Description

Anjan Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture and the founding Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. He wrote The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art and co-edited Neuroethics in Practice: Mind, Medicine, and Society and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology. 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. He currently serves on the Boards of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and has served on the boards of Haverford College, the Norris Square Neighborhood Project and the Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Abstract:

Aesthetic experiences can be mysterious and are often regarded as ineffable. Yet, ineffability is predicated on identifying the effable. I propose that language plays an important role in understanding the effable and review our work in developing a taxonomy of cognitive and affective impacts of aesthetic experiences. With this taxonomy as a tool, we ask questions about the nature of digital and in-person aesthetic encounters, the effects of considering art slowly, public art changing impressions of urban neighborhoods, and art being used to index emotional recovery. The approach also offers insight into neural bases of these impacts. Finally, the taxonomy makes explicit the gap between deep first-person phenomenological experiences and third person aggregated descriptions. I will touch on our recent attempts to use large language models to close this gap and further chip away at the boundaries of the ineffable.