Beholding beauty: how art changes the brain
Have you ever looked at a work of art, heard a piece of music or even walked through nature and felt totally transfixed? If you have, then you have had an aesthetic experience. These experiences reach beyond ordinary perception with an effect much more nuanced than when we simply like a piece of art. Rather, they ignite our senses, unfold our minds and overshadow every distraction around us.
Join Tamar Torrance to learn what happens to our brains and bodies when we have a peak aesthetic experience, and how it shapes our perceptions of beauty, emotion and meaning.
Using her research in neuroaesthetics, Tamar will describe how the brain interacts when we engage with art, how this hits us at a physical level, and how the arts can be leveraged in education and therapy to transform the way we learn, heal and grow.
Bio
Tamar Torrance is an arts writer and PhD researcher in the Faculty of Science. She studies neuroaesthetics, an emerging subdiscipline of neuroscience investigating how art changes our brains. Her research draws on network neuroscience to model how different parts of the brain interact when we are transfixed by a work of art, and how these changes can fundamentally alter the way we think, feel and see the world.
Event
Tuesday, 25 August 2026, 7:30pm – 8:30pm @The Birdcage, 133 Franklin Road, Freemans Bay, Auckland 1011
The other talk at this location is We don’t have a spare: keeping a healthy brain at 6:00pm – 7:00pm
