How Art Can Enhance Science

Alchemical Stage. by Marcus Eugenius Bonacina

Source: Featured on PDR in the collection The Surreal Art of Alchemical Diagrams

Art and science make for strange bedfellows. Art traffics in images and sounds, science in numbers and graphs. Art evokes first-person subjective experiences, science makes third-person objective claims. Art is expansive, science is reductive.

Yet many of us wish to align art and science. Taking the specific case of visual art and neuroscience, we might consider alignments as the art of neuroscience or the neuroscience of art.

By the "art of neuroscience," I do not mean the work of people who conduct neuroscience research well, a comment on the style of their investigations. I am being more concrete. I mean art that depicts the beauty of neuroscience—for example, artists who capture the elegance of neuronal connections, delicate dendritic branching of neurons, or intricacies of synaptic communication.

At the other end, by "neuroscience of art," I mean the kind of experimental work that drives neuroaesthetics as a programmatic line of inquiry and our work at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics (PCfN). On this view, the neuroscience of art investigates the biological underpinnings of aesthetic experiences and artistic outputs.

Art as a Tool

Here, I would like to focus on another way to think about art’s relevance to science—that is, art serving as a tool.

To be clear, art is under no obligation to serve anything. It can be self-contained and exist for its own sake, regardless of whatever meaning the rest of us project onto it.

However, art can and often does function with a purpose. For example, art can promote social justice, speak truth to power, sway opinion, build community, and signal climate change.

How can art be a tool for science? I recently wrote an article (Chatterjee, 2025) for the journal Cortex, in honor of the retiring editor-in-chief, Sergio Della Sala. For years, Sergio had used art on the covers of this neuroscience journal in innovative ways that were not restricted to depicting pretty pictures of the brain. The covers included images of amusing cartoons, pointers to popular culture, and direct references to specific papers within the issue.

Moving forward, Isabella Bobrow, the PCfN manager, and I will serve as the art editor for Cortex covers. As we take on this assignment, the question we face is: How should we use art?

Art Impacts

Art can have different impacts on the viewer. Most people can identify if they like or dislike a specific work and if they find it interesting. Yet after such anodyne reactions, they may struggle to find words to express their experience.

To lay out a vocabulary for how art affects us, we reported a semantic network of art impacts comprising 69 terms which can be organized into 11 dimensions (Christensen et al., 2023). These 11 dimensions comprise of: anger, calm, compassion, challenge, edification, enrapture, enlightenment, interest, inspiration, pleasure, and upset. Using statistical methods, these eleven dimensions can be further reduced to coarse categories of positive affect, negative affect, immersion, and epistemic transformation.

Curiosity

One important goal for us will be to use art to evoke curiosity. Thoughtful scientific discussions of curiosity date back to the mid-20th-century writings of Daniel Berlyne (1954). Berlyne distinguished between perceptual and epistemic curiosity: the first triggered by percepts to acquire more sensations and the other by information that evokes a desire for greater understanding.

Curiosity is characterized by the desire to seek information, to find answers, and to pursue knowledge. Many critical scientific discoveries depended on asking “Why?” Curiosity is having a moment as a topic of contemporary psychological research (Kenett et al., 2023). We understand the multidimensional construct as operating in different domains, expressing itself distinctly through different personality types, and implemented in the brain through interlocking neural networks.

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Berlyne found that complex and ambiguous images hold viewers’ attention. Ambiguous images can be unsettling. In our network, the challenge cluster, which includes “unsettled” and “confused,” directs us to upset, which includes “anxious” and “frightened” in one direction, and to interest, which includes “curious” and then extends to “wonder” in the other direction. These contrasting trajectories highlight the pivotal role that feelings of disquiet and the evocation of curiosity can play when engaging with art, with the hope of guiding the viewer toward advancing understanding.

As we move forward in our role as art editors for a neuroscience journal, one of our goals will be to select images that encourage immersion, perhaps through ambiguity, in order to evoke curiosity, especially for old-school scholars who actually pick up a hard copy, pause at the cover, before flipping through pages in pursuit of knowledge.

Acknowledgment: The work cited was funded in part by the Templeton Religion Trust.