The Arts and The Brain: Psychology and Physiology Beyond Pleasure

Dr. Julia F. Christensen is a postdoctoral Fellow of the B.I.A.S. project (NOMIS foundation) at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and a Newton International Research Fellow Alumni (British Academy) in the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit (CNRU) and the Autism Research Group (ARG) at the Psychology Department (City, University of London). She is also an honorary member of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London; UCL). Her current work explores the neural underpinnings of emotional expertise in dance. In this approach she works with dancers and other artists as participants to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms that make these groups of people so highly emotionally sensitive. She has a strong interest in dance herself as she trained as a professional dancer before becoming a neuroscientist.Her PhD work with Professor Camilo Cela-Conde (University of the Balearic Islands; UIB) and Dr. Marcos Nadal (University of Vienna) investigated the affective mechanisms involved in watching dance and how that affective experience is modulated by relevant expertise (e.g., in dance) (title Dance moves: Affective responses to expressive body movement ). Dr. Christensen has also worked in the field of Neuroscience of morality under the supervision of Professor Antoni Gomila (UIB), and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience with Professor Patrick Haggard (UCL), leading a series of studies investigating how agents’ sense of agency over their actions is modulated by the emotional context in which an action occurs. Dr. Christensen uses behavioural, psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods. Dr. Christensen uses behavioural, psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods and has published a series of articles in international peer reviewed journals on the topics of neuroscience and psychology of dance and the arts, morality, empathy, ethics and autism. She is author of the German popular science book about dance ‘Tanzen ist die beste Medizin’ [‘Dance is the best medicine’], to appear in May 2018.

Professor Antoni Gomia is Full Professor of Psychology (Thinking and Language), at the Psychology Departament of the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. His background is in Philosophy and his interests have centred on issues at the “no man’s land of the frontiers between philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science: representation and meaning, expression and intersubjectivity, intentional explanation and rationality, also taking an evolutionary perspective into account in order to make sense of what makes us human. He co-edited a Handbook of Cognitive Science: an embodied approach (Elsevier, 2009), with Paco Calvo, and is the author of Verbal Minds: Language and the Architecture of the Mind (Elsevier, 2013). His current interest centers around moral psychology and the evolution of morality.