A new study suggests beauty may have a neurological basis. Using brain scans, researchers in the UK found appreciation of abstract beauty - such as in finding aspects of mathematics beautiful - excites the same emotion centers in the brain as appreciation of beauty that comes from more sensory experience - like listening to music or looking at great art.
They report their findings in the open access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience .
Having read reports about how some people compare experiencing the beauty of mathematics to appreciating a fine work of art, the researchers decided to see if the brain's emotion centers are active in the same way for these different experiences of beauty.
Lead author Semir Zeki, a professor at the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at University College London (UCL), says the amount of activity in a person's brain correlates with how intensely they report their experience of beauty to be - even when the object of their attention is an abstract concept.
He adds:
"To many of us mathematical formulae appear dry and inaccessible but to a mathematician an equation can embody the quintessence of beauty."
The quality that the mathematician finds beautiful may lie in the expression of an immutable truth, or just in the simplicity, symmetry or elegance of a concept.
"For Plato," Prof. Zeki notes, "the abstract quality of mathematics expressed the ultimate pinnacle of beauty."
Beautiful equations activated same part of brain as beautiful music
For their study, the team asked 15 mathematicians to take away and consider 60 mathematical formulae, rate how beautiful they experienced each one to be and to note this as a score between -5 (for ugly) and +5 (for beautiful).
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