Prologue

Abstract

Extract Seated on a wrought iron chair, enveloped in the sweet scent of magnolias and surrounded by decaying architectural remnants, I (AC) resolved to study the biology of aesthetic experiences. It was early in the spring of 1999. The setting was the courtyard at Garages, my favorite bar in Birmingham, Alabama. I was with two close friends; we often met there on Friday afternoons to talk about life and work. I had just been recruited by the University of Pennsylvania to join the newly forming Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Several drinks in, as the end to our cozy collaborations sunk in, Britt posed the following question to Mark and me. Imagine yourself 10 years into the future. Look back at your professional life. What would you regret not doing? Professionally, my work had focused on attention, spatial representations, and language. Personally, I had always been preoccupied by beauty, and I was obsessed with photography. With alcohol-infused clarity, I realized that my regret would be not making aesthetics an object of scientific inquiry. I was changing institutions, and it seemed an opportune time to tackle new ideas. At the time, neuroaesthetics did not exist. I didn’t know anybody who studied it or had written about it. After arriving at Penn, still a time before internet searches, I explored the old-fashioned way—musty meanderings through the library looking for relevant journals and books that could tether me to the topic. I found the Empirical Studies of the Arts, the flagship journal of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA). In 2002, I traveled to the next biennial meeting of IAEA held in Takarazuka, Japan, and met a small congenial group of people committed to scientific aesthetics. A path forward, although still obscure, seemed possible.