Hervé Platel is a neuropsychologist at the University of Caen-Normandie. He studies the impact of artistic supports on memory and the way in which art can be used as therapeutic lever in patients with neurological diseases. Since the 1990s, he conducted research on the effects of music on the brain. His work also relates to those of pictorial art.
What’s going on in our brain when we look at a work of art?
Faced with a work, we have an aesthetic experience of judgment. The question is very simple: what we can see or not? To answer it, the brain hires extremely complex processes. The perceptual information is first decoded in the visual regions, at the back of our head, then it arrives in the frontal regions at the front, where it is confronted with everything that has been garnered in our memory. A bit as if we compared it to our personal database. We can then know if this information, which we look at instant T, resonates with a previous experience. In the end, there is no region of aesthetic pleasure strictly speaking. The brain combines the work of different circuits, that of perception, emotions, memory, to determine whether we like a work or not.
Can art give us well-being?
Yes, our pleasure circuit activates when what we look at has a status of particular interest with regard to our history, that does not come out of nowhere. It is when we consider that the work has a value for ourselves, that it refers to something personal, autobiographical, to our personal journey … and it is of course very linked to the context. For example, the pleasure we feel by looking at the image of a painting in a book has nothing to do with that of contemplating it in the museum, where we can see the fragility of the work, its crackers, its brushstrokes, understand the creative process of the painter … All this will build our aesthetic judgment and potentially bring to the release of substances like dopamine, oxytocine, which will have effects soothing and can also decrease painful sensations.
Hervé Platel.
© DR
Does a work need to be visually soothing to do us good?
No, since we can also have pleasure in contemplating an impressive, mysterious, violent or even a little scary work. It’s like in music, where many take pleasure in listening to sad music. What is very interesting is the virtue that the art of making us live emotional experiences, sometimes even very intense, while knowing that we are safe. When we go to a museum, we see things that make us think of love, separation, death, suffering … but all in a “safe” context.
Do some reasons still provide more pleasure than others?
Our brain has, in fact, natural appetite for certain associations. Studies in psychology, which date back to the end of the 19th century, show that it will prefer certain visual information because it is easier to process. The brain is a bit feigning. When it is symmetrical for example, it is easier to analyze so more satisfactory in a certain way. This is also the case of color associations, proportions, completion games between figures … All these parameters play innate but will be modulated by our culture, which can thwart these obvious. This is why when you look at a Picasso painting, with its asymmetrical faces, you can find it beautiful, pleasant, interesting.
Does our brain react differently to figurative art than abstract art?
Faced with a work with characters, there is a phenomenon of empathy. From the moment that something brings us back to ourselves, as a species and in relation to lived contexts, the intimacy with the image will be stronger. The active brain of the mechanisms of recognition of phenomena on which there is a mirror effect. A mirror effect in relation to recognizing a human being but also, in the case of a genre scene for example, vis-à-vis the gestures that this character achieves. Our capacity for empathy allows us to imagine what the character can feel according to his position, what he does, the context, etc.
What impact can mediation have on our appreciation of the work?
A very important impact. Cultural mediation completely influences the way we enter the work. If we see the portrait of a woman with her child, a traditional portrait, from the 18th century, we can say ourselves “nothing remarkable”. But if we are told that the day after the portrait, the child died overturned by a coach, we look at the picture differently! We see a broken fate, a mother soon to be mourned … When we are told a context effect, we project ourselves in it. This is why today mediation is an essential component of the visit of a museum.
Between contemplating and practicing art, is the effect the same?
This is a question that has been widely studied in music. Having a musical practice and listening to music is different mechanisms even if you listen when you practice. For visual arts, it’s a bit the same. The mechanisms linked to creativity and those linked to aesthetic experience are largely common. But when someone is creating, he thinks about composition, attempts, retains certain hypotheses and rejects others. Invest in an art is a commitment that involves somewhat different cognitive functions.
Art therefore has multiple benefits. Who are they for patients with neurological diseases?
In a context of art therapy, patients can be asked to issue an aesthetic judgment or to be creative. This work will make it possible to obtain a global stimulation: perceptual, memorial, emotional. These are often experiences around creativity workshops. But the simple exposure to (the vision of) the work is already, in itself, an interesting experience. We have notably carried out work with patients with Alzheimer’s disease, who therefore have major memory disorders and which was considered to be no longer encoding (recording in memory, editor’s note) of new information. And we realized that even in patients at a severe stage of illness, there were still integrated mechanisms of the functioning of memory. The repeated exhibition to an artistic image left a trace. After five or six visits to the museum, they could remember, in the long term, a painting which had been presented to them repetitively. They then felt a feeling of familiarity, even if they did not remember having been exposed to work.
Is art therapy a well-developed psychotherapy in France?
For more than twenty years, many works have emerged on the subject. A current of neuro-aesthetics (study of aesthetic experiences through neuroscience, editor’s note) has developed. But in France, I think there is a form of delay concerning the links that can be established between cultural and health practices. The two areas are well separated. While in other countries, visits to the museum can be prescribed on a prescription.
What prospects do these studies open for the future?
These experiences will continue to evolve and develop so that we can have specific prescriptions for each pathology. That is to say, lead such type of workshop to obtain such a benefit in such type of patient. It is thanks to this scientific work that we obtain more relevance and specificity. We are not in a globalizing speech, a little naive, which just argues that art is beneficial. What matters is under what conditions it can be. And it is by feeding on scientific results that cultural mediation can make new, more relevant proposals, adapted to the specificity of audiences.
