Beauty Measured and Manipulated by the Brain: The Psychophysiology of Beauty

Abstract

Neuroaesthetics, a relatively young field of research, seeks to understand the neural bases of the aesthetic experience. Neuroimaging studies have revealed that at least three functionally distinctive domains are involved in perception of subjective beauty: the affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor systems. The affective system consists of cortical (e.g., orbitofrontal cortex) and subcortical (e.g., ventral striatum) areas implicated in the reward circuit and influence aesthetic emotion, whereas the cognitive system (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) integrates information needed for aesthetic evaluation in a top-down manner. Some research reports that the sensorimotor areas are also activated by visual objects (e.g., art, and face or body images) evaluated as beautiful. More recently, neuroaesthetic studies using brain stimulation techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation, have demonstrated that neural activity related to aesthetic evaluation has a causal role in the subjective experience of beauty. Accumulating evidence in neuroaesthetics indicates that the aesthetic experience arises from the interaction between the reward processing, decision-making, and sensorimotor neural systems.