How neurobiology uncovers beauty
Does beauty lie in the eye of the beholder or in the object? New research from the United Kingdom suggests that it lies in a region at the front of the brain, namely the medial orbito-frontal cortex. University College London scientists say this area of the brain 'lights up' when people experience beauty in a piece of art or a musical concept. Presented in the journal PLoS ONE, the findings indicate that all forms of art correlate, triggering activity in the same brain region. So at the end of the day, beauty does lie in the eye of the beholder, and not in the object. Writing in his 'Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful', the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, said: 'Beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses.' In a nutshell, any and all senses can stimulate a unique faculty of beauty. So would auditory and visual senses correlate with activity in the same or different regions of the brain? In this latest study, the researchers assessed 21 participants from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. They asked the subjects to rate a series of paintings or excerpts of music as 'beautiful', 'indifferent' or 'ugly'. All 21 individuals were then placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to either look at the pictures or listen to the music. The researchers measured the activity of their brains. Professor Semir Zeki from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at University College London in the United Kingdom, along with colleague Dr Tomohiro Ishizu, discovered that the medial orbito-frontal cortex, what experts call the pleasure and reward centre of the brain, showed stronger activity in the brains of participants that listened to music or looked at a picture that they had already deemed beautiful. They also found that no specific area of the brain correlated generally with artwork previously deemed 'ugly'. However, the experience of visual ugliness, in comparison to the experience of 'beauty' correlated with activation in several regions. While past studies associated the medial orbito-frontal cortex with appreciation of beauty, this latest research study substantiated how the same area of the brain is activated for both visual and auditory beauty in the same subjects. Thus beauty does exist as an abstract concept within the brain, according to the duo. Besides the medial orbito-frontal cortex, the visual cortex is also activated by visual stimuli. The duo observed that this region was more active when participants saw a painting than when they listened to music, and vice versa for the auditory cortex. An intriguing finding of the study was that activity in the caudate nucleus, which is located near the centre of the brain, jumped in proportion to the relative visual beauty of a painting. Researchers in the past found that the caudate nucleus correlated with romantic love, hinting that a neural correlate exists for the relationship between beauty and love. 'The question of whether there are characteristics that render objects beautiful has been debated for millennia by artists and philosophers of art but without an adequate conclusion,' Professor Semir Zeki says. 'So too has the question of whether we have an abstract sense of beauty, that is to say one which arouses in us the same powerful emotional experience regardless of whether its source is, for example, musical or visuals. It was time for neurobiology to tackle these fundamental questions,' he adds. 'Almost anything can be considered art, but we argue that only creations whose experience correlates with activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex would fall into the classification of beautiful art,' he goes on to say. 'A painting by Francis Bacon, for example, may have great artistic merit but may not qualify as beautiful. The same can be said for some of the more 'difficult' classical composers - and whilst their compositions may be viewed as more 'artistic' than rock music, to someone who finds the latter more rewarding and beautiful, we would expect to see greater activity in the particular brain region when listening to Van Halen than when listening to Wagner.'For more information, please visit:University College London:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/PLoS ONE:http://www.plosone.org/home.action
Countries
United Kingdom