Feeling our way: what does art have to do with it?

Inspired by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, I've been trying to figure out what a scientific understanding of how we've evolved to function in the world might say about the practice and experience of art. We humans seem to be particularly good at finding our way through unfamiliar, uncertain, and initially inhospitable environments. How (and why) do we do it?

Even when we don't know where we are headed, we are able to feel our way. How might art be part of that process?

So I've been doing my research, reading up on theories of emotions (what they are and what they're good for) and pouring through some of the most recent studies on the relationship between feeling and thought. By placing emotions in the context of natural selection, Darwin set the stage for a long series of neuroscientific discoveries which have revealed phylogenetically nested and interwoven layers of emotion-related neural processes and networks.

Interoception is the perception of our internal processes, such as heartbeat and respiration. It may be at the heart of our subjective emotional experiences, and perhaps of our very sense of self. Feeling, even in its most subtle form, evolved to help us survive and thrive in uncertain and unfamiliar situations and environments. Descartes’ famous assertion “I think, therefore I am” might be rewritten in the light of Darwin and current research, “I feel, so that I may be.”

Emotional brain-processes not only resemble the ordinary sensorial brain-processes, but in very truth are nothing but such processes variously combined.
--William James, What is an emotion? 1884

Turns out William James had the right idea, way back in the 19th century. Our emotional experience originates in bodily sensations. Our body reacts much faster than our minds, when we sense an important event. Good thing too-- better get ready to move before we have time to figure out whether its a saber tooth tiger, or just a strong breeze rustling those bushes. Antonio Damasio imagines a tree, rooted in ancient processes of natural selection, whose trunk consists of metabolic regulation, reflexes and immune responses, which we share with paramecium. The main branches of pain and pleasure divide into ever finer nuances of emotion until, the very top is crowned by the very human ability to be aware and make conscious choices about how to respond to our emotions, what Damasio calls feeling.

There's a paired set of neural stuctures, called the insular and the cingulate cortices, buried deep in our brains, which seem to be in charge of telling us when to pay attention and when we can afford to daydream. A recent issue of the scientific journal Brain Structure and Function was devoted to the insula, with research indicating its involvement in everything from regulation of heartbeat to the experience of uncertainty and empathy.

The unified representation of all salient conditions—represented as feelings—is in effect a representation of the entirety of the individual…a continuously updating series of global emotional moments… that incorporates predictive representations based on acquired internal models”
---- A.D. (Bud) Craig, The Sentient Self

In other words, we build a sense of ourselves through our awareness of a continuous flow of feeling states. It turns out that when we daydream, the insular and cingulate cortices are still busy, talking to each other, switching on and off diffuse neural networks across our cerebral cortex. Some researchers are asking if during these moments these structures are quietly knitting together our autobiographical sense of self (Sridharan, et al., 2008; Taylor, et al., 2009).

Most good teachers will tell you that instilling “a love for learning” in students is more than half the battle and many students will tell you their best teachers seem to truly love what they are teaching. Yet the quality of social relationships and affective environment in classrooms is too often ignored or sidelined. Neuroscientific insights into the intimate role emotional awareness plays in executive functioning and cognitive effort has important implications for education. Immordino-Yang and Damasio identify reciprocal and recursive cycles of influence between emotional processes rooted in bodily experience and rational thought in their essay, We feel, therefore we learn:

Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning, and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of affect in education.

So what does art have to do with it? I would argue that both the practice and appreciation of art is all about the integration of feeling and thought. Aesthetic experience grounds our most elevated concepts in sensate form. By externalizing our thoughts and feelings in tangible form, we can look at them, examine them closely, see them anew, pull them apart and put them back together in unexpected ways, surprising even ourselves. We improvise, feeling our way toward innovation and invention. We practice being human.


here are some of the references I've found useful on this subject:

Allman, J. M., Tetreault, N. A., Hakeem, A. Y., Manaye, K. F., Semendeferi, K., Erwin, J. M., et al. (2010). The von Economo neurons in frontoinsular and anterior cingulate cortex in great apes and humans. Brain Struct Funct, 214(5-6), 495-517.

Craig, A. D. (2008). Interoception and Emotion: a neuroanatomical perspective. In M. Lewis, et. al (Ed.), Handbook of Emotions (Three ed., pp. 272-289). New York: The Guilford Press.

Craig, A. D. (2010). The sentient self. Brain Struct Funct, 214(5-6), 563-577.

Critchley, H. D. (2005). Neural mechanisms of autonomic, affective, and cognitive integration. The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 493(1), 154-166.

Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens : body and emotion in the making of consciousness (1st ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace.

Damasio, A. R. (2003a). Looking for Spinoza : joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain (1st ed.). Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt.

Damasio, A. R. (2003b). Feelings of emotion and the self. Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1001, 253-261.

Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Available from http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1142&viewtype=text&pageseq=1z

Gallese, V., Keysers, C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2004). A unifying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends Cogn Sci, 8(9), 396-403.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., McColl, A., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (2009). Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 106(19), 8021-8026.

Medford, N., & Critchley, H. D. (2010). Conjoint activity of anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortex: awareness and response. Brain Struct Funct, 214(5-6), 535-549.

Menon, V., & Uddin, L. Q. (2010). Saliency, switching, attention and control: a network model of insula function. Brain Struct Funct, 214(5-6), 655-667.

Pollatos, O., Gramann, K., & Schandry, R. (2007). Neural systems connecting interoceptive awareness and feelings. Human Brain Mapping, 28(1), 9-18.

Singer, T., Critchley, H. D., & Preuschoff, K. (2009). A common role of insula in feelings, empathy and uncertainty. Trends Cogn Sci, 13(8), 334-340.

Sridharan, D., Levitin, D. J., & Menon, V. (2008). A critical role for the right fronto-insular cortex in switching between central-executive and default-mode networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 105(34), 12569-12574.