The brain takes pleasure in beauty; therefore, it finds beauty rewarding.
No matter where our brain finds beauty—in the natural world, a face or body, a song or work of art, a mathematical equation, or a perfect slice of tiramisu—it responds by activating the same neurological processes. Dopamine signals that a stimulus is rewarding and initiates the motivation and the muscle movements we need to move toward it. Mu-opiod and cannabinoid receptors then work together to produce the experience of pleasure.
We may have our own theories about why we like and take pleasure in some things and not in others. But all our aesthetic experiences are rooted in these processes that take place deep inside the brain.
Although we’re consciously aware of only a tiny fraction of them, our brain processes around 11,000,000 bits of information at a time, most of which are related to vision. The objects in our visual field, whether we’re aware of them or not, have an effect on us. As John Medina says in Brain Rules:
Visual processing doesn’t just assist in the perception of our world. It dominates the perception of our world.
But while it’s often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it’s much more accurate to say that beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Consider a few of the many things we can’t see that we can experience as beautiful, such as:
- passages of music
- scents and aromas: oranges, jasmine, fresh baked cookies
- birds singing in the morning
- the warmth of the sun on your skin
- an embrace
- laughter
- rain (the scent, the sound, and the feeling of it)
When an epileptic seizure left painter John Bramblitt legally blind, he learned new ways to carry on with his work.
When you break it down the eyes really only do two things for a painter; they allow you to know your placement on a canvas, and they allow you to determine color. … Basically what I do is replace everything that the eyes would do for a sighted artist with the sense of touch.
The result:
Pleasures are more than simple reflexive reactions to desirable things. —Anjan Chaterjee
Many of our aesthetic preferences—including preferences for sugar, for faces and bodies, and for places in nature—developed during the Pleistocene era. The things we experience as beautiful today connect us not only with each other but also with all of our human ancestors.
Our hard-wired aesthetic preferences are an excellent example of how unconscious processes in the brain operating outside our awareness affect us on a daily basis. We think we’re unique in our preferences and beliefs and in the actions we think we’re choosing to take. Because we don’t understand how and why they developed, we come up with explanations that are bound to miss the mark—and can even lead to strife rather than to cooperation.
However, because we find beautiful things pleasant, they activate the reward system in our brain. The purpose of the reward system is to help us learn and remember things, places, people, and experiences that will contribute to our survival. This makes me hopeful. In our modern splintered world in which humans are continually engaged in various forms of brinksmanship, anything that can help us see ourselves as ultimately part of the same species might yet contribute to our ability to survive.
Aesthetics refers to our appreciation of what is beautiful. Neuroaesthetics is the study of the cognitive (mental) and affective (emotional) processes that underlie aesthetic experiences from a combined neurobiological, psychological, and evolutionary perspective.