What Makes Art Beautiful, and How Do Our Brains Know?

 

 

Whether it’s a vast landscape in nature, a meticulous painting, an eloquent poem, a melodious song, or even a face, how do we decide what is beautiful? How does one person’s perception of beauty differ from the next? How is the emotional or affective response from experiencing something beautiful reflected in the brain? Does beauty truly lie in the eye of the beholder? The search for the answer to the age-old question of what makes something beautiful has been a never-ending quest across multiple disciplines—philosophy, psychology, and art. Recently, neuroscientists have undertaken the same quest. The emerging field of Neuroaesthetics, cognitive and neurobiological approaches to discover the underlying mechanisms in the brain that lead to the perception, emotional affect, and residual judgment of beauty by humans, and whether this process can be objective or subjective, or even both.

In the article "Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer," researchers Aleem et al. discussed the question of what defines beauty from a neuroscientific point of view. Utilizing a major theory in neuroaesthetics, the processing fluency theory—the more fluent or easy one perceives and conceptualizes an object, the more positive their aesthetic response (Reber et al., 2004)—and various experimental models to measure individuals' "aesthetic values" as applicable to artwork, researchers found that both objectivity and subjectivity, and the neuronal circuits that process these mechanisms, interact to produce the perception of beauty for the perceiver, alone. While internal factors, such as reinforcement learning and motivational personality traits, influence this perception, so do external factors, such as culture. Researchers concluded that while the universality of the objective view of beauty is most likely due to evolution, the more subjective view of beauty is, in contrast, more flexible and individualized because it involves the mechanisms behind reinforcement learning. Ultimately, the perception of beauty comes as result of the interaction between both objectivity and subjectivity to account for the universality in addition to the individuality for the perceiver’s preferences for aesthetic value (Aleem et al., 2019).

Art in the form of portraits or paintings isn't the only aesthetic experience people enjoy. The field of neuroaesthetics has also extended to music. A study conducted by Rebrouk et al. summarizing multiple neuroscientific studies dissecting the musical aesthetic experience, primarily seeking to uncover the subjective, affective, and evaluative processes and their functional neural connectivity in the brain (Reybrouk et al., 2018). These researchers wanted to look at a more neurobiological network-based approach to explore the aesthetic experience of music, rather than a cognitive neuroscience approach, in order to find out how different brain areas and neuronal circuits communicate during the aesthetic processing, as opposed to simply seeking what brain regions are independently activated. Therefore, they wanted to combine neuroimaging, network science, and connectomics methods of neuroscience, and conducted a meta-analysis of different studies contributing to this approach at studying the musical aesthetics and, specifically, its subjective experience. They found that there were many integrating neuronal networks involved in the aesthetic experience of music, including neuronal circuits of the reward system in the brain, the DMN, cortical regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), subcortical regions such as the amygdala, and functional connectivity of the brain as a whole (Reybrouk et al., 2018).

            The field of neuroscience can be a wonderful contribution to further understanding of how the brain works. Uncovering the neuronal mechanisms as to how people perceive beauty could take a step in the direction of utilizing this knowledge in a clinical sense, as well. For example, in the instance of the neuroaesthetics of music, this could be an essential factor in improving treatments in music therapy. The field of neuroaesthetics is relatively untapped and it is exciting to think about where the field could take us in the quest to better understand how our brains make us human.

 

 

Works Cited 

Aleem, H., Pombo, M., Correa-Herran, I., & Grzywacz, N. M. (2019, November 16). Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer. SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-24326-5_11.

Reybrouck, M., Vuust, P., & Brattico, E. (2018, June 12). Brain Connectivity Networks and the Aesthetic Experience of Music. Brain sciences. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29895737.

Rolf Reber, N. S. (2004, November 1). Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience? - Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, Piotr Winkielman, 2004. SAGE Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3.