The brain’s reaction to the beauty decoded by science

NotSometimes we stop in front of the beauty of the reflection of a lake, a face, or even a painting. What is happening in the brain at this exact moment? A new discipline, neuroaesthetics, is taking a close interest in the topic of beauty. There is still a big question in this area. Is the appreciation of beauty based on objective criteria found in the thing? Who have we contemplated or is it determined by purely subjective judgments?

Plato, an advocate of the first hypothesis, suggested that beauty depends on the intrinsic properties of an object that provide a pleasurable experience for the person observing it. Humans will therefore be equipped with processes at the cerebral level that will allow them to enter into resonance with certain physical parameters present in the object of their crush. On the contrary, the second proposition suggests that the viewer’s evaluation is entirely subjective and determined only by past experiences and personal value judgment. If so, then any work of art could, in theory, elicit the same pleasure.

However, when it comes to aesthetic judgment, there is a magic number that has been talked about a lot, and that is the golden ratio. Often referred to as, this approximate value of 1.618 corresponds to a ratio (about 3/2), considered ideal, between the length and height of a figure that would boggle our brains.

No. through the ages

It is difficult to trace the history of this concept. It seems to have been evoked already in antiquity, but during the Renaissance in particular, an Italian Franciscan friar, Luca Pacioli, venerated and attributed to her “my god”. during the nineteenth century^H and XX^H Century, artists will be interested in this golden number and scholars will look for it even in works of art, landscapes or faces that we find particularly harmonious.

The importance of neuroimaging studies is that they now make it possible to investigate whether a shape that possesses this magical proportion activates our brain’s visual regions in a certain way. This is exactly what Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues from the Universities of Parma and Rome tested in 2007. These authors were able to show that when we judge a work of art, we activate two systems, one located in the insula, sensitive to the golden ratio and therefore to the intrinsic properties of the work, and the other located in the amygdala, Which seems to respond to the criteria of autonomy and our previous experience.

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