Making sense of landscape: integrating neuroscientific perspectives

This paper proposes firstly that landscape imagery has an affective bias and secondly that consciousness studies and neuroscientific perspectives suggest alternative reasons why this is so. The Landscape image is not a medium or genre that elicits all mood effects ‘democratically’ but rather favours the gloomy end of the spectrum. The Romantic notion of melancholy—which we may describe concisely as a pleasurable sadness—captures the paradoxical mood that infuses much landscape imagery across its various sub-genres and art-historical contexts. I ague that this landscape mood is not merely, or not only, a cultural trope but should more accurately be described as a predisposition. The paper proposes hypotheses for this affective bias drawn from neuroscientific perspectives which compliment but also offer more fundamental explanations than prevailing perspectives. In particular, I draw on Susan Greenfield’s transient neuronal assembly hypothesis in which external stimuli produce varying degrees of consciousness in the subject. These differing degrees of consciousness in turn correlate with the subject’s (more reportable ) affective states. Greenfield’s theoretical framework—and its system of correlations—is considered in the context of landscape and its reception. Her ideas hence resonate with the Romantic’s interest in the dynamic relationship between landscape, subject and the degree of consciousness that such encounters produce. From both perspectives, melancholic mood becomes a by-product of a heightened “sense of self”.