Dramatic Arts and Neuroscience: Evaluating the Artist-Audience Connection by Scientific Tools

Fine arts form a communication system between artist and viewer, represented in a manner not afforded by language alone. Neuroscience of Art is a new interdisciplinary field which explores scientifically the neural basis for perceiving the emotional content embedded in a piece of art -e.g., a literary text or performance- as a form of cognitive task to be processed by the neural network of human brain. Drama, per se, entails a wide range of elements such as, plot, character, dialogue, symbolism, genre, rhythm, and theme, all of which as a non-reducible whole, leads to emotional arousal of the audience. The positive or negative valence of emotional stimulus (such as, happiness or sadness, respectively) as well as its power to dominate the viewer (e.g., to make the audience feel scared or surprised) may impose limits on higher cognitive functions in the brain, namely, attention and memory, in such a way that the sensory data of a neutral scene be ignored by the brain cortex under the impression of either an earlier or a later dramatic event. Suspense, mind reading, and empathy with the protagonist of drama are but a few states of mind which the audience experience during sustained attention on a well-directed or written piece. This experience may well cause and/or reflect significant electrophysiological changes in the nervous system of the audience, an outcome which further lets the affective and social prospects of neuroscience come into view, specifically if the event holds at a theatre hall -as one of the best models for real life society. The most important matters of fact are (i) human neural system has a limited capacity for letting in the sensory data over a timespan, which permits only part of the surrounding data enter the sensory network of the brain, and (ii) the higher cognitive procedures mentioned above do not usually happen at the conscious level, yet often subconsciously or even at the non-conscious level. While this latter fact may disturb psychologists who assess mental states and behavior of the audience by means of traditional techniques (such as, questionnaires, interviewing, and observation), neuroscientists get the chance to keep a robust track of the spatial and temporal changes in the brain of an individual engaged with a piece of art. Brain-Mapping techniques (such as fMRI, qEEG and ERP), as well as Eye-tracking and Autonomous Nervous System monitoring may help researchers from two disciplines of Arts and Cognitive Neuroscience achieve a common insight of the influence of performing arts on the immediate neural response of the audience. Main goal of this review is to reveal such common basis and the multidisciplinary path that is underway by the current team of researchers who aim (at a later time) to focus on imaging the viewers’ brain function during watching different parts of a dramatic work, in order to answer the questions ‘which part of a performance may dominate the attentional network of the brain, be significantly memorized, and better recalled in the future, and why does it happen so?’