Semir Zeki's work at UCL has demonstrated relations between certain abstract works of visual art and neurones in the brain that detect movement, direction and colour.
Novelist A S Byatt, writing in the Times Sep 22 2006, speculates that in the case of aesthetic response to narrative and poetry this `lighting up' may be the activity of mirror neurons (cells in the frontal lobes of monkeys which fire not only when the monkey performs an action, but when it observes the same action performed by another.)
And the link seems to work both ways....
Research which combines fMRI scanning with traditional questionaire methods has suggested that `creative types' have trademark patterns of brain activity, such as ``significantly higher activation in right and left cerebellum and in right and left frontal and temporal lobes, confirming inter-hemispheric interactions'' when engaged in a creative task.