|
Abstract Cognitive neuroaesthetics is an emerging branch of science that combines Western neuroaesthetics with Chinese cognitive aesthetics. The latest achievements of cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology and neuroscience are sources of inspiration to aesthetic research, especially to the material substrate for understanding the basic category of aesthetics. Cognitive neuroaesthetics provides a pivot for comparing and analyzing the imagery in classical Chinese aesthetics and the illusion in contemporary aesthetic category. There is a possibility of multiple comparisons between the two in terms of brain abstraction, sensory perception and cognitive-emotion processing. By contrast, imagery, a classical Chinese concept, is of great hermeneutic value to contemporary Chinese and Western aesthetic phenomena. Illusion, as a contemporary aesthetic concept, continues to enlighten future aesthetic emotion. Semir Zeki, the founder of neuroaesthetics, combines the study of neurons, neurotransmitters, and functional brain regions with artistic creation and appreciation, and provides a thorough analysis of neuroscience ininterpreting the artworks of Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Magritte, Malevich, Duchamp, etc. Zeki offers an in-depth analysis of key concepts—essential, ideal, inherited, acquired, ambiguity, perception, micro-consciousness, neurons, modular and functional brain regions. The analysis is a key inspiration to understanding imagery and illusion. Neuroaesthetics and cognitive neuroaesthetics serve to reveal the similarities and differences between imagery and illusion. Based on the aesthetic and objectification process of brain abstraction and sensory perception, imagery and illusion undergo the same process of information processing in the brain, including perceptual processing, memory processing and cognitive-emotion processing. Their difference lies in the fact that the object of imagery processing is an objective image in history and in reality, which is original, constant, unfinished and ambiguous; the object of illusion-processing and presentation is the potential possibility in reality and in the future, with a stress on human existence which is abstract, novel, evolutionary and utopian. Therefore, the two categories reveal different interests in aesthetic emotion. The microscopic exploration of an aesthetic material substrate by cognitive neuroaesthetics is inseparable from influencing factors in social history. The generation of aesthetic emotion is bound to be swayed by factors such as the historical practice of macroscopic politics and economics, the evolution of living beings, and the customs and institutions of collective organizations. Therefore, the reductive discussions of neuroaesthetics must be combined with philosophical thinking or with social, historical realities. Taking the analysis of classical Chinese imagery and contemporary aesthetic illusion as an example, a holistic approach to aesthetic study is necessary and it promotes the development of aesthetics and neuroscience. As Zeki puts it, neuroaesthetics does far more than borrowing from the latest science—the thinking style and main categories of aesthetics should also be able to boost neuroscience with the exploration of the principles of love, creativity and happiness and the understanding of the relationships between language, images and intentions.
|
|
|
|
|
|
