Neuroaesthetics Symposium

Our sensory systems interact to provide a robust representation of the world around us and to optimise our perception of the objects, people and places that occupy this world. The extent to which the senses interact to shape our preferences for certain stimuli over others is, however, relatively poorly understood.

In this talk I will discuss how our preferences might be shaped by general

experiences with multisensory stimuli, and from the perceptual and cognitive processing of multisensory information. In particular, I will review recent behavioural evidence suggesting that perception benefits from multisensory inputs, and neuroimaging studies suggesting the underlying neural mechanisms supporting these interactions. Moreover, for some individuals, sensory stimulation in one modality can give rise to perceptual experience in another modality.

This condition, known as synaesthesia, can provide further insights into how the senses interact for everyday perception. Our research suggests that synaesthesia is supported by general perceptual mechanisms involved in multisensory integration, but that synaesthetes benefit from enhanced

processing of certain sensory information. Together these investigations help towards a better understanding of the perceptual basis of aesthetic responses.

Dr. Fiona Newell is Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Neuroscience in Trinity College Dublin. She leads the Multisensory Cognition Group that conducts investigations into perceptual function in humans. The goal of this research is to elucidate the brain and behavioural processes involved in the multisensory perception of objects, faces and scenes. Recently, this research has broadened into investigations of synaesthesia, as well as developmental processes in multisensory perception. Her research group has played a significant role in large international studies and has published in many of the leading academic journals. Newell obtained her Ph.D. in 1993 and was subsequently awarded an Addison-Wheeler Fellowship in Life Sciences from the University of Durham, UK. Following post-doc positions in the Weizmann Institute, Israel and Max Planck Institute, Germany, in 2000 she joined the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. In 2006 she became a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, and in 2008 a Professor of Psychology.

Rising interest in theories of embodiment highlight the need to better understand the relation of action and conscious perception.

Specifically, we investigate the concept that the quality of sensory awareness is determined by systematic change of afferent signals resulting from behaviour and knowledge thereof.

The feelSpace belt provides qualitatively new sensory signals, relating

the orientation of the subject to magnetic north. The resulting transformation laws, linking change of sensory signals and actions by the subject, establish sensorimotor contingencies.

The study demonstrates that the signals provided by the feelSpace belt improve behavioural performance, influence physiologic reactions and lead to qualitative changes in perceptual effects.

These results provide evidence for a causal role of sensorimotor contingencies in perceptual awareness. In a follow-up we study sensory enhancement in a congenitally blind subject.

Consistent with an earlier report improved behavioural performance and perceptual effects could be induced. However, unsupervised training by itself was not sufficient, and explicit instructions and training was necessary to ground the qualitatively new signals and provide associations with the available senses.

A unified framework is presented that describes the interaction of sensory and motor systems as an interaction optimizing the predictability of sensory representations in the light of the behavioural repertoire.

In summary, the presented experiments argue for a constitutive role of action in the formation of perception, although in some aspects it was dependent on available cognitive resources.

Dr. Peter König is Professor of Neurobiopsychology at the University of Os-

nabrück and director of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He studied physics and medicine at the University of Bonn. From 1978 to 1994 he was scholarship holder and research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main in the department of neurophysiology, and from 1995 to 1997 Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California.

This was followed by his Habilitation thesis at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the conferring of the title of private lecturer. From 1997 to 2003 he worked at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the ETH Zurich as assistant professor. In 2009, he founded WhiteMatter Labs GmbH of which he is the scientific director. Since 2001, he is visiting professor at the Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

In my installation piece The Undistorted Image of…

I proceed from a short passage in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology.

While explaining how the movement of light through the eye and brain forms images, Descartes puts forth the possibility of these images passing through

the arteries of a pregnant woman to form birthmarks on the foetus.

Using this installation and samples of other artwork, mainly from the project

Occular* Witness, I will present different ideas that have evolved from working with light, vision, and meaning in a world overflowed with information and image.

*occular: adj. (see occult and ocular) that which passes the visual system and

simultaneously remains hidden, invisible to the observer. The term occular is

used when the apparently real is difficult to identify, considering reality as it is depicted through mediated layers of electromagnetic transmissions (signal

transmission through implants, external or extrasensory sources).

The smallest component in the occular context is usually a photon, referring to the light energy that passes the body and leaves traces in the flash of a moment (in: Encyclopaedia of the Future, Glänta, 3/2008).

Arijana Kajfes is a visual artist born in Croatia, based in Sweden. Her work has its outset in sculpture and installation. She has worked in several interdisciplinary projects and was part of the Smart Studio research group at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm (1999–2004).

She often works with process-contained installations using both objects and electronic media, conceptually moving on the borderlines of perception and meaning, interested in uncertainties and

what representation is in its becoming stage.

