How do you break down that process? What happens? We

think about it in the context of a framework that we refer to as the aesthetic triad.

Sensory and motor organization is one.

Our emotions and valuation, that we're always imposing value on what we see.

If it's beauty, there's always some pleasure.

But, you know, it can be other things.

And the way in which semantics and knowledge overlays on that.

Tell us what you think slowing it down does to this three-stage process of aesthetic experience, and how do you test it in a museum? We have people

But no, a porcelain urinal.

As you know, and so we're in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of these Duchamp urinals, and some people think it's, it may have been the most significant work of art in the 20th century, so critics will claim that.

The question was, do we think of art as an expression of an impulse, an instinct, or is it something else? To me, the question which has been in the literature perhaps was the wrong question, because it's predicated on the idea that art is one thing, and then we can then talk about what art is, is it this or is it that? Perhaps I thought the better question might be, under what conditions does this artifact that we call art, really an expression of an instinct, and under what conditions circumstances as this artifact that we also call art actually something else.

And so that was the strategy to try to understand that and this is where the the bengalese finch and the white ramunia came became of interest because the the basic idea is that there is this wild type finch that a group of japanese collectors started to collect and then started to breed but instead of breeding as determined by the nature of the song, the bird's song, which is what happens in the wild, now they're being artificially bred for their plumage, the way they physically look, and so the song no longer has the same survival value that it does in the wild.

And so the question is, what happens to its song? On the one hand, you could think it would just degenerate and, you know, wouldn't matter, but that's not what happens.

It turns out that the songs become more complex, they become more socially responsive, and they have a very different kind of structure, and in birds, We know a fair amount about the neuroscience of their brains and how it's structured.

And it turns out that the implementation of these songs in the Bengali's Finch, which are more varied more responsive to their social environment is also more distributed and so the argument is that using by analogy in the songs that here's one kind of song we're calling them birth songs we're not calling them different things one that is more stereotypic that is responsive to certain environmental pressures.

There's no

And what did you experience during that time?

It was very strange.

My mother was there and...

I could hear her voice while I'm in the coma.

I could hear her voice.

I could hear nurses saying things like we should test him for HIV, things like that.

But I was hearing them in a different setting where I was hearing he has HIV or things like that.

But this was still carried back home.

[laughs]

... and our brains are not that different than they were a hundred and fifty years ago.

And so whenever we're designing experiments or asking questions, we try to tease those apart with the idea, and I think this is important for the non-scientists listening, that every experiment is incremental and provisional.

There's no such thing as the silver bullet experiment that's gonna answer any deep question.

So that's one key.

And then the other piece I think worth bringing in is we've spent some time developing a taxonomy of aesthetic impacts.

And the intuition here is that if you take a complex sensory experience, and let's say wine tasting, most people can say, "I like it," "I don't like it," or, "It's kinda interesting," and then they get stuck.

[laughs]