How our sense of beauty takes shape in the brain
A new study tries to map why humans can experience beauty collectively
A recent study published in Nature Communications sought to unravel how the brain perceives beauty when viewing visual artworks. Researchers found that the brain separates aesthetic experience into two main components. First, there's the visual content, which identifies what an image depicts, whether it's a landscape, object or figure.
This information is processed through familiar visual pathways that allow us to distinguish faces from scenes. The second component is the emotional value, or hedonic value, that we derive from the artwork, a sensation similar to the pleasure we experience from food or money. This value is processed in deeper brain regions associated with reward and pleasure.
The study involved 34 volunteers who viewed 96 traditional Chinese watercolor paintings inside a 7T MRI scanner, which measures blood flow in the brain to track activity. After the scans, participants rated their emotional responses to the paintings. To analyze the data, researchers utilized collaborative filtering algorithms, a method commonly used in recommendation systems like Netflix and Spotify.
These algorithms revealed two dimensions underlying participants' responses: one sorted the paintings from most figure-like to most landscape-like, indicating what each image conceptually represented. The other dimension ranked the paintings from least to most liked, reflecting emotional value. Despite these dimensions complementing each other, the brain treated them as distinct systems.
When examining the two-dimensional aesthetic landscape created by the brain, the researchers discovered that the strength of this encoding depended on an individual's expertise in visual arts. This difference was primarily observed in the default mode network, a system of connections in the brain linked to imagination, consciousness, self-reflection, and meaning-making.
The findings suggest that engaging with visual arts may alter the brain's representation of beauty, making arts education more than enrichment but also a form of training that modifies perception, emotion, and meaning wiring. The implications extend to art-based therapies for mental health issues, suggesting that a clearer understanding of the brain's role in aesthetic experiences could help refine these therapeutic approaches.
As more images are generated by machines, understanding the neural basis of beauty becomes increasingly important. The study's results challenge the notion that beauty is purely subjective, indicating that a measurable structure exists within the brain, reflecting our evolutionary predisposition to judge the world around us for its aesthetic qualities.
Written by urgent.news from Scientific American's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
