Just in Time: Temporality, Aesthetic Experience, and Cognitive Neuroscience

Literature and neuroscience come together to illuminate the human experience of beauty, which unfolds in time.

How  does beauty exist in time? This is Gabrielle Starr’s central concern in  Just in Time as she explores the experience of beauty not as an  abstraction, but as the result of psychological and neurological  processes in which time is central. Starr shows that aesthetic  experience has temporal scale. Starr, a literary scholar and pioneer in  the field and method of neuroaesthetics, which seeks the neurological  basis of aesthetic experience, applies this methodology to the study of  beauty in literature, considering such authors as Rita Dove, Gerard  Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Toni Morrison, and Wallace Stevens, as well  as the artists Dawoud Bey and Jasper Johns.


Just in Time is  richly informed by the methods and findings of neuroscientists, whose  instruments let them investigate encounters with art down to the  millisecond, but Starr goes beyond the laboratory to explore engagements  with art that unfold over durations experiments cannot accommodate. In  neuroaesthetics, Starr shows us, the techniques of the empirical  sciences and humanistic interpretation support and complement one  another. To understand the temporal quality of aesthetic experience we  need both cognitive and phenomenological approaches, and this book moves  boldly toward their synthesis.