Culture and art: Importance of art practice, not aesthetics, to early human culture

An Evidence-Based Framework for the Use of Arts and Culture in Public Health

ObjectivesIn recent years, increasing efforts have been made to apply arts- and culture-based strategies to public health concerns. Accumulating studies point to the value of these strategies for addressing social determinants of health in ways that center communities, cultures, and lived experiences. However, this work has lacked a common framework to support application and advancement. The objectives of this study were to examine knowledge, experience, and evidence related to the uses of arts and culture in public health in the United States and to develop a pilot version of an evidence-based framework to guide cross-sector development and research.MethodsUsing a convergent mixed-methods design with sequential elements, this study drew upon findings from a national field survey, seven focus groups, eight structured working-group dialogues, and a five-day structured dialogue and writing process with 12 interdisciplinary thought leaders. Data were integrated to develop a pilot evidence-based framework.ResultsThe study identified six broad ways in which arts and culture can be used in public health and 59 specific outcomes that can be addressed through arts and cultural strategies. The framework identifies evidence supporting the effects of arts and culture on each outcome, along with mechanisms that may mediate or moderate these effects.ConclusionThe pilot framework clearly links arts and culture practices with public health outcomes. In doing so, it provides both a resource for current practice and a model for the continued development of interdisciplinary tools that support health researchers and practitioners in utilizing arts and culture resources to advance community health and health equity.

The arts and hemispheric specialization

Art was initially thought of as a single function linked mainly to spatial perception and right hemisphere functional specialization. Art was also considered to be diametrically opposed to language, further solidifying the right hemisphere specialization model. This view remained dominant for many decades. However, increase in published observations of artworks by professional artists following acquired unilateral hemispheric damage showed that quality artistic works can be produced when there is damage in either the left or the right hemisphere. With the advent of neuroimaging such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), light was shed on the neural underpinning of the esthetics of artworks revealing activation in multiple regions across both hemispheres. The bulk of recent data suggests complementary hemispheric contributions to art production and esthetic evaluation of numerous art expressions. Similarly, creativity and imagination, upon which art expression depends, both appear to recruit interhemispheric processes. Culturally, the early evolutionary origin of art is associated mainly with Homo sapiens (HS) but, despite evidence for cerebral asymmetry based on fossil skulls, their emergence did not coincide with visual art making. A significant lag of hundreds of thousands of years intervened before humans produced art consistently and abundantly. By now, the arts are practiced ubiquitously throughout the globe, in all human societies.

Hemispheric asymmetries in the control of upper limb movements

This chapter deals with the unique human abilities of using tools, imitating others' gestures, drawing, and building complex items. Herein, after a brief overview of clinical manifestations and assessment of disorders of tool use and imitation (upper limb apraxia) and of the impairments in drawing and assembling multipart objects (constructional apraxia), brain asymmetries are discussed mainly starting from the neuropsychologic studies on patients with focal brain lesions, although both upper limb apraxia and constructional apraxia are often observed during the course of neurodegenerative diseases. Although no room is allowed here for a full discussion of brain-behavior relationships, relevant functional neuroimaging findings in healthy individuals are considered. The data presented in this chapter clearly demonstrate that tool use, gesture imitation, and "formative" activities (i.e., drawing and assembling) require the interplay of several brain areas and neural networks distributed over both hemispheres. Nonetheless, gesture processing exhibits a quite strong lateralization to the left hemisphere in typical right-handers. As regards "formative" activities, the neural networks in both hemispheres seem to provide complementary contributions, although the left inferior parietal lobule might play a specific role. The convergence of gesture processing and "formative activities" in the parietal lobes might be related to their considerable expansion in our species and could suggest that some shared basic, still unknown, computational processes allowed the development of these skills in modern humans.

