What is What? Focus on Transdisciplinary Concepts and Terminology in Neuroaesthetics, Cognition and Poetics

The birth of the new discipline “neuroaesthetics” (Zeki, 1993, 2008, 2014) and more in general the “biocultural turn” (Wojciehowski & Gallese, 2011, 2018; Cometa, 2018; Gambino & Pulvirenti, 2018; Uboldi, 2018; Gallese 2018) have put at the core of the recent transformation of the epistemological paradigms the linkage among literary studies, neuroaesthetics, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, poetics, art history, psychology, and the most recent cognitive and neuroscientific studies. This new transdisciplinary venture overcoming the dichotomy between culture and nature has highlighted how we can better understand the artistic creation by relating it to the cognitive brain processes underpinning any human activity. In this perspective, culture is to be intended as an extension of the human mind and bodily nature and as a process of cognitive technological development (Gallese, 2017). This transdisciplinary approach, although criticized as expression of reductionism and interference between science and human studies, has shed new light on many relevant issues with regard to both artistic questions and brain–body processes such as empathy, emotions, consciousness, imagination, vision, perception and narration, in the frame of a new concept of cognition: in opposition to the computational model of the first generation, the nature of mind is now considered by cognitive sciences as embodied, embedded, enactive and extended, giving rise to the concept of “4E cognition”, with regard to the coupling of brain, body, action and environment (Newen, de Bruin & Gallagher, 2018). Consequently, this issue aims at providing a series of terms used in the last generation of cognitive studies and of examples of how the new approach to cognition is opening new routes to interpret the most surprising product of human mind: art.