The study of culture and biology have historically been stratified, however,

recent theoretical and methodological advances in cultural and biological sciences provide novel opportunities for understanding the nature and origin of

human diversity by bridging these gaps. Cultural neuroscience is an emerging

interdisciplinary science that investigates cultural variation in psychological, neural and genomic processes as a means of articulating the bidirectional relationship of these processes and their emergent properties.

Here I will discuss how cultural and genetic diversity affect mind, brain and behavior across multiple timescales.

Specifically, in this talk, I will review recent evidence elucidating the effect of cultural values, practices, and beliefs, such as individualism-collectivism, racial identification, and preference for social hierarchy, on brain and behavior. I will also present evidence for culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR).

Finally, I will examine the implications of cultural neuroscience research for addressing population health disparities and public policy across the globe.

Dr. Joan Y. Chiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology

at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 studying social psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Her main research interests include cultural neuroscience of emotion

and social interaction, social and affective neuroscience across development,

social dominance and affiliation, and integrating psychology and neuroscience

research with public policy and population health issues. Chiao currently serves on the board of several journals including Culture and Brain, NeuroImage, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Social Neuroscience, Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.

From 2009 to 2010, she served as editor for an edited volume of Progress

in Brain Research on cultural neuroscience called Cultural Neuroscience: Cultural Influences on Brain Function and a special issue on cultural neuroscience in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Dr. Chiao is a recipient of funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology. In 2011, she was named a Rising Star by the American Psychological Society and received a NIMH Early Career International Travel Award.

»Looking from within – On the concept “neuronal aesthetics”«

For Olaf Breidbach at stake is a new phenomenology, which does not divide

nature and culture into two fields, apprehends them separately nor reduces

one side to the other.

In viewing our environment we orient ourselves on the specific properties

of our senses and our brain. Here we find that these properties are modified as a reaction to our culture, which also orients our minds. Neural activity is not merely an effect of evolution, it is a reflex to a culture, and it should be interpreted in this twofold sense as a unity. This is about a new, integrative phenomenology that will again connect our experience to our corporeality, while at the same time conceiving the body as embedded in its culture and, therefore, in a history that points beyond mere nature.

Prof. Dr. Olaf Breidbach teaches history of science at the Friedrich-Schiller- University Jena where he is Director of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Natural Sciences, and Technology and the Ernst Haeckel Haus museum. In addition to the history of modern science, he is interested in theoretical biology, the development of an experimental history of science, and the structuring of non-discursive practices and perspectives of neural aesthetics. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. His last three book publications include Goethes Naturverständnis, Munich, 2011; Radikale Historisierung. Kulturelle Selbstversicherung im Postdarwinismus, Berlin, 2011; Anschauung denken, Munich, 2011. Forthcoming is his book Neuronale Ästhetik: Zur Morpho-Logik des Anschauens, Munich.

Using Neuroaesthetics, which I began lecturing upon in 1996 at the School

of Visual Arts in New York City, as a model I will first explain the differences between artistic, art historical and scientific research. 

Subsequently, through

my art works If it looks like art it probably isn‘t, The Education of the Eye, Rainbow Brushes, The Noologist‘s Handbook and finally The Sound of Cats Meowing I will illustrate the power of art as a cultural and neuroplastic modulator. Finally, I will explore artistic research in the context of Cognitive Capitalism.

Warren Neidich is an artist and writer who works in multiple media. He has

recently been exploring the conditions of cognitive capitalism using noise music as an inspiration for installations made of speakers, drawings, and videos which set up what he refers to as dissonant resonances. He has been

exhibited internationally at such institutions as MoMa PS1, the Whitney Museum

of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Institute of

Contemporary Arts, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MuKHA, Antwerp; and

Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam. He recently received the Fulbright Scholar

Program Fellowship, Fine Arts Category, 2011 and the Vilem Flusser Theory

Award, Berlin, 2010. He is author of numerous publications including Blow-up:

Photography, Cinema and the Brain (2002), Lost Between the Extensivity/Intensivity Exchange (2009), Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics (2011). His work The Noologist’s Handbook and Other Art Experiments is forthcoming in 2012 with Archive Books, Berlin.

Despite enormous and widespread enthusiasm for the project of using the

methods of neuroscience to investigate art and its importance for us, results have been few and far between. In this talk – focusing on a range of cases, but with special attention to the problem of pictorial representation – I propose that there may be principled reasons why neuroscience will fail to make a productive contribution to the study of art.

Dr. Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from Harvard University. He also holds degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities.

Noë has been a fellow of the Wissensschaftskolleg zu Berlin and he is a permanent fellow of the Humboldt University Research Project on Embodiment and the Picture-Act. Noë is “philosopher in residence” with the Forsythe Company andhe is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004), Out of Our Head: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (FSG / Hill and Wang, 2009), and Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012).

