By: S.I. Rosenbaum
As a child, Judith Schaechter dreamed of being an artist who made beautiful images. And she did indeed become an artist. But the images which she now creates—chaotic stained-glass panels full of fantastic creatures—could not simply be called beautiful. She knows that many of her images initially strike viewers as “anguished” or “distorted.”
“There’s a difference between art that pleases people and art that pleases people in a way they don't know they need yet,” she said. “I’m not making stuff people already find beautiful, I’m trying to persuade them of new ways to see beauty.”
The work Schaechter does today also grapples with questions that bridge art and science. Why can the same image be beautiful to one person and ugly to another? How does our sense of aesthetics influence our other cognitive functions, like emotions or reasoning?
These are the kinds of questions that drive researchers at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, where Schaechter is now the artist-in-residence. The center—the first such scientific hub in the U.S.—allows researchers to explore what exactly our brains are doing when we experience art, and what we’re doing when we create art out of our experiences.
Aesthetic phenomena are an historically neglected subject for science. Humans universally experience pleasure in sensations: we savor certain tastes, swoon at certain sights, move to certain sounds. It's also a common human trait to seek out, curate, and create such experiences, attaching cultural contexts, values, and meanings to them. But even though these behaviors are as unique and universal in humans as language, somehow neuroscience had overlooked them—until recently.
That's part of why the center exists, says Neurology professor Anjan K. Chatterjee, MD, its founder and director. “I felt that if I was going to study human cognitive neuroscience, here was a fundamental experience people have, something people value, and it didn’t seem as though people had studied it very much from a biological perspective,” he said.
Developing an eye for art
Art was part of Chatterjee's life from the beginning. As a student at a Jesuit school in Gujarat, India, drawing was part of the basic curriculum—and more, it was a basic pleasure in his life. “When I grew up in that part of India, this was in the 1960s, there was no TV," he said. "We had the radio, but books were hard to come by.” Chatterjee and his friends often entertained themselves by walking around their neighborhood with sketchpads, drawing whatever they saw. Art, he said, “was always there, and it always seemed important.”
He never lost his eye for beauty—and he continued to make art as an adult, eventually switching from drawing to photography after his residency at the University of Chicago.
It was not until he was a young professor of Neurology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, being recruited by Penn, that he began to think seriously of combining art and science. He quickly realized this was almost untouched scientific territory. Chatterjee ascribes this gap to a distaste among scientists for the squishy subjectivity of the arts: “a frivolous thing for the bougie class.”
For the first decade of his work at Penn, Chatterjee would only let undergrads do work on neuroaesthetics: “I thought it wouldn't be responsible to let post-docs or grad students do this work—there was no market for it,” he said.
The artist inspired by science
Meanwhile, not far away in South Philadelphia, Schaechter was creating wildly colorful and intricately patterned stained glass panels that referenced dreams and emotional states as often as they did scientific and medical concepts. Schaechter had been raised by science-minded folk: Her father was a microbiologist at Tufts University, and her mother, a social worker, had a passion for neurology.
“She was always reading some brain book for brainy people about brains,” Schaechter said. Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden and Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat helped to “unleashed the floodgates” of Schaechter’s own scientific curiosity, she said.
Through the years, even as she devoted herself to her art, she remained interested in medical science, and also kept reading popular neuroscience texts. One of them stood out: The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art, published in 2014 by Anjan Chatterjee.
“The thing that really moved me was that he talks about beauty,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, this man understands.’”
Neuroaesthetics heats up
By the time Chatterjee was able to publish a book on his niche interest, “the zeitgeist was changing,” he said. Neuroaesthetics had become enough of a hot topic that, a few years later, in 2018, Penn launched the Center for Neuroaesthetics, with Chatterjee at the helm. Chatterjee even secured funding for an artist in residence: someone to provide an expert aesthetic point of view. The first to hold the post was Lucas Kelly, an interdisciplinary artist who reached out to Chatterjee with the idea.
The position is a free-form one. “I know what I do not want: I do not want an artist who will make pretty pictures of brains. I do not want an artist who will create sophisticated data visualizations,” Chatterjee said. “I want someone who is curious and open.” There are no requirements beyond attending all-hands meetings and creating an art project that in some way is inspired by the lab’s work.
In 2022, Schaechter sought Chatterjee out at a local lecture. She had a question for him: “Why, as human beings, do we have a sense of beauty at all?”
And a follow up, which she posed by email: What could neuroaesthetics offer a working artist and art teacher like her?
You might ask our artist-in-residence, Chatterjee replied.
“From that moment, I realized I want to do this more than anything,” Schaechter said. “Some people, in their golden years, want to travel; I wanted to travel to Penn and go sit in on their lab meetings.”
Data, doodles, and architectural art
In May 2023, she got her wish. As part of her role, Schaechter sits through weekly lab meetings—even when they consist of long discussions of data sets. Sometimes she doodles. Sometimes she hears things that intrigue and inspire her, like an investigation using eye-gaze tracking to see how moral judgements change how people look at faces, and how this can lead to bias against people with facial anomalies.
That struck a chord with Schaechter. One of the first works she made after starting her residency depicts people with facial scars and birth differences, framed in glass like medieval saints.
Now, she’s building a structure inspired by the center’s work on how the design of physical spaces can affect brain function in neurotypical and neurodiverse people. The small, enclosed dome made of brilliantly colored glass panels will be a work of art that surrounds the viewer: both a visual experience and an architectural one.
Asking why in art and science
Meanwhile, the center continues to explore the science behind just that type of subjective experience. If you ask Chatterjee why we experience beauty, he demurs—even though he wrote a book about this. It’s a tremendously complex question to answer in a brief statement, even with years of research providing some pieces of the puzzle.
But Schaechter has an answer to that question: Aesthetic pleasure exists because it softens life’s loneliness and pain.
“Beauty is a way of making life bearable,” she said. “I feel like people could probably hang in there to reproductive maturity without a sense of beauty—but they’re not going to last long enough to raise the kids. It has biological survival value: We need it to want to stay alive.”