arte y anatomia

The enormous variety of art created in human societies throughout the world expresses a multitude of ideas, experiences, cultural concepts, creativity and social values. The arts – aintings,sculpture, theater, poetry, film, music and dance to name but a few – form a communication system between artist and viewer, represented in a manner not afforded by language alone. Whereas nearly everyonecan use language, only a few can create art compositions with qualities that elicit reactions of pleasure and appreciation for subsequent centuries and millennia. Because the compositions seem toincorporate unique understanding, their neuroanatomical basis is a challenge. Clues and insights can be obtained from several sources including the study of artists with brain damage, the times of earlyhumans when art practice began, evolution of Homo sapiens and immediate ancestors, as well as discussion about biological motivation, such as mate selection strategies in animals, and diverse fieldssuch as archaeology, anthropology and the fossil record (see Fig. 1).
Several factors have simultaneously shaped the search for the elusive underpinnings of art in the brain, namely its ubiquitouspresence in human societies, in contradistinction to its absence in animals, art’s symbolic and representational essence, its seeming lack of functionality and its relatedness to pleasure. Threetheories, which can be roughly grouped together into the localized brain regions or pathways, biological motivation of courtship displays and evolutionary explanations, have been proposed. The background andsources of evidence for these art and brain theories, particularly the visual arts, are described in this work (for general music and brain reviews see Peretz, 2006; Patel, 2007). The localized brainregions theories focus on specific brain areas, pathways and physiological responses (reviewed in Zaidel, 2005). The biological theories link art to mate selection (sexual selection) strategies in...