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The Art of the Brain: Unlocking the Power of Neuroaesthetics...
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The Art of the Brain: Unlocking the Power of Neuroaesthetics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 3545

Editor

Dr. Elena Sidorova

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Guest Editor
Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI), Sciences Po Paris, 75006 Paris, France
Interests: contemporary art market; online art market; sociology of art; art economics; art and politics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The relationship between art and the brain is multifaceted. Art not only stimulates various brain regions, but also offers numerous cognitive, emotional, and social benefits. Whether you are an artist or simply an appreciator, engaging with art can enrich your life in profound ways. Neuroaesthetics, a field exploring the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and the arts, seeks to bridge the gap between subjective aesthetic experiences and objective scientific inquiry. By understanding the neural mechanisms underlying our appreciation of art, we can gain deeper insights into the human mind, creativity, and the nature of beauty itself.

Studying the relationship between art and the brain offers a wealth of valuable insights. It can help us understand the human mind by revealing how our brains process information, perceive beauty, and experience emotions. This knowledge can be applied to develop new therapies, such as refining art therapy techniques for treating mental and physical health conditions. Furthermore, understanding how art engages different brain regions can inform art education practices and create more effective and engaging learning experiences. By demonstrating the cognitive, emotional, and social benefits of art, research can encourage greater access to and appreciation of the arts in society, ultimately promoting human well-being. Finally, exploring the intersection of art and neuroscience can lead to innovative approaches in fields like Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, and human–computer interaction.

The international scholarly open-access journal Arts (ISSN 2076-0752) invites submissions for the Special Issue on the topic "The Art of the Brain: Unlocking the Power of Neuroaesthetics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” We welcome interdisciplinary contributions (4,000–6,000 words long) from researchers working in various academic disciplines, including art history, sociology of art, art economics, legal studies, neuroscience, cognitive science, biology, psychology, and computer science. Submissions may address the following topics:

  • Neuroscience of Creativity: Investigating the neural mechanisms underlying creative processes, such as divergent thinking, insight, and imagination; examining the role of specific brain regions, neurotransmitters, and brainwave patterns in creative cognition; exploring how different art forms engage creative processes and stimulate aesthetic experiences.
  • Art and Cognitive Function: Studying the impact of art engagement on cognitive abilities like attention, memory, problem-solving, and executive function; investigating how art can enhance cognitive function in aging populations and individuals with neurological conditions; exploring the use of art-based interventions to improve cognitive outcomes in various settings.
  • Art and Emotional Regulation: Exploring how art can influence emotional states, such as reducing stress, anxiety, and depression; examining the neural mechanisms underlying the emotional response to art, such as the activation of reward centers and the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine; exploring the use of art therapy for mental health challenges.
  • Data-driven Forms of Aesthetics (Data Aesthetics, AI Aesthetics, Agentic Aesthetics): Examining how AI, potentially informed by large datasets of neural responses to art through brain–computer interfaces (BCI), is evolving its own "aesthetic" and what that means for the creation and consumption of human-centric artistic outputs and evolving appreciation of art and beauty.

Dr. Elena Sidorova
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • neuroaesthetics
  • art and brain
  • creativity
  • cognitive function
  • emotional regulation
  • artificial intelligence (AI)

