Awe

There is no better guide: Gopnik, Adam. “The Right Man: Who Owns Edmund Burke?” New Yorker, July 22, 2013.

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The book has oddities: This view is obviously naive and must reflect some sort of personal bias of Burke’s. Emotion and olfaction share many common neural pathways, which in part accounts for how powerful, and awe-inspiring, scents can be. Soudry, Y., Cedric Lemogne, D. Malinvaud, S. M. Consoli, and Pierre Bonfils. “Olfactory System and Emotion: Common Substrates.” European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Diseases 128, no. 1 (2011): 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anorl.2010.09.007. Epub January 11, 2011. PMID: 21227767.

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When what we encounter: Zajonc, Robert B. “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” American Psychologist 35 (1980): 151–75.

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studies of faces, scents: Art critic John Berger, in his influential book Ways of Seeing, gives us reason to be skeptical of our feelings of comfort, pleasure, and beauty. For several hundred years, Berger shows, men like Renoir and Degas painted the female nude. In such art it is the male gaze that looks upon the woman, who is controlled and confined within society’s regard. In this case art teaches us to find comfort in a way of seeing that preserves subjugating gender dynamics within a patriarchal status quo. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.

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In visual art, we like

: Palmer, Stephen E., Karen B. Schloss, and Jonathan S. Gardner. “Hidden Knowledge in Aesthetic Preferences: Color and Spatial Composition.” In Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, edited by Art Shimamura and Steve Palmer, 189–222. New York: Oxford University Books, 2012.

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enables new “possibilities of feeling”: Langer, Susanne K. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Shimamura, Art, and Steve Palmer, eds. Aesthetic Science: Connecting Mind, Brain, and Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. For a more recent history of this idea and others about the evocative powers of art: Berger, Karol. A Theory of Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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to evoke mystical feeling: Kandinsky, Wassily, and M. T. H. Sadler. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover, 1977, 2.

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Psychedelic artists like Alex Grey: What is true of painting is true of all forms of visual design: that in engaging with perceptions of vastness and mystery, we as participants feel a sense of being connected to something larger than the self. For example, Haussmann’s wide, airy, and light-filled boulevards and large public squares in Paris integrated Parisians into a larger sense of identity from the 1850s on.

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study of Mesoamerican art: Stone, Rebecca. The Jaguar Within: Shamanic Trance in Ancient Central and South American Art

. Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

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what some call shamanism: Winkelman, Michael. Shamanism. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Press, 2010.

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art activates the dopamine network: Nadal, Marcos, and Marcus T. Pearce. “The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference: Prospects and Pitfalls for an Emerging Field.” Brain and Cognition 76 (2011): 172–83. Chatterjee, Anjan. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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