Experts Explore the Part of the Brain That Responds To Beauty

People seek beauty in nature, art, philosophy, and also in material things like phones and furniture. Beauty is valued beyond reason; that is why people surround themselves with it and will even lose themselves in pursuit of beauty.

Philosopher George Santayana once said in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty that there is something within people "a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it."

For many centuries, experts have studied it with varying theories trying to make sense of what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. One theory about beauty is by the German philosopher Gustave Fechner in 1876, who provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides proportional to the golden ratio of about 1.6:1.

But times have passed, and science has evolved. Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing examined the origin of beauty and said that it is as enigmatic as it is in the brain and the real world.

What Part of the Brain Responds to Beauty?

According to Scientific American, the part of the brain that responds to beauty depends on whether beauty is seen as a single category at all. Some scientists who believe in the idea of a "beauty center" believe that the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or the insula respond to beauty.

If this is true, then that means a single part of the brain is responsible for appreciating all kinds of beauty. Like when listening to good music, or staring at a captivating painting, or seeing the beauty of nature.

Moreover, this will confirm the theory of functional localization. According to PubMed.gov, this theory holds that "different cerebral cortical territories serve different functions, such as vision and language."

However, the researchers believe that although this theory is somewhat true, it does not certainly explain all kinds of mental states as being localized in one region of the brain. Experts have seen that many functions failed to match a region that is supposed to explain its job description, like a "beauty center" or a "pleasure center."

The Brain Has Two Beauty Centers

Since past theories are proven to be inconclusive of what part of the brain truly responds to beauty, the researchers performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on the existing neuroimaging studies of beauty appreciation of faces and visual art.

The researchers found that the brain has two beauty centers: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). According to Research Digest, the former is activated when the person sees a beautiful face, while the latter gets activated when appreciating the beauty of visual art.

It implies that beautiful faces seemed to act more like "primary rewards," just like how the brain process food and sexual contact. Meanwhile, appreciating visual arts is the secondary reward or something that people have learned as pleasurable. As such, these two functions are processed differently in different regions of the brain.

However, it is noteworthy that the study was not designed to contribute to the ongoing debate of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" theory. The researchers said that the study showed how people appreciate beautiful faces and visual art and that it does not shed light on how non-visual beauty is processed in the brain.

Check out more news and information on Brain and Neuroscience on Science Times.