The Neuroscience of Beauty

    After reading the Hassan Aleem et. al. article, “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder Or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer” I became interested in the ideas of neuroaesthetics. Aleem and colleagues discussed the question of whether beauty is objective or subjective in the brain. Prior to reading this article, I did not actually know that neuroaesthetics was a research field. I always wondered how it was possible for one human to find something beautiful, and another human to find it repulsive. That means beauty has to be in the eye of the beholder, right? This leads me to so many other questions. What goes on in your head when you see something beautiful? Does the same area in the brain get triggered in everyone when they see something beautiful? What are the limits of what can be seen as beautiful?

In an article written by Faith A. Pak and Ethan B. Reichsman, “Beauty and the Brain: The Emerging Field of Neuroaesthetics”, they discuss a few people that are shaping the field of Neuroaesthetics currently. Pak and Reichsman discuss their interview with Neurobiologist, Theodora T. Mautz, and her work in neuroaesthetics. Mautz wants to know why we seek out beauty, and how the beauty found by each person is different. She states “Beauty is one of life’s basic pleasures” (Pak & Reichsman, 2017), therefore people will seek out the things that make them feel something, and those things are what are beautiful to them. Mautz relays this to art, and how the art pieces that are beautiful to people are those that move them. Her next question is then what is happening in the brain when people find the beautiful object that makes them feel moved? Mautz believes a “complex whole-brain response” (Pak & Reichsman, 2017) occurs when we witness something beautiful. She backs up her statement with the idea that our brain is not focusing on just the one image it is looking at, it is also bombarded with thoughts of the future, memory, and self. This experience creates the moving feeling that one experiences when seeing something beautiful. This phenomenon Mautz discusses is similar to the subjectivist view as well as the processing fluency theory discussed in the Aleem et. al. 2019 research paper.

Another person mentioned in the Pak & Reichsman article, who is also involved in shaping the field of neuroaesthetics is Semir Zeki. Zeki is a Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London. He has used neuroimaging to monitor the brain during a beautiful sensation. The data from neuroimaging has shown that the medial orbital frontal cortex has always been triggered in correlation with the perception of many different types of beauty. Zeki also backs his findings up with the fact that “activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is stronger when you think something is more beautiful” (Pak & Reichsman, 2017). This is slightly different from Mautz’s whole-brain response theory. Zeki also argues that beauty can be both subjective and objective. However he categorizes objective beauty as culturally inherited and subjective beauty as biologically inherited. He is specifically interested in the biological aspect of beauty. 

These two articles are extremely interesting to me because the field of Neuroaesthetics is so new and so much is still unknown about how the brain reacts to different aesthetics. The article by Pak & Reichsman makes it clear that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, however everyone reacts to beauty in the same way biologically. As the Aleem et. al. 2019 article brought up, the processing fluency theory has a lot of support in neuroaesthetics. As Zeki stated in the Pak & Reichsman article, the area of the brain that is triggered by beauty emits stronger activity when looking at something found to be more beautiful. This supports the idea that objects have different fluency of beauty to each person, which I believe helps to answer the main question about beauty according to the brain.

References: 
Aleem, Hassan & Pombo, Maria & Correa, Ivan & Grzywacz, Norberto. (2019). Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer. 10.1007/978-3-030-24326-5_11.

Pak, F. A., & Reichsman, E. B. (2017, November 10). Beauty and the Brain: The Emerging Field of Neuroaesthetics: Arts: The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved from https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/11/10/neuroaesthetics-cover/