All Arts Are Technologies That Evolved To Cohere The Group

by Tim Beckley

Haidt argues in the Righteous Mind and elsewhere that religion evolved biologically and culturally to increase trust and thereby group cohesion and competitive advantage. His understanding of its evolutionary function is informed by E.O. Wilson’s work on multilevel selection.

In “The Social Conquest of Earth,” Wilson makes the exact same point that Frey makes here, except with reference to literary fiction. He writes that “the novelist asks, ‘does that work?’ and the scientist, ‘could that possibly be true?’”

I think this understanding of religion and fiction as technologies that either work or don’t, actually applies to the arts in general (religion simply being a constellation of various art forms, a highly conflationary art, which probably goes far to explain why it’s so effective as a unifying technology).

The arts either work or they don’t. They may convey truths but to do so isn’t their primary function. Their primary function is to cohere the group.

ARTS OPERATE ON A NEUROBIOLOGICAL LEVEL AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS (WHETHER OR NOT THEY WORK) IS MEASURABLE

The work of Semir Zeki and others on neuroaesthetics and interpersonal neurobiology is beginning to explain not only a) where in the brain an artwork operates, localizing the subjective mental states that art affects; but also b) how successful the artwork is in affecting them, quantifying these states so that the functionality of the artwork can be reliably and objectively measured.

Zeki’s work has found that the experience of artistic beauty activates the oribitofrontal cortex (OFC), an area associated with maternal attachment; the anterior cingulate, associated with romantic attachment; various other reward centers of the brain; and the parietal cortex, associated with spatial attention (aesthetic arrest). It also finds that ugliness strongly activates the motor cortex, as if the brain responds to it as a threat. Ugliness is anxiety inducing and literally repulsive.

His studies of the experience of the sublime, which is most common in religious contexts, show that it engages separate but related systems of the brain. It engages the posterior hippocampus also associated with romantic attachment, and the inferior frontal gyrus, associated with imagination. It disengages the superior frontal gyrus, associated with self-awareness, as well as other areas related to self-knowledge, fear, and negative emotion.

The effectiveness of an artwork in producing these states can be measured by the amount of blood flow to the respective brain centers. So our ability to determine whether a particular piece of art is functioning at the individual level will improve as we improve our understanding of brain architecture and ability to quantify neural activity.

*This blog entry is quoted verbatim and copied by permission from Tim Beckley's comments on facebook, find more of his content here:
https://www.facebook.com/tim.beckley.984