He received early recognition, first exhibiting at the National Academy in 1883. After moving to New York City the following year, Curran enrolled at the National Academy of Design and continued his training at the Art Students League. When you experience virtual reality, read poetry or fiction, see a film or listen to a piece of music, or move your body to dance, to name a few of the many arts, you are biologically changed.Born in Hartford, Kentucky, Charles Courtney Curran studied briefly at the Cincinnati School of Design in 1881. The arts, as you will read throughout this book, trigger the release of neurochemicals, hormones, and endorphins that offers you an emotional release.

When Lorraine Hansberry wrote her play A Raisin in the Sun, she gave us a powerful story of people grappling with racism, discrimination, and the pursuit of the American dream while also offering a touching portrait of family life. When Picasso painted his masterpiece Guernica in 1937, he captured the harrowing and brutal nature of war, and offered the world a way to consider the universal suffering caused by the Spanish Civil War. The arts, in this way, become vehicles to contend with ideas and concepts that are difficult and uncomfortable otherwise. That can also be a powerful aesthetic experience.” “In art, when there’s something challenging, which can also be uncomfortable, this discomfort, if we’re willing to engage with it, offers the possibility of some change, some transformation. “The arts can be more than just sugar on the tongue,” Anjan says. They offer emotional connection to the full range of human experience. The arts and aesthetics encompass far more than just beauty. The pleasure that we get out of art-when we think the art is beautiful-offers the same basic response.” As Anjan explained to us, “When we’re talking about pleasure preferences we are activating our general reward system which is also used for very basic things like food and sex. It’s here that you register love, and the pleasures of a fantastic meal, for example. Typically behaviors that activate the reward system are ones that help the brain to keep us alive-eating, drinking, and sleeping-or ones that help the brain to keep our species alive, such as reproductive behaviors. When the reward system comes online, it increases the probability that you repeat the behaviors that occurred prior to the event that sparked it. This is a set of neural structures, or circuits, that activate when you experience happiness or pleasure. The second circle is your brain’s reward system. This is the first circle of the aesthetic triad. When you gaze at artwork your body and brain, through your sensorimotor systems, bring in information.

Charles Courtney Curran by Nancy Davis