I guess that I am a real sucker, when it comes to big questions. Delving into aesthetics (to define of debate various principles) is rather murky work at the best of times. This Wired article “Why does Beauty exist?” is possibly the fundamental underpinning of all of this.
What do we need it, why did we ‘invent’ it?
This may be one of the classic ineffable topics, in that we all ‘know’ what it is, but can’t really define it. We always focus upon what it is which we find beautiful (which can be difficult enough to describe…). But a deeper question is in the background.
All of these important (in our lives) questions are hard to define…for instance, define:
· What does beautiful really mean?
· What makes something ugly?
· What is funny? What does that even mean?
· Can you describe sadness only with words?
…and so forth…The fact is that while there are no simple, obvious definitions and descriptions, minimally these concepts exist for us to live as humans, and in this realm of questions, answers, and thoughts…to be a whetting stone to sharpen out enquiry…
Why Does Beauty Exist?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/why-does-beauty-exist
Over at the always excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong summarizes a new investigation into the neural substrate of beauty:
Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki from University College London watched the brains of 21 volunteers as they looked at 30 paintings and listened to 30 musical excerpts. All the while, they were lying inside an fMRI scanner, a machine that measures blood flow to different parts