Our Brains Have Two Distinct “Beauty Centres”: One For Art And One For Faces

By Emma Young Audrey Hepburn’s face and Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. Darcy Bussell dancing the role of Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty and The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. All of these things, and more, are widely regarded as looking beautiful. Do we have, then, a “beauty centre” in the brain that responds to something that we find visually beautiful, no matter what it is? For almost two decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have been exploring this question, without reaching a consensus. Now a new meta-analysis of existing fMRI studies on almost 1,000 people concludes that no, our brains don’t have one “beauty centre” — but two. Hu Chuan-Peng at Tsinghua University, China, led the study, published in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioural Neuroscience. The team identified 49 studies that involved whole brain analyses of young and middle-aged people (aged 18 – 50), none of whom were art experts. Some of these studies focused on responses to human faces, while others looked at reactions to art, including paintings, sculpture, visual textures, dance videos and architectural space. In all cases, fMRI was used to image the brains of the participants, who also made aesthetic judgements, or at least rated how much they liked or disliked a given stimulus. Using a technique called “activation likelihood estimation” (ALE) meta-analysis, the team searched for any crossover between the studies in patterns of br...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Aesthetics Brain Source Type: blogs