SITs would enable subjects to maintain an optimal level of arousal. Three possible explanations of the functional significance of mind wandering were offered by Mason et al. The SITs are what we might call “the mind talking with itself.” Mind wandering refers to images, thoughts, voices, and feelings that the brain spontaneously produces in the absence of external stimuli (stimulus-independent thoughts, SITs hereafter) ( Mason et al., 2007).
A different question is that of explaining how this link between DMN and aesthetic perception appeared or, in other words, what characteristic of the DMN might lead to the sudden experiences of the beauty of a picture or a landscape.Īn added function of the DMN relates to “mind-wandering” processes. As Raichle and Snyder (2007) held “intrinsic activity instantiates the maintenance of information for interpreting, responding to and even predicting environmental demands.” This functional capacity seems adaptive enough to justify by itself its metabolic costs, and it is performed by means of “mind-wandering” processes, in which DMN seems to play a fundamental role.Ī DMN phylogenetically fixed and linked to aesthetic perception is sufficient to justify such human capacity for appreciating beauty in objects. However, a complementary justification for the evolution of capacities for appreciating beauty may be given by pointing out the coincidence between the delayed aesthetic network and the DMN.Ī fundamental function of the DMN is facilitating responses to stimuli. Obviously, any hypothesis about the subject would be difficult to test. (2011) hold that “such a system evolved first for the appraisal of objects of survival advantage, such as food sources, and was later coopted in humans for the experience of artworks for the satisfaction of social needs.”
Focusing on positive-valence aesthetic appraisal, Brown et al. For instance, Kaplan (1987) states that “It would be adaptive for animals to like the sort of settings in which they thrive.” Thus, preference for landscapes would have led to preference for ornaments like gardens. In other words, aesthetics might be just an exaptation. It has been posited that aesthetic perception does not need to imply any adaptive advantage, since it could profit from other previously evolved cognitive characteristics with their own adaptive benefits. Ayala, in Progress in Brain Research, 2018 7 Aesthetic Appreciation as an Exaptation It founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, human and subject.Camilo José Cela-Conde, Francisco J. The aesthetics of force is thus a thinking of the nature of man: of aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture acquired by practice. The latter conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but as a play of expression-propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised like a faculty, does not recognize or represent anything because it is obscure and unconscious: the force of what in humanity is distinct from the subject. Yet an aesthetics in the Baumgartian manner, as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force. On the one hand, Baumgarten's Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the "subject": as a totality of faculties an agent defined by capabilities one who is able. Force demonstrates that aesthetics, and hence modern philosophy, began twice. This book reconceives modern aesthetics by reconstructing its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten's Aesthetics and Kant's Critique of Judgment.