Abstract
We wanted to learn whether activity in the same area(s) of the brain correlate with the experience of beauty derived from different sources. 21 subjects took part in a brain-scanning experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Prior to the experiment, they viewed pictures of paintings and listened to musical excerpts, both of which they rated on a scale of 1–9, with 9 being the most beautiful. This allowed us to select three sets of stimuli–beautiful, indifferent and ugly–which subjects viewed and heard in the scanner, and rated at the end of each presentation. The results of a conjunction analysis of brain activity showed that, of the several areas that were active with each type of stimulus, only one cortical area, located in the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), was active during the experience of musical and visual beauty, with the activity produced by the experience of beauty derived from either source overlapping almost completely within it. The strength of activation in this part of the mOFC was proportional to the strength of the declared intensity of the experience of beauty. We conclude that, as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources–musical and visual–and probably by other sources as well. This has led us to formulate a brain-based theory of beauty.
Highlights
In the work reported here, we address a question that has been addressed many times over past centuries, namely what constitutes beauty
That definition suggests that there is a unique faculty of beauty that can be stimulated by any and all the senses. It raises an important question: would the experience of beauty derived from different senses, say the visual and auditory, correlate with activity in the same or different brain areas? If the latter, the clear implication would be that brain systems that correlate with the experience of beauty are functionally specialized, the experience of visual beauty correlating with activity in one area or set of areas and that of auditory beauty correlating with another
Indifferent + Visually Ugly led to activation in the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), at 3 35–11 and 23 38–11, while the contrast Musically Beautiful
Summary
The question was especially well formulated, in a neurobiologically accessible way, by Edmund Burke In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke wrote that ‘‘Beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses’’ [1]. Our reading of the relevant humanistic literature, too numerous to mention, suggests that the first alternative has been more favored by those who have discoursed on the subject, namely that there is a single faculty of beauty into which different senses feed. This alternative is reflected in Burke’s definition
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