The Neuroscience of the Aesthetic Experience

Look at a Jackson Pollock painting and you might find yourself drawn to a particular drip of paint. Without even realizing it, you’ll inch your nose close to the canvas, trying to get a better look. Then the museum guard is screaming at you and you become aware of yourself again and pull away. What caused you to do that? Or, listen to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” (as my parents often do) and a chill runs down your spine when Stevie Nicks croons. How can it be that music — or any art form for that matter — could have this kind of impact on you and your body?

The answer can be found in the labyrinth of our brains. Neuroscientists have discovered that our experience of art — from crying at the movies to getting wrapped up in a novel — isn’t just a matter of personal taste. There’s a universal, biological basis to what we find beautiful in art.

A high-tech tool called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows neuroscientists to see how our brain lights up when we experience beauty, tracking shifts in blood flow to reveal which areas are active. The default mode network, it turns out, lights up like a Christmas tree. In particular, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a brain region associated with pleasure, kicks into high gear. It’s the same region that activates when we experience love, or taste a delicious meal.

But here’s the twist: beauty isn’t just about pleasure. It’s about surprise, too. Enter the predictive coding theory — a fancy term for the idea that humans love a little bit of mystery in their beauty. We like a balance between the expected and the unexpected. A song that follows a predictable melody might be pleasant, but one that deviates slightly — introducing a surprising chord, maybe — can be more moving. It jolts us. This dance between anticipation and fulfillment is orchestrated by our dopaminergic reward system, that trusty conductor of learning and reward, encoding our aesthetic appreciation as a complex, ever-evolving experience.

So, is beauty purely biological? No, not quite. Our experience of beauty is shaped by our personal histories, our respective cultures, the idiosyncratic memories and feelings that a particular piece of art might strike a chord with.

But aesthetic appreciation isn’t just about what’s in our hearts, or our eyes, or our ears. It’s in our neurons, too. What we find beautiful isn’t just out there in the world waiting to be found — it’s already inside of us, encoded in our brains, waiting to be activated. And that might just be the most beautiful thing of all.