Podcast Episode 5: Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Neuroaesthetics

Our guest today is Dr. Anjan Chatterjee. He is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and has served as the Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital.

While his clinical work focuses on cognitive disorders, the focal points of his research are in neuroaesthetics, spatial cognition, language, and neuroethics.

Dr. Chatterjee is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art and co-editor of Brain, Beauty, and Art: Bringing Neuroaesthetics in Focus.

He received the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology
and the Rudolph Arnheim Prize for contributions to Psychology and the Arts by the American Psychological Association. Dr. Chatterjee is a founding member of the Board of Governors of the Neuroethics Society, and the past President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society.

Dr. Chatterjee joins us to discuss the following:

1. His academic path from philosophy to neuroscience to neuroaesthetics.
2. Are humans hard-wired for beauty?
3. Is beauty driven by nature or nurture (or is that the wrong question?)
4. The Aesthetic Triad
5. Beauty and morality
6. Using beauty as a heuristic
7. Why humans can find beauty in non-sensory subjects, like mathematics
8. The big questions that neuroaesthetics is seeking to answer
8. What we can learn from exploring aesthetics in science

Visit Dr. Chatterjee’s blog on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-behavior-and-beauty

Check out his books:

The Aesthetic Brain: How we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art and co-edited Brain, Beauty, and Art: Bringing Neuroaesthetics in Focus as well as Neuroethics in Practice: Mind, Medicine, and Society, and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FHZZYOU/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1

Brain, Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus (With Eileen Cardillo)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09LVVRY54/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0

Neuroethics in Practice (With Martha J. Farah)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CXQ6PSU/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2

The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology (With H. Branch Coslett)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HFPV4AI/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3

This podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust as part of an international study on the role of aesthetics in science (TRT0296).

Visit https://www.wellbeinginscience.com to learn more about the study, and https://www.beautyatwork.net to explore the broader initiative on the role of beauty in our work.

Podcast editing: Dave Visaya, Podcast Engineers
Music: Venkat Subramaniyam