Beautiful or Ugly?
(December 13th 2007) Usually, colourful fMRI images captivate headline makers. Therefore it's especially astounding that a neuro-art paper reporting on how humans perceive beautiful art didn't find its way into the press. Lab Times did not overlook this paper.
Gorgeous statues such as the Venus di Milo or Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" are widely admired. Why is that so? How do humans perceive beauty and ugliness? This is the fundamental question that underlies the concept of aesthetics. Ages have passed since Plato pondered the question, but we still don't know whether humans define beauty by some objective parameters or whether our judgements rely merely on subjective factors. Perhaps a deep look into the brain would provide some clues.
Cinzia Di Dio and her collegues from the University of Parma (Italy) observed what was going on inside the brains of fourteen volunteers with no experience in art theory while they studied images of sculptures. Using fMRI they found that only original sculptures with their "golden ratio" but not sculptures with modified proportions activated specific sets of neurons in some lateral and medial cortical areas and the right insula, a brain region mediating emotions.
The scientists also investigated the subjective feelings of their volunteers. When they were asked to judge a sculpture's beauty their brain scans revealed that this process selectively activated the right amygdala, a brain structure involved in emotional learning and memory.
Though all sorts of fMRI imagery have become exceedingly influential, we shouldn't be seduced with these pictures. fMRI tells us "where" activity in the brain takes place, but it doesn't reveal "how" neurological and psychological mechanisms happen. This has lead to the reproach that fMRI studies are simply a modern-day phrenology. Nevertheless, the report " The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures" in
PloS ONE indicates that the sense of beauty "derives from a joint activity of neural cortical populations responsive to specific elementary or high order features present in works of art and neurons located in emotion controlling centers".
So, why hasn't this paper made headlines? It's got all ingredients to get good press coverage: it's about neurology; it's about a phenomenon that everybody can experience; it's not too scientific. And it was accompanied by a "killer press release". We don't know. The journal's press officers wagered on which of their stories would figure most prominently in the news. To their - and our - suprise, the winner of the PloS internal contest was a report about the texture of deadly fluids in carnivorous plants. Biophysics outplayed arts. Strange enough.
Karin Hollricher
Original paper: Di Dio C, Macaluso E, Rizzolatti G (2007) The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures.
PLoS ONE 2(11): e1201. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001201
