ISSUE III

6 SIENNA SOLSTICE
ISSUE I 7
An Interview With Dr. Anjan Chatterjee
This idea that you might ask questions about the nature of mind in terms of biology was regarded by
many as soft and fuzzy. There remain residual sentiments along these lines in some parts of
neuroscience.
I went on to do my neurology residency at the University of Chicago, and then I did two fellowships.
One was in dementia at Case Western Reserve and the other in behavioral and cognitive neurology at
the University of Florida.
In the early 90s, I began my academic career at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. At the time,
I was studying questions of spatial cognition, spatial attention, language, and how we communicate.
Then, in 1999, I was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania, where a center for cognitive neuroscience
was being created.
Dr. Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University
of Pennsylvania and author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and
Enjoy Art. The founding director of the Penn for Aesthetics, his research has focused on
questions about neuroaesthetics, neuroethics, spatial cognition and language.
DR. CHATTERJEE: We can start at the beginning.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
I was a philosophy major as an undergrad, and I’ve never stopped reading philosophy. Questions from
philosophy remained of interest throughout my career. Similar to our conversation about the idea behind
Sienna Solstice, part of the issue was: how do you approach philosophical questions and remain
grounded? For me, grounding in those questions meant being tethered to empirical sciences. I’m not
saying that’s true for everybody; but for me, that grounding is necessary.
When I got to medical school, I found medicine—at least as a medical student—to not be very exciting.
Medical education is ingesting a bunch of facts. It’s conceptually light and factually dense. So, it never
fired my imagination until we got to the neuroscience section of the curriculum.
Just to give you some context, I graduated from college in 1980. In the late 70s, neuroscience was not
something that undergraduates were exposed to. I went into medical school without knowing anything
about neuroscience. So, encountering neuroscience was the first time I got excited about a biological
approach to the mind. I graduated medical school in 1985. At that time, cognitive neuroscience and
cognitive neurology was not a fashionable career choice. The idea was that if you wanted to be taken
seriously as a scientist, you should be studying protein chemistry, cellular biology, or immunology. That
period between 1981 and 1985 was when AIDS hit the scene. It was a completely novel and devastating
disease. So, immunology was a hot topic.
My move [to Pennsylvania] was a period of transition. I was hanging out with some friends in Birmingham,
and we were thinking about what we might do over the next 10 years — this idea actually came
out of a barroom conversation. One of my friends brought up the question: “Imagine yourself ten years
into the future. What would you regret not having done?” At the time, I thought that I had always been
interested in arts and aesthetics. While a lot of my work was in visual and spatial processing and communication,
I’d never really thought of incorporating aesthetics as a focus of inquiry. Growing up as a
child, I used to draw all the time. I’d carry a sketchbook with me. Later, I ended up doing much more
photography as an aesthetic practice. In pondering that question, I decided to study the biology of aesthetic
experiences.
Early in 1999, there was almost nothing written about the biology of aesthetics. Partly because this was
an academic transition period where I was reevaluating my plans, I thought I’d incorporate aesthetics
seriously as part of my research program.
Do you identify as an artist or a scientist exclusively, or do you feel that your identity is a fluidity of both
processes in both frameworks?
DR. CHATTERJEE: I think most people who end up studying empirical aesthetics or neuroaesthetics
tend to have an aesthetic practice. That’s often what drives them towards such investigations. It can
be music, it can be painting, it can be photography, it can be drawing, and some people write poetry. I
think there are some similar features to both endeavors—a kind of curiosity drives both and a willingness
to be vulnerable.
How do we appreciate the contributions of both art and science without oversimplifying either process?
DR. CHATTERJEE: I think the kinds of questions people ask or address can be similar and overlap. Scientists
can inform artists and artists can inform scientists.
I think it simplifies the process to say that artists are scientists, as some do, and denies what makes
these endeavors special. Both approaches abide by certain distinct rules. You could say that soccer
players could be good baseball players, and baseball players could be good soccer players, but it
doesn’t really make sense that a soccer player is a baseball player.