In a World on Edge: Neuroaesthetics

We tend to treat beauty as something extra, belonging to the part of life we attend to once the important things have been handled. Work first, pleasure later. Deal with the crisis, answer the emails, clean the kitchen, make sure everyone else is all right. Then perhaps we can think about flowers, music, light, colour or the room we have been sitting in for the past eight hours.

I have never been entirely convinced by that hierarchy.

There are days when the smallest sensory details seem to matter disproportionately. Harsh overhead lighting can make an already difficult afternoon feel more difficult. Music can alter the atmosphere of a morning before anything in the morning itself has changed. Walking beneath trees can reach us in a way that twenty minutes of trying to reason ourselves into calm simply doesn't.

Often the shift happens before we have consciously registered it. Our shoulders drop. Our breathing changes. Something that had been clenched loosens a little.

This shouldn't be particularly mysterious. Human beings have always been responsive to their surroundings. We have made art, sung, danced, decorated our bodies, built beautiful places, gathered around fires and carried objects of no obvious practical value for a very long time. What is newer is the scientific interest in what is happening while we do it.

Neuroaesthetics sits somewhere in that territory, bringing together neuroscience, psychology and the study of our responses to art and aesthetic experience. More recently, researchers have been looking beyond the traditional question of why we find certain things beautiful towards what engagement with art, nature, music, architecture and other sensory experiences may be doing in the brain and body.

I am interested in the science. I am equally interested in what we already know from being alive.

Our surroundings get into us.

The room is part of the experience

We give conscious thought an enormous amount of authority. Once we understand why we are stressed, it is tempting to assume the body should accept the explanation and behave accordingly.

Anyone who has ever lain awake at 3:00 a.m., knowing perfectly well that thinking about the problem for another hour will accomplish nothing, has encountered the limitations of this arrangement.

The nervous system is taking in information continuously, much of it outside conscious awareness. Light, sound, temperature, movement, proximity, facial expression, tone of voice, and the general sensory character of a place all contribute to our experience of being there. We can enter a room and feel uncomfortable before identifying what is bothering us, or find ourselves lingering somewhere because it feels good without having any particular desire to investigate why.

Not every experience needs to come through the front door of conscious thought.

This is part of what I find so compelling about beauty and sensory experience in the context of nervous-system work. A piece of music doesn't need us to identify a limiting belief before it moves us. The sight of water doesn't require a cognitive reframe. Warm afternoon light coming through a window may alter something in us without asking for our participation at all.

Of course, that doesn't make any of these things universally calming. The idea that there could be a standard aesthetic for a regulated nervous system rather defeats the point.

Your nervous system retains the right to an opinion

I have seen enough wellness advice involving neutral interiors, candles and carefully positioned houseplants to know that we are perfectly capable of turning beauty into another set of instructions.

Real aesthetic experience is much more personal than that.

One person settles in a sparse room with very little visual information; another feels happier surrounded by books, textiles, photographs and evidence that somebody actually lives there. Classical music may be exquisite to one nervous system and unbearable to another. Silence can feel spacious or unsettling. Even experiences routinely presented as calming can have the opposite effect when they are unwanted or imposed.

Our histories come into the room with us too.

A song can evoke grief before we remember who we once listened to it with. Scent has a particularly startling ability to collapse time. A landscape associated with happiness may feel entirely different after a loss. Even beauty itself can sometimes hurt. Sometimes, encountering something magnificent makes the absence of someone we would have shared it with more acute.

So I am not particularly interested in compiling a list of aesthetically approved ways to regulate ourselves. We have enough instructions.

What seems more useful is noticing what we respond to when nobody is telling us what ought to work.

I know people who need visual simplicity and others who would find it vaguely punitive. Some of us are drawn towards old buildings, worn wood, paintings, books and objects with history. Others breathe better around clean lines and empty surfaces. It may be the sound of a cello, rain against glass, church bells in the distance, the blue-grey light before a storm, the smell of coffee or a garden that has ignored several instructions about how gardens are supposed to behave.

Taste is part of it, certainly. But I think there is another question underneath taste: What happens in me when I encounter this?

That is a much more interesting question than whether we are supposed to find it relaxing.

The sensory life of competent people

Beauty also interests me because of what tends to happen to it in lives organized around competence.

When we are accustomed to getting things done, experiences without an obvious productive value can become strangely difficult to defend. Music plays while we work. A walk is more legitimate if it counts as exercise. Sitting outside is pleasant, but perhaps we should bring the laptop. Even rest has acquired metrics.

