinct from that of beauty and is a counterpoint to it. We wanted to chart the pattern of brain activity which correlates with the declared intensity of experience of the sublime, and to learn whether it differs from the pattern that correlates with the experience of beauty, reported in our previous studies (e.g.

Varieties of perceptual instability and their neural correlates.

We report experiments designed to learn whether different kinds of perceptually unstable visual images engage different neural mechanisms. 21 subjects viewed two types of bi-stable images while we scanned the activity in their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); in one (intra-categorical type) the two percepts remained within the same category (e.g.

The "Visual Shock" of Francis Bacon: an essay in neuroesthetics.

In this paper we discuss the work of Francis Bacon in the context of his declared aim of giving a "visual shock."We explore what this means in terms of brain activity and what insights into the brain's visual perceptive system his work gives. We do so especially with reference to the representation of faces and bodies in the human visual brain.

Distinct neural mechanisms of tonal processing between musicians and non-musicians.

Objective: Both behavioral and neural responses to deviant melody endings can be enhanced through musical training. Yet it is unknown whether there are any differences in the neural responses of musicians and non-musicians given no difference in their behavioral responses. It is also unknown whether the melody preceding the fixed final tone influences the sense of completion.

Disambiguation of ambiguous figures in the brain.

Disambiguation refers to the ability to interpret ambiguous information in a sensible way, which is important in an ever-changing external environment. Disambiguation occurs when prior knowledge is given before an ambiguous stimulus is presented. For example, labeling a series of meaningless blobs as a "human body" can change the observer's perception.

Toward a brain-based theory of beauty.

We wanted to learn whether activity in the same area(s) of the brain correlate with the experience of beauty derived from different sources. 21 subjects took part in a brain-scanning experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Prior to the experiment, they viewed pictures of paintings and listened to musical excerpts, both of which they rated on a scale of 1-9, with 9 being the most beautiful.

Magnetoencephalographic study of the neural responses in body perception.

A fundamental trait of human beings is the ability to discern information communicated by others. The human body is one of the important sources of such information. To date, several researchers have reported two body-selective regions in the brain-the extrastriate body area (EBA) and fusiform body area.

Motor activity and imagery modulate the body-selective region in the occipital-temporal area: a near-infrared spectroscopy study.

The extrastriate body area (EBA) lies in the occipital-temporal cortex and has been described as a "body-selective" region that responds when viewing other people's bodies. Recently, several studies have reported that EBA is also modulated when the subject moves or imagines moving their own body, even without visual feedback. The present study involved 3 experiments, wherein the first experiment was conducted to examine whether near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) could capture any activity in the EBA when viewing images of bodies.

Temporal dissociation of global and local features by hierarchy of vision.

Most objects in our environment are organized hierarchically with a global whole embedding its local parts, but the way we recognize these features remains unclear. Using a visual masking paradigm, we examined the temporal dissociation between global and local feature as proposed in Reverse Hierarchy Theory, RHT (Ahissar & Hochstein, 2000), where global and local information are assumed to be processed, respectively, by feed-forward and feedback systems. We found that in a long Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) condition, both global and local information were recognized adequately.

Configurational factors in the perception of faces and non-facial objects: an ERP study.

During the viewing of human faces, it is easier to recognize detailed features if the face is presented in an unusual configuration; for example, a split face. The present study used electroencephalography to investigate the brain activity elicited in response to a neutral, inverted, and split face and compared this to the activity produced in response to a non-facial stimulus (a clock). Results showed that the N170 response amplitude was larger and its latency longer during recognition of split and inverted faces as compared to a normal face, whereas no amplitude change was seen for the different clock configurations.