Does the prenatal exposure to arts generates love and attitude for the arts? Individuals, that since the very childhood are used to be in harmony with nature, are more incline to become more interested in the environment topics? People living in a sacred context will become religious? Proximity with sciences will generate curiosity and scientific attitude? People that are used to live in a quality context, full of aesthetic stimuli are more incline to care about arts and styles?
These questions are ancient and unclear because they have to deal with the mystery of our lives, and our lives are always defined by our living context and always autonomous from it.
It is true, neuroscience and cognitive psychology (as more recently the neuroaesthetics and psychoneuroimmunology), as stated by Maria di Bello, evidenced how the living experience in a stimulating context is an important factor in the individual evolution.
The first living environment, the approach with the beauty, the variety of the received stimuli and the positive emotion that they raise shape, somehow, our “relational biological system and the physiological regulation system of the individual”, by increasing the understanding and the elaboration of stimuli arising from the environment.
This perspective links science and other kind of disciplines, which deal with the creation and generation of built environment: architecture, design, city planning and landscape planning, always involved in combining both ethics and aesthetics values.
The introduction of an individual in an enriched context helps the human and intellectual growth, and, in certain conditions, simplifies the assimilation of good customs and civil traditions.
The myth of the great north-European countries relies on the assumptions that things talk to us, move us, and educate us. In other words: habitat creates habitus, a custom, an attitude that helps us in understanding reality.
The inner (inwardness, habits, the way of doing, the body, the posture) and the outer (nature, landscape, environment and urban spaces) influence and shape each other. Inner space influences the outer space and vice versa.
Most recent studies in the field of science confirm that human being is a relational individual and that we are profoundly deeply rooted in our living environment. I think that this is a fertile research perspective, although I think that science should deal also with the contradictions of the human beings.
Many of the artistic avant-gardes as many of the contemporary artistic expressions, many of the scientific and thoughts innovations were born, and they still do it, paradoxically, in a poor environment. They grow in degraded suburbs, in wars, in the missing and in the loss.
Pavel Florenskij showed how, in the exile and in the grips, in the white-blank Siberian gulag the scientist sees what it misses and get what it was obscure to him. Intuitions sometimes arise from privations. And it is visible in our daily lives: when sometimes persons learn to listen in the silence.
Maybe scientists may explain us the emotional traits of silence or, maybe, we should accept that sometimes life is paradoxical, and going on in building livable worlds, full of beauty and rich of stimuli for everyone. Still hoping that the paradoxical genius, the exception and the unforeseen will surprise us.
