A Study on the Interface between Arts and Sciences: Neuroesthetics and Cognitive Neuroscience of Art

Background: Science, Art And Aesthetics

Science, as we know it today, bears great expectations about “how” and “why” general phenomena occur. It's primarily focused on the cognition of the “natural world” and reflects the necessity of extracting order structures from a vast, chaotic background from time to time. According to Júlio Plaza (2003, p. 38), influenced by Ortega's ideas, knowledge is the mental effort that extracts information, or language, from disorder. Plaza also argues that in order to actually know something we must reach its very “being”. This “being” is not achieved through perception, but through an intellectual model. The production of knowledge is thus the construction of intellectual models that results from a work proccess based on complex information (Srour apudPlaza, 2003, p. 38). Scientific knowledge is grounded on the faith in empirical information, with which scientists usually create massive theoretical structures to link observation and reality (Wilson, 2001, p. 19). Science pursues ways of effectively acting upon reality and, therefore, “builds conceptual models or representations that reflect, with some isomorphy, aspects of the world's objective organization” (Vieira, 2006, p. 48).