NeuroArts Expansion: A Framework for Artist-Led Inquiry in Applied Aesthetic Contexts

This framework essay proposes a complementary expansion of the NeuroArts field toward practice-integrated investigation in Applied Aesthetic Contexts — real-world environments in which aesthetic experiences are intentionally designed and socially embedded. The essay argues that NeuroArts increasingly faces a structural paradox: the field seeks to understand the transformative power of artistic experience while relying primarily on methodological structures developed outside the environments in which art's most complex effects occur. Central to the proposed expansion is Artist-Led Origination (ALO), a structural principle by which research agendas may legitimately originate from the lived expertise of artistic practitioners rather than exclusively from institutional or disciplinary priorities. ALO is operationalized through two interrelated pathways: Artist-Initiated Inquiry, in which practitioners articulate phenomena for formal investigation, and Practice-Led Inquiry, in which knowledge emerges from iterative artistic processes within Applied Aesthetic Contexts. The framework further advances Reciprocal Embodied Literacy as a condition for meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, proposing that effective NeuroArts inquiry requires bidirectional experiential competence across scientific and artistic domains. To support population-scale, longitudinal investigation, the essay introduces ETUDE (Empirical Tracking of Universal Development in Esthetics), a proposed modular measurement infrastructure designed to document how sustained aesthetic engagement shapes cognition, emotion, identity, and social behavior across the human lifespan. Together, these four components — Applied Aesthetic Contexts, Artist-Led Origination, Reciprocal Embodied Literacy, and ETUDE — outline a practice-integrated approach that complements existing NeuroArts paradigms by incorporating practitioner knowledge, ecologically valid environments, and population-scale phenomena into the field's evidentiary landscape. This essay serves as the foundational framework text of the NeuroArts Expansion Series, a multi-essay project proposing structural expansions of NeuroArts research to include practitioner-originated inquiry, applied aesthetic environments, and interdisciplinary methodological integration.