Art's Influence on the Brain Better Understood: New Data

Medscape

01-07-2025

She saw an angel of mercy. You saw a sandwich.
Such is the fun of visiting a museum or art gallery with a friend and gazing at an abstract painting together and then realizing you have different interpretations of it.
The funny thing is, neither one of you has to be right, or even close, to benefit from the experience.
Art history experts would attribute this experience to a long-held idea in the art world known as 'Beholder's Share.' It suggests that individuals actively engage in creating meaning when they're looking at art and that meaning is based on one's personal memories and associations. In other words, an artist never really 'finishes' a work of art on their own. Beholder's Share says the artwork is completed by the person viewing it.
The mood-boosting effects of viewing art are well-known, but new brain scan research on Beholder's Share — as well as a more rigorous review of existing data showing the mental health benefits of viewing art — suggested that art's influence on our own creativity, critical thinking, and happiness could be more therapeutic than originally thought.
One Key May Be Subjectivity vs Objectivity
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences scientifically supports the notion of Beholder's Share, said its authors. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers from Columbia University, New York City, discovered that people use their brains differently when viewing abstract art vs when they look at realistic art, and brain activity was more varied — more person-specific — when viewing abstract paintings. 'People responded more subjectively to abstract paintings' compared to realistic paintings, said study author Celia E. Durkin, PhD.
What's more, a specific area of the brain appeared to be involved when they viewed abstract art. Ariana Anderson, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who shared thoughts about the study but was not involved with the research, said, 'Responses were more dissimilar for abstract art in those areas of the brain typically associated with the Default Mode Network.'
The authors had a couple of aims when they were devising their study, said Durkin. 'Our two key goals were to establish whether we do indeed interpret abstract art more subjectively than representational art and whether and where we might see evidence of individual contribution to the meaning of paintings in the brain.' They wondered, would they see patterns of brain activity corresponding to Beholder's Share, and how would these patterns vary across individuals?
To answer these questions, Durkin said they needed to both 'operationalize and manipulate' the Beholder's Share (the subjective experience) of an image. 'To manipulate the Beholder's Share in a controlled way, we used abstract and representational paintings by the same artist, with the logic that abstract paintings would elicit more of the Beholder's Share,' she said. 'We operationalized the Beholder's Share as dissimilarity across subjects and compared this dissimilarity between abstract and representational paintings, both in written descriptions and neural responses measured with fMRI.'
To first test whether people responded more variably to abstract vs figurative (realistic) art, the researchers collected written captions from an online sample of 30 participants who viewed a total of 164 paintings (82 in each category). The paintings were by abstract expressionist artists — such as the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian — who painted lifelike art early in their careers but whose work evolved into a more abstract style over time. The representational paintings included a recognizable object, person, or scene. The abstract paintings did not feature recognizable images (picture shapes, blobs, and splashes of color). The captions varied more for the abstract paintings, 'suggesting abstract art elicits differences in verbalizable interpretation across participants,' the authors wrote.
For the second part of the study, 29 healthy participants were shown abstract and figurative paintings while they were scanned with fMRI and asked to make subjective decisions about each painting they viewed. The researchers analyzed participants' brain activity in anatomical regions based on the Harvard-Oxford Atlas, commonly used in neuroimaging for brain mapping. For each painting, the authors said they 'computed the dissimilarity in regional activations across participants' and discovered that brain patterns linked to responses differed across participants significantly more when they were looking at the abstract paintings compared to when they viewed the realistic paintings. The more abstract a painting, the more dissimilar the participants' brain patterns were.
The scientists also performed several control analyses, Durkin noted.
How the Brain 'Sees' Art
'Figurative art, being more concrete and recognizable, tends to elicit more consistent brain responses across individuals, especially in early visual areas,' said UCLA's Anderson. This would include the visual cortex, located at the back of the brain.
The study results suggested that viewing abstract art goes beyond simply liking or not liking it, the authors wrote, and that there is a complexity to art appreciation shaped by a person's past experiences and personal context — as the Beholder's Share theory posits.
While the authors didn't quantify 'how' brain patterns vary during art viewing, Durkin said they did quantify 'where' in the brain these patterns varied. When observing abstract art, the study indicates it involves the brain's Default Mode Network (which functions across numerous brain regions, including the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes).
Anderson described the Default Mode Network as 'a set of brain regions that are more active when you're at rest, daydreaming, remembering, or thinking about yourself or others — for example, internally focused tasks.' She said, 'It is associated with mind wandering and creativity.' Anderson said since abstract art lacks clear visual references, it makes sense that 'people rely more on personal interpretation, emotions, and imagination, all functions tied to the Default Mode Network.'
Edward A. Vessel, PhD, Eugene Surowitz assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at The City University of New York, New York City, said, 'I think the Default Mode Network is also partly, not fully, but partly responsible for the pleasure we get from the act of sense-making, with art in particular.'
Vessel's research has included looking at the idea of shared taste and why it is that two people agree or not. He has published previous work showing that there tends to be less agreement across people for judgments of cultural artifacts, like artwork and architecture. But there is more degree of shared taste for natural landscapes or judgments of faces, he said.
The study findings also suggest that more ambiguity in a painting activates regions in the Default Mode Network, the authors wrote. This parallels ideas that Eric R. Kandel, MD, shared during a talk about Beholder's Share in 2013. Kandel, 95 years old, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000 and is recognized for identifying the physiological changes that occur in the brain during memory formation and storage.
In his 2013 talk, he said, 'Ambiguity is what brings out difference of interpretation' and pointed to the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. While it's not abstract, he noted the centuries-old debate about it: Is she smiling or is she not? In the same YouTube talk, he said, 'The painter exercises a dramatic amount of creativity in doing a portrait, but you yourself generate a fair amount of creativity reconstructing it in your head and reconstructing it in a way that is unique for you and slightly different for me.'
Can You Increase Your Beholder's Share?
Viewing art, in a general sense, has always been regarded as a net positive when it comes to mental health — inspiring creativity, critical thinking, and boosting mood.
A new review of 38 studies aimed to collect previous research on visual art and also establish better study protocols going forward. The study covered nearly 7000 people and found that viewing art can improve eudemonic well-being — reflection, empowerment, identity maintenance, and building meaning in life.
This builds on a 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) report examining more than 3000 studies on the benefits of art that resulted in the WHO suggesting art as a social determinant of health.
All this to suggest: More is better, and maybe the more we experience art, especially abstract art, the more we'll begin to understand how it affects us personally.
'I can't answer this definitively, but I think so,' said Durkin. 'There is research showing that experience with abstract art can change how we interact with it and how much we like it.'
And more: A 2023 study in Nature suggested that arts-based programs in schools can enhance creativity in teens. Another recent small study involving 42 students from three universities suggested that participation in extracurricular activities, including painting and drawing, was positively linked to levels of creativity.
Vessel said, 'Within the field of neuroaesthetics and empirical aesthetics, I have started to adopt a position that everything is driven by learning. It's not like we're born with any kind of a priori or hedonic marking for certain features, right?' And what people find aesthetically pleasing may change across a lifetime as they continue to learn and be exposed to new visual experiences, he added.
Experts at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, recommend a four-step process involving looking, describing, thinking, and connecting to encourage closer observation and deeper thinking when looking at art.
Stanford experts advise doing a bit of research on artists and artworks before visiting a gallery or museum. Or when viewing a painting with a figure, try to place yourself inside the frame with them and think about the painting from their perspective.
Wandering the virtual halls of a museum may have an impact on well-being and art appreciation, too. The Louvre, the Met, the Tate, and many more museums offer digital access to their collections.