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Music

The Origins and Development of Aesthetics

Profile image of Daphne MaurerDaphne Maurer

2024, Philosophical Transactions B of the Royal Society

https://doi.org/10.1098/RSTB.2023.0246
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29 pages

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Abstract

All people (and some other animals) have aesthetic responses to sensory stimulation, responses of emotional pleasure or displeasure. These emotions vary from one person and culture to another, yet they share a common mechanism. To survive, an adaptive animal (as opposed to a tropic animal) needs to become comfortable with normality and to have slight abnormalities draw attention to themselves. Walking through a jungle you need to notice a tiger from a single stripe: if you must wait to see the whole animal, you are unlikely to survive. In Homo sapiens, the brain's adaptive neurochemistry does this naturally, partly because the brain's neuronal networks are structured to react efficiently to fractal structures, structures that shape much of nature. Previous associations may turn a slight variation from normal into feelings of either pleasure or danger. The details of these responses-what is normal and what variations feel like-they will depend upon an individual's experience, but the mechanism is the same, no matter whether a person is tasting a wine, seeing a face or landscape, or hearing a song.

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Francis Mechner

The Psychological Record, 2017

distinguishing attributes of effects one might call "aesthetic," I examined hundreds of examples in music, visual arts, poetry, literature, humor, performance arts, architecture, science, mathematics, games, and other disciplines. I observed that all involve quasi-emotional reactions to stimuli that are composites of multiple elements that ordinarily do not occur together and whose interaction, when appropriately potentiated, is transformativedifferent in kind from the effects of the separate constituent elements. Such effects, termed synergetic, can evoke surprise-tinged emotional responses. Aesthetic reactions, unlike many other kinds of emotional reactions, are never evoked by biologically urgent action-demanding events, such as threats or opportunities. The examined effects were created by various concept manipulation devices: class expansion, identification of new relations, repetition, symmetry, parsimony, and emotional displays for the audience to mirror (I identified a total of 16 such devices). The effects would occur only for individuals with the necessary priming, in circumstances that include effective potentiating factors. Synergetic stimuli that evoke aesthetic responses tend to be reinforcing, via mechanisms related to their biological utility during our evolution. I offer a theory as to how aesthetics may have evolved from its primordial pre-aesthetic roots, with examples of how consideration of those roots often explains aesthetic and related effects. The article suggests that aesthetic phenomena are a special case of a more pervasive aspect of behavior and proposes research approaches involving laboratory models and fMRI technology.

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The behavioral architecture and biological utility of aesthetic reactions
Francis Mechner

European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 2019

The article presents a behavioral and biological theory as to how aesthetic reactions form. It takes a naturalistic perspective in exploring the likely phylogenetic origins of aesthetic reactions; their functions in the maintenance of human culture; and as indicators of group identity. According to the theory, aesthetic reactions occur when certain affectcharged cognitions interact with transformative effect. The term cognition, as used here, refers to verbal, conceptual, abstract, and derived relational behavior in music, poetry, narratives, and the perception of auditory, visual, tactile, sexual and other sensory stimuli, and excludes respondent behavior. Cognitions become affect-charged and come to elicit affect-linked respondents either when they acquire conditioned stimulus (CS) functionalities via previous Pavlovian conditioning episodes, or when such functionalities are genetic. The theory can be tested experimentally by applying it to the laboratory synthesis of aesthetic reactions and then assessing the result's conformity to accepted definitions and instances of aesthetic reactions.

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Related topics

  • Evolutionary Psychology
  • Music
  • Aesthetics
  • Perception
  • Evolution and Human Behavior
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