Beauty and the Art of Perception

Confucius once said wisely “Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it”. It is interesting how Confucius thought beauty is perceived: with the eyes. What are people's most common answers when asked about what beauty means to them? 

Initially, they think about physical attributes, especially of other humans. This probably is a consequence of the media’s focus on what a perfect body or face should look like. This especially seems to resonate with teenagers. Ideally, the older you get, the more beauty is also seen in subtle and, as many would probably agree, more valuable things of life. Beauty can mean a warm hot chocolate after a full day of skiing, the rewarding view from the top of a mountain after an energy-sapping five-hour hike or merely the joy a mother feels when she sees her child smile at her while going crazy on a trampoline. Beauty is conveyed by all different modes of perception: looking at something, but also touching, tasting or listening to it.

The “Aesthetic System”
In the early phase, research in neuroaesthetics restricted itself to visual perception. For example, scientists tried to assess the physical properties of human faces in order to find the basic neural mechanisms underlying our brain's decision that something is beautiful [1, 2]. Key features are average, symmetry and hormones. The first factor that contributes to beauty is average, because it harbors greater genetic diversity and adaptability to the environment. The second factor is symmetry, because developmental abnormalities are often associated with asymmetry, while symmetry is an indicator for health. And the third factor are hormones, because high level of estrogen and testosterone play important roles in shaping features that people find attractive (when we confine ourselves to heterosexual norms).

Picture: By Hector Salazar

I personally think that these features are what describes attractiveness and are partly evolutionary pre-determinations of how we subconsciously choose our life partners. Anyway, let us have a look what happens in the brain: Attractive faces activate a network of areas that range from the back of our brain to the frontal lobes. An area called fusiform gyrus, which is part of our visual cortex and temporal lobe, as well as the lateral occipital complex in the back of the brain are activated. The fusiform gyrus is especially attuned to process faces, while the occipital complex is especially attuned to process objects. In addition, attractive faces activate parts of our reward and pleasure center located in the front and deep in the brain. These areas are the ventral striatum, the orbifrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex [3].

Beauty is in the brain of the beholder

Since the field of neuroaesthetics is a new but rapidly expanding area, recent studies cover also other art forms, like music and performing art [4], as well as other senses, like smell, taste, hearing and touch. One consistently activated region in response to beautiful stimuli in neuroimaging studies was the anterior insula [5]. This small neural area that sits deep within the lateral sulcus of the cerebral cortex is implicated in a wide range of subjective feelings based on interoception, from cigarette craving to maternal love and, as the term interoception implies, integrates bodily sensations. Since tasting a favorite meal, listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 or looking at visually appealing art have all effects on the body, it is not surprising that a region that is meant to give feedback on how much an experience satisfies the physiological needs can also be part of an “aesthetic system” in the brain.

Things that Matter
Interestingly, the sense of beauty seems to require activation in the brain’s reward system. Thus, the brain’s output is a pleased feeling that we sense when we perceive beauty. Sadly, we choose quite often to be blind to beauty because of distraction, worry and daily stress. But it would be very beneficial for each of us to actively predispose ourselves to embrace beauty. Whatever it means for the individual, beauty means happiness at the end. And the good thing is, you decide what’s beautiful, because - if you allow me to adjust the popular saying - beauty is in the brain of the beholder.


[1] Rhodes, Annu. Rev. Psychol., 2006
[2] http://bit.ly/2lYvDJe
[3] Kocsor et. al, Socioaffect Neurosci Psychol, 2013
[4] Cinzia & Vittorio,Curr Opin Neurobiol, 2009
[5] http://bit.ly/2lYvDJe

by Anahita Poshtiban, PhD Student, AG Plested
This article originally appeared March 2018 in Vol 11, Issue 01, "Beauty and the Brain"