Liberty to Create: Debriefing with Anjan Chatterjee

Anjan Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture and the founding Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. He has received the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology and the Rudolph Arnheim Prize for contribution to Psychology and the Arts. He is a founding member of the Board of Governors of the Neuroethics Society, the past President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the past President of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society.

Below, he shares his thoughts about many things, including his contribution to Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity’s annual meeting (June 1-3). SfNC is the forum for presenting the latest work in creativity neuroscience, broadly defined. It is the place researchers and practitioners share new data, methods, and theory on the varied relationships between creativity and cognition. This year’s theme – Liberty to Create – placed a deliberate spotlight on creative expression in the arts.

Hi, Dr. Chatterjee. Let’s begin with some basics today, if you don’t mind. Could you offer a lay definition of neuroaesthetics?

Neuroaesthetics is a discipline that tries to understand the nature of aesthetic experiences and why they matter—and that understanding is filtered through a biologic lens. Aesthetic experiences include beauty and art, but they are not confined to those two. If you ask people to give word associations for aesthetics, beauty is the word that comes up most often. In our view, aesthetics is more than beauty. Historically, for example, people thought about the sublime, a state that includes elements of anxiety and little bit of fear… perhaps close to how we in the modern era use the term “awe,” which is a hot topic in empirical aesthetics.

We’ve worked on establishing a vocabulary, or a taxonomy, to describe the nature of aesthetic experiences. They broadly precipitate into four big domains: 1.) Positive affect—the kind of good vibes that people get. 2.) Negative affect—an example of this is people willingly paying money to be scared at horror movies. 3.) Immersion—where people feel transfixed by an experience. 4.) The final one—the possibility of transformation. In some ways, the last is the holy grail for many people, both in producing and apprehending works of art.

Aesthetics goes beyond art. We have aesthetic experiences all the time: the way people look and how we react to appearance or to our environment. If asked about their own experiences of deeply moving beauty, people often bring up nature. So there are a panoply of ways in which we can have aesthetic experiences. In my lab, we have tried to deconstruct and demystify this notion of art as a special, elite thing that you have to climb up a bunch of stairs and go through Roman pillars to get to see. Making a fine meal can be a creative act, and eating a fine meal can be an aesthetic experience—often is an aesthetic experience. So aesthetics encompasses much more than art. Having said that, art provides a distillation of some ideas around aesthetics, in a relatively controlled and also culturally specific way.

Tell me about the symposium you just completed.

I ran this symposium as part a bigger meeting: the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity’s Liberty to Create. And the meeting was set up to have scientists and artists occupy the same space and interact and talk about what those interactions are like. In my specific symposium, I started out with my thoughts about the relationship of science and art, and the relationship between scientists and artists—to set up the conversation. Then a few artists presented their work, artists who are engaged with science. Jonathan Reiner is a neurologist in Israel who himself is an artist. He talked about some of his work, thinking about the role of dopamine in people with Parkinson’s disease and the relationship of dopamine and creativity.

There was also the artist Mat Tomezsko, who we are hoping to collaborate with and who along with Emily Crane—as part of the mural arts program—run a storefront operation right under the L in Kensington at the epicenter of the Philadelphia opioid crisis. These people are doing incredible work. Unhoused people can walk into their space… no judgments, no questions asked. People who enroll are given $50 up front. They’re taught skills, art skills, and if they don’t want to do that, they can stretch canvases or do other meaningful work. If they remain engaged, then they stay on and eventually get put on longer projects. In my lab, we write in grants, “We think such and such effects from engaging with the arts might be happening.” But to hear the very impacts that we hypothesize—like a growing sense of belonging, of recovery of identity, of new meaning in their lives—emerge unprompted in conversations with these participants is amazing. We really hope we can work with them. The opioid crisis is a deep problem, it’s a local problem, these people are doing amazing work, and nobody is scientifically assessing its impact.

In the symposium, we also had an hour-long conversation with three artists-in-residents that have been at my center: Lucas Kelly, Judith Schaechter, and Jennifer Joseph. It was a conversation about why I wanted the lab to have an artist-in-residence, and then questions about their experience. Why would an artist even want to be in a neuroscience lab? What did they think they would get out of it? What did they get out of it?

Those artists brought up a question they mentioned you often ask in your lab: What is art good for?

Well, it’s not an easy question to answer. There are a number of domains where art serves as a utility. In the current era, people talk about art as being good for health, for being vehicles for transcendence, to create a sense of well-being, for social communication and engagement. I think art for social justice is an important one.

Having said that, I do want to be clear that I’m not a person who thinks of art as an unalloyed good. I think of it as a powerful human technology. Like many technologies, it can also be used for nefarious purposes—it can be used to manipulate people, it can be used to convey misinformation. So for us, the question we ask is not always, What is art good for? It is: Under what conditions is art good and for what purposes and for whom?

