Beautiful embodiment: The shaping of aesthetic preference by personal experience
Beautiful embodiment: The shaping of aesthetic preference by personal experience
The co-evolution of dance with the human race has fuelled a rich debate on the function of art and aesthetic experience, engaging artists, philosophers, and scientists. While dance shares features with other art forms, one unique attribute is that it is expressed (only) with the human body. Because of this, social scientists and neuroscientists are turning to dance to help answer questions of how the brain coordinates the body to perform complex, precise, and beautiful movements. This chapter highlights findings from studies that use dancers to explore how individual experience shapes the links between watching and performing action. This research capitalizes upon recent advances in neuroscientific methods to advance our understanding of not only the cerebral phenomena associated with dance learning and observation, but also the neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation when watching dance. This domain of work stands to inform and mutually benefit the scientific and artistic communities.
Keywords: dance, neuroscience, aesthetics, action, perception
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