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 229 KB  
Article
From Alignment to Evocation: On the Capability Boundaries and Collaborative Paths of AI Art Creation—A Framework Based on the Neuroaesthetic “Ring Scale” and Prompt Engineering
by Xianqun Yi and Hongsheng Li
Arts 2026, 15(8), 179; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080179 - 3 Aug 2026
Viewed by 162
Abstract
Recent generative art outputs across music, literature, painting and moving-image media have attracted extensive scholarly and public interest, yet evaluations of their creative capacities are mostly limited to informal observational accounts. Drawing on neuroaesthetic reasoning, this paper puts forward a dual-layer analytical framework [...] Read more.
Recent generative art outputs across music, literature, painting and moving-image media have attracted extensive scholarly and public interest, yet evaluations of their creative capacities are mostly limited to informal observational accounts. Drawing on neuroaesthetic reasoning, this paper puts forward a dual-layer analytical framework that differentiates two distinct modes of aesthetic reception: Alignment, defined as statistical template matching, and evocation, referring to the novel association of scattered embodied memory fragments. Building on this binary categorization, the study introduces the tentative Ring Scale taxonomy—a figurative target-shooting metaphor rather than quantitative metric—as a purely descriptive tool for stratifying relative aesthetic evocation intensity. This framework further unpacks the neurocognitive underpinnings of auditory, visual and textual aesthetic pathways, alongside their combined multimodal interactions within film and television works. It tentatively accounts for why generative systems tend to deliver more cohesive aesthetic outcomes within the auditory domain, and hypothesises a present functional limitation of current large models: these systems perform comparatively well within Alignment-driven aesthetic effects, while layered high-order evocation remains constrained by inherent structural limitations of statistical training architectures. From this diagnostic observation, three directional paradigm shifts for human–AI collaborative creation are outlined: shifting from human substitution to human–machine complementarity, shifting from exhaustive template imagery generation to targeted latent fragment elicitation, and shifting from optimising figurative Ring-tier descriptive labels to pursuing transformative aesthetic fission effects. The study frames imaginative cognition as the central driving force behind fruitful human–AI co-creation, and positions prompt engineering as the actionable operational bridge connecting human imaginative thought to machine-executable generative parameters. Three tentative prompt design tactics are then elaborated: physiological arousal framing, multisensory scenario simulation prompts, and intentional strategic blank-leaving. Additionally, this work discusses the plausible constructive functions of model hallucination phenomena when viewed through the lens of high-tier aesthetic evocation, rather than merely framing such outputs as technical errors. All judgments and tier comparisons raised throughout the paper are framed as unvalidated observational hypotheses open to empirical testing. To facilitate follow-up empirical scrutiny, the paper collates a full set of testable hypotheses derived from its theoretical reasoning and outlines feasible experimental validation pipelines, with an open call for controlled empirical research to corroborate or refine the proposed qualitative framework. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Art of the Brain: Unlocking the Power of Neuroaesthetics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
14 pages, 401 KB  
Article
Art as Structural Necessity: A Formal Theory of Aesthetic Engagement in Post-Scarcity Information Environments
by Boris Kriger
Arts 2026, 15(7), 149; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15070149 - 26 Jun 2026
Viewed by 486
Abstract
This paper argues that art and aesthetic engagement are not cultural luxuries but structural necessities for any cognitive system operating in post-scarcity information environments—a claim derived from a unified structural theory of complex systems grounded in the persistence principle. The argument proceeds in [...] Read more.
This paper argues that art and aesthetic engagement are not cultural luxuries but structural necessities for any cognitive system operating in post-scarcity information environments—a claim derived from a unified structural theory of complex systems grounded in the persistence principle. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, drawing on the formal theory of structural viability, the paper demonstrates that when a cognitive agent’s basic needs are satisfied and information is abundant, the agent’s viability set expands until utilitarian goal structures degenerate. Non-utilitarian goal-setting—creative activity pursued beyond direct utility—remains the only structurally available mode of purposeful agency. Second, the paper provides a neuroaesthetic grounding for this claim: predictive processing, derived as the unique optimal cognitive architecture under physical constraints, entails that creative engagement generates prediction errors whose resolution activates reward pathways shared with reproductive behavior—both being instances of generating new structure. Active perception of art constitutes co-creation through the same mechanism. Third, the paper addresses the role of artificial intelligence: AI accelerates the arrival of post-scarcity conditions and serves as an instrument of creative engagement, but passive consumption of AI-generated content without the agent’s own goal-setting fails to fulfill the structural function of art and deepens the very condition it could remedy. The framework contributes to neuroaesthetics by providing a substrate-independent formal foundation for understanding why cognitive systems require art—not merely enjoy it—and why this requirement intensifies as post-scarcity conditions approach. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Art of the Brain: Unlocking the Power of Neuroaesthetics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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16 pages, 3064 KB  
Article
Panel Painting to JPEG: The Ontological Failure of Artificial Intelligence Generated Icons
by Karen Phan
Arts 2026, 15(4), 76; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15040076 - 13 Apr 2026
Viewed by 843
Abstract
This thesis examines the theological status of artificial intelligence-generated religious imagery through Byzantine icon theory, asking whether such images can participate in the material, devotional, and communal, definitions traditionally ascribed to icons. Situating AI within an intellectual lineage beginning with iconoclasm debates and [...] Read more.
This thesis examines the theological status of artificial intelligence-generated religious imagery through Byzantine icon theory, asking whether such images can participate in the material, devotional, and communal, definitions traditionally ascribed to icons. Situating AI within an intellectual lineage beginning with iconoclasm debates and then turning to Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, this project places contemporary image generation models such as DALL·E and Midjourney in dialog with late antique and Byzantine debates on representation, likeness, and mediation. Drawing on St Theodore the Studite’s defense of icons as relational images grounded in the Incarnation, this thesis argues that AI-generated portraits cannot be understood as icons in a theological or art historical sense. Icons depend upon an embodied triad between maker, prototype, and worshiping community, sustained through liturgical practice, ascetic discipline, and intentional craft. Adding Aristotle’s account of deliberation further clarifies this distinction: algorithmic production lacks the ethical agency and purposive choice intrinsic to sacred image-making. While engaging the scholarship of Robin Cormack, Charles Barber, Bissera V. Petcheva, and many others, this study reasserts the Christological foundations of icon theory while situating AI imagery within contemporary political economies of data extraction, militarism, and environmental cost. AI may attempt to reproduce religious imagery, but it cannot generate objects of real veneration. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Art of the Brain: Unlocking the Power of Neuroaesthetics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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