For two years now, artist Tim Otto Roth and mathematical neuroscientist

Benjamin Staude have been working in the Sound Dome of the ZKM, where they

make the fascinating world of neuronal interactivity come alive using synthetic

audio neurons. In the Sonapticon Roth and Staude combine a unique translation

of neuronal systems’ electrical communication into acoustic communication

via the forty-three loudspeakers of the Sound Dome with the deceleration of

biological neuronal processes that take place on the timescale of milliseconds.

In this way, in the Sonapticon neuronal communication mechanisms become

both a sensual and a comprehensible experience.

Intuitive understanding of the acoustic feedback through sine tones in the

Sound Dome space is complemented visually through lights mounted on the

speakers indicating firing activity and a visualization of the changing

membrane potentials projected onto the floor. Thus, with their Sonapticon, Roth and

Staude transform the Sound Dome into a new instrument for which they have

developed a special method of composing in and with the Sound Dome space:

setting the connections, choice and location of scales up to the 1/8 tone range,

and tempo variation. At the concert premiere three solo Piccolo flute players

demonstrate different facets of the Sonapticon through their precise interven-

tions, which ranged from a microtonal soundscape to a pseudo-repetitive pat-

tern in the inaudible sound spectrum of ultra sound – a musical brainstorm.

More information on the work can be found on: www.pixelsex.org/sonapticon.

Tim Otto Roth studied politics and philosophy in Tübingen before he changed

to studying liberal arts at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Since 2008, he is a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

In 1997, Roth gave his first major audiovisual performance with Rudi Meier (composition) and Christoph Böhme (electronics)

at various venues including the Donaueschingen Society of the Friends of Music.

Since 2002, Roth has aroused attention with his large-scale projects in public spaces.

In many of his projects he works closely together with scientists

(from KIT Karlsruhe, the European Space Agency, and NASA, amongst others).

He has received numerous awards, including the 2004 German Light Art Award LUX.US,

Lüdenscheid, and the International Media Art Award of the SWR and ZKM | Karlsruhe in 2004;

he received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, Linz, in 2009.

After his studies of mathematics and philosophy at the Technische Universität

Berlin with a focus on differential geometry and philosophy of science,

Dr. Benjamin Staude turned his interest to Computational Neuroscience.

With a NaFöG scholarship at the Freie Universität Berlin and two years as a research

assistant at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako-Shi, Japan, he received

his doctorate in biology in 2008 from the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg.

After two more years as a research associate at the Bernstein Center of Computational Neuroscience Freiburg,

Staude moved back to Berlin where he works as a scientific consultant and programmer

for arts and science projects (for example, with Tim Otto Roth, Rainer Dunkel, and Archimedes GmbH), and as a

musician in various bands and projects (Mariahilff, Kapaikos).

The ego of a person is central for its perception of the environment, including

various cultures. In philosophy, the concept of the ego has been frequently

discussed under the term “self” or “subject”. Recently, psychology and

neuroscience have also begun to study the self. This gives rise to the question, to what extent the dependence of the self on a cultural context is mirrored in the neural activity of the brain. My contribution explores these findings and issues, and considers the self in the context of brain and culture. It concludes by discussing the implications of these results for our self-understanding as self, subject, and human being.

Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. Georg Northoff studied medicine and philosophy in

Hamburg, Essen, Bochum, and New York. He was Professor of Neuropsychiatry

and Neurophilosophy and Director of the Laboratory for Imaging and

Neurophilosophy at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Since 2009, he holds the Chair of Mind, Brain, and Neuroethics Research at the University of Ottawa,Canada, which was created especially for him. Dr. Northoff’s goal is to establish neurophilosophy as a separate discipline that is independent from philosophy and neuroscience.

Sounds are vibrations in the ambient air, but sounds are also perceptual entities that I will call, for lack of better terminology, auditory objects.

The relationships between sounds and the resulting auditory objects are indirect: auditory objects are synthesized in the auditory system through a long and complicated sequence of processes which are only partially understood, which are largely pre-attentive, but which may be experience-dependent. It is natural to assume that once these auditory objects are created, their inter-relationships are processed to uncover the organization of the sound stream. I will show that, surprisingly, the synthesis of auditory objects is to a large extent preceded by pre-attentive processes that organize auditory objects in time, creating complex expectations and detecting their fulfillment or violation. These are universal processes that seem to be present in all vertebrates. Such processes are engaged in humans when listening to music, so that in as much as music is organized sound, brains (including the human brain) extract organization before they construct sounds.

After undergraduate studies of mathematics and physics (B.Sc. 1982, Hebrew

University), Prof. Dr. Israel Nelken turned neurobiologist (M.Sc. 1985, Ph.D.

1991, Hebrew University; postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University,

Baltimore, MD, USA), specializing in the auditory system. Since 1994 Nelken is on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel (full professor since 2008). He received the Katz prize in 2000 and the Michael Bruno prize in 2008. His research centers on the coding of natural and naturalistic scenes in the central auditory system, using methods that span the range from single-neuron recordings in animal models to recordings of evoked potentials in humans.