Beauty fares badly under these conditions because its usefulness is not always obvious.

This is particularly relevant when someone has lived through prolonged periods of stress. Attention changes when we are concerned with what might go wrong. We become more interested in what needs managing, preventing or anticipating, which makes perfect sense. Threat deserves attention. A creature trying to protect itself has little evolutionary incentive to pause and admire an interesting arrangement of hydrangeas.

The trouble is that attention can become practised.

After long enough spent scanning for problems, we may become very good at finding them. We notice the unfinished task before the morning light, the tension in somebody's voice before the music playing in the room, the thing that needs fixing before anything that might be enjoyed.

This isn't pessimism or personal failure. Nor do I think the answer is to train ourselves to notice five beautiful things every morning and then feel deficient when we forget.

It is simply worth knowing where our attention has learned to go.

There is something significant about discovering that it can go somewhere else as well.

More than one thing can be true in a room

I am wary of grand claims about what beauty can heal.

A garden does not resolve grief. Good lighting cannot repair an abusive relationship. Trauma doesn't disappear after an afternoon in a gallery, and I would be deeply suspicious of anyone trying to sell the gallery ticket on that basis.

There are experiences that require words. Others require relationship, mourning, anger, boundaries, practical change or skilled therapeutic support. Sometimes what needs to happen is not that we become calmer but that we recognize something is wrong.

Beauty doesn't need to compete with any of that.

Its value may be much quieter.

One of the effects of prolonged stress is that the world can begin to organize itself around the difficulty. This happens psychologically, but also attentively. The problem becomes enormous because, at that moment, it is enormous. Our awareness contracts around it.

Then something else enters the field.

A dog does something ridiculous. A familiar song comes on unexpectedly. The sun appears after several days of miserable weather and catches the wall in a particular way. Someone has planted something extraordinary in an otherwise unremarkable front garden.

The difficult thing has not gone anywhere.

But it is no longer the only thing in the room.

I think that matters.

What reaches us without words

There is an interesting meeting point here between neuroaesthetics, nervous-system work, Internal Family Systems and felt-sense approaches. All of them, in different ways, complicate the idea that human experience is primarily verbal and rational.

We are certainly meaning-making creatures, but we are also sensory ones.

Some experiences inside us do not respond immediately to explanation. A protective part that has been vigilant for years may remain entirely unmoved by our assurance that everything is fine. What it notices may be consistency, tone, rhythm, warmth, space, choice and whether there is any demand being made of it.

Sometimes the surroundings participate in that conversation.

As I get older, this has changed the way I think about beauty. I am less interested in treating it solely as taste, as a collection of things I like or don't like, and more interested in the felt experience of being around them.

What makes me want to stay in a place? What creates friction I hadn't noticed I was tolerating? Where do my eyes naturally go when they need somewhere to rest? Why does one room feel alive and another, despite containing objectively nicer things, feel like somewhere I am waiting to leave?

These aren't necessarily profound questions, and I don't think they need to be. Much of a life is made from things too ordinary to receive much consideration: the light where we drink our morning coffee, the sounds we wake to, what we can see from the place where we work, the mug we always choose when several perfectly serviceable alternatives are available.

We are affected by ordinary things all day long. Perhaps it is worth becoming a little more interested in which ones make being here feel better.

Beauty does not need another job

This is where I become reluctant to describe beauty as a “tool.”

Tools have jobs. We pick them up because we want a particular outcome, and contemporary wellness culture has become remarkably inventive at giving ordinary human experiences assignments.

Walking becomes a nervous-system intervention. Humming becomes vagal toning. Music becomes auditory regulation. Looking at art becomes neuroaesthetic self-care.

None of those descriptions is necessarily wrong. Sometimes having the science helps us take seriously things we were taught to dismiss.

But I don't want usefulness to become the only argument we have for them.

There should still be things in a life that don't have to improve us.

A song can be worth hearing because we love it. We can arrange a room because it gives us pleasure to be there. We can stop and look at the moon without converting the experience into a practice. Flowers are allowed on the table without a measurable outcome.

Perhaps this is especially important for people who have spent a great deal of their lives being useful themselves.

Beauty can remain gloriously unproductive.

And if, somewhere along the way, the shoulders drop and the breath becomes a little easier, we don't have to make a job of that either.