Neuroaesthetics: Exploring Beauty Within and Around Us

Neuroaesthetics has become an important new field in the sciences bringing together researchers from cognitive science (as a general term including brain science, psychology, anthropology, ethology, artificial intelligence), the humanities (including linguistics, philosophy), and the arts (artists from the visual arts, music and poetry). Thus, neuroaesthetics is a prime example of successful interdisciplinarity. In the book Neuroaesthetics: Exploring Beauty Within and Around Us we distinguish and represent in several articles two different kinds of interdisciplinarity: "Horizontal interdisciplinarity" brings together in a complementary way different fields like (as an example) psychology, linguistics and poetry. "Vertical interdisciplinarity" refers to research on data generating mechanisms like (as an example) neural activities in the brain being associated with subjective experiences of "beauty". In the book articles refer to the visual arts ("art in space"), to "faces in art", to poetry and music ("art in time"), and to general ideas (bridging art and science). This is a unique collection of articles with a broad scope.