That makes me wonder about your thoughts surrounding generative AI—people using AI to replace what would otherwise be their engagement with artistic processes?

So the short answer is, I don’t know. It’s such a moving target. In 2022, I wrote a paper. This was before ChatGPT, but when things like Midjourney and Dali were just peaking. The paper was called “Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” and it was riffing off of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It laid out what I thought were some of the issues. One of which was from the viewer’s perspective: To what degree do we care about agency? Do we care if there is a human on the other side of art? The experimental work so far has borne out that people care. Even if they are misinformed about its origins, people tend to prioritize and prefer art they think is made by a human. But what happens 20 years from now, when kids who are now 5 or 10 have grown up with this stuff—is that importance of human agency going to be true? I don’t know.

On the creative side, it depends on how AI is used. So, we talk about exploration… where you’re trying out different ideas, and you’re bouncing things around in workshops, in lab meetings—we do this all the time. The use of AI can be another version of that, right? Coming up with more ideas. But there is a danger of brainstorming being completely offloaded. I think using it as an adjunct to generate ideas is reasonable, so long as the responsibility is not completely bequeathed to the machine. I do worry about that piece—that, in the broader sense, the creative output of people may get diminished. But these are early days. Trying to predict the future is a dicey business.

It is. In the present, what do you see as the added value of artists and scientists working together?

So, let’s talk about Mural Arts and other Philadelphia institutions like the Barnes Foundation, Fringe Arts and the Clay Studio. What scientists can bring to those relationships is some way of trying to measure or identify or index the impact of art on the community. We have one paper published about how when people engage with the murals in Philadelphia, it changes their perception of the neighborhood. So that’s a concrete, tangible result. We have looked at—both at the Barnes and the Penn Museum—when people engage with art, how do we even index what that means? And then, under what conditions can people’s engagement grow deeper?

We are also part of a movement around slow looking. We are asking, How do you get people to slow down? To absorb what they’re looking at? Most of us live in this hyper-manic environment where it’s hard to be present. You have to learn or relearn how to be present. We think art might be a vehicle to slow down, and we’ve shown that might be true. Arguably, if you think being more engaged and being more present is a good, then I think art becomes a way to get there.

Philadelphia is known as a great sports city and a good food city. Philadelphia is pretty well known for its music scene, particularly for alternative music. But Philadelphia has not capitalized on its fine arts and cultural riches in the same way. I think people are realizing that to publicize and amplify the arts and culture offerings requires coordination. It requires some political will, some policy decisions, all of the usual things. The one piece that scientists can bring to the conversation is to measure certain kinds of impacts. I think that’s where our center can enter the community conversation.

The domain lends itself to interdisciplinary thinking… because the reality is we don’t know what we don’t know. So, in addition to having an artist-in-residence in my lab, we often have an art historian, we have an anthropologist, and we get a lot of visitors—artists, filmmakers, architects, interior designers. They come to the lab meetings, listen to what we’re doing, and they make presentations. This kind of conversation broadens how and what we’re thinking, offers a greater expansiveness. And to be honest, it’s just fun. It’s fun having people come in and tell us things that we don’t know.

But this type of interdisciplinarity—it’s not standard practice, is it?

It’s certainly not easy. I think we have an environment in this country, probably most countries, that rewards specialization. You might know this 1950s essay by Isaiah Berlin called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” The idea is that some people process information by digging, digging, digging (hedgehogs) and others (foxes) dart around. And our systems prioritize and reward the hedgehogs. I think that is absolutely true. There are all sorts of structural reasons why. While many people talk about the benefits of interdisciplinarity, structurally it’s not encouraged. If you are young in academia and trying to get tenure, you are advised to stay in the middle of your discipline, to wait to do outlier work until later. But why cut yourself off from good ideas when you’re young? Similarly, when you’re writing grants, the more focused, the better. The truth is nobody wants to fund this kind of edge work: if you’ve got a foot in more than one domain, you’re neither fish nor fowl, and no one, including foundations, knows what to do with you. That’s the reality.

I think I’ve been lucky. All along, at every stage of my career, I did things that people who were more experienced and genuinely had my best interests in mind told me not to do. And… either because of stubbornness or whatever… I’ve managed to pick and choose the advice that made sense to me. Quite frankly, I’ve been lucky at every step to get to where I am and to get to do this work. I would not want to convey to young scholars that they should take a similar path because I don’t know if that’s good advice. I mean, I was told not to do this. Having said that, if you can get away with it—you’re going to have a great time.

I believe it. Thank you so much.