Aesthetic Characteristics of Dance Based on Few-Shot Learning and Neural Networks

Dance is constantly discovering truth, goodness, and beauty in human social life, spreading truth, goodness, and beauty, and fully expressing the artistic pursuit of dance beauty. It shapes different dance images, expresses the aesthetic consciousness and feelings of dance, and resonates with the audience to meet their aesthetic needs through various forms of movement. Because the RBF neural network model is good at approximating functions, many researchers have begun to use the RBNN approximation model for engineering design. Due to the limited dance data available for research, this paper uses radial basis function neural network model to study the aesthetic characteristics of dance in the context of few-shot learning. When the time index reaches 50, the average ratio of the L-MBP algorithm is 33.4 percent, 32.5 percent for the RBNN algorithm, and 46.3 percent for this method. As can be seen, this method has the highest ratio of the three algorithms, giving it a distinct advantage in terms of dance aesthetics. As a result, this paper establishes a neural network model, trains and simulates the network model, studies and analyzes the influence of changes in influencing factors on the aesthetic characteristics of dance, and provides a new idea for the prediction of the aesthetic characteristics of dance and a reference for optimizing the design of the aesthetic system of dance using the prediction ability of radial basis function neural networks.

Dance on the Brain: Enhancing Intra- and Inter-Brain Synchrony

Dance has traditionally been viewed from a Eurocentric perspective as a mode of self-expression that involves the human body moving through space, performed for the purposes of art, and viewed by an audience. In this Hypothesis and Theory article, we synthesize findings from anthropology, sociology, psychology, dance pedagogy, and neuroscience to propose The Synchronicity Hypothesis of Dance, which states that humans dance to enhance both intra- and inter-brain synchrony. We outline a neurocentric definition of dance, which suggests that dance involves neurobehavioral processes in seven distinct areas including sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, and creative. We explore The Synchronicity Hypothesis of Dance through several avenues. First, we examine evolutionary theories of dance, which suggest that dance drives interpersonal coordination. Second, we examine fundamental movement patterns, which emerge throughout development and are omnipresent across cultures of the world. Third, we examine how each of the seven neurobehaviors increases intra- and inter-brain synchrony. Fourth, we examine the neuroimaging literature on dance to identify the brain regions most involved in and affected by dance. The findings presented here support our hypothesis that we engage in dance for the purpose of intrinsic reward, which as a result of dance-induced increases in neural synchrony, leads to enhanced interpersonal coordination. This hypothesis suggests that dance may be helpful to repattern oscillatory activity, leading to clinical improvements in autism spectrum disorder and other disorders with oscillatory activity impairments. Finally, we offer suggestions for future directions and discuss the idea that our consciousness can be redefined not just as an individual process but as a shared experience that we can positively influence by dancing together.

Coevolution of language and symbolic meaning: Co-opting meaning underlying the initial arts in early human culture

Many of language's components, including communicating symbolic meaning, have neurobiological roots that go back millions of years in evolutionary time. The intersection with the human social survival strategy spawned additional adaptive meaning systems. Under conditions threatening survival in socially oriented human groups, extra-language meaning systems co-opted and adapted to facilitate unity, including the early formats of the arts. They would have percolated into cultural practice for this social purpose and ultimately survival. With evolutionary pressures tapping into biologically inherited, physiologically functioning sensory-motor pathways, anchored specifically in rhythm cognition and motor synchrony output, initial art practice conveyed symbolic group cohesion through communal, all-inclusive synchronously moving dance formations and rhythmically produced vocal or percussion sounds. As with the sounds of language in the deep past, and numerous other cultural behaviors, such nonmaterial early art formats would not have left marks in the archeological record but their evolutionary driven practice would have contributed to adaptive genetic factors woven into brain-behavior evolution. Their practice is likely to have well predated unearthed art-related objects. Consolidation of evidence and notions from language evolution, genetics, human physiology, comparative animal communication, archeology, and climate history in the distant past of early humans in Africa supports the evolutionary driven practice of initial nonmaterial art formats conveying symbolic expressions optimizing group survival. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Linguistics > Evolution of Language Psychology > Comparative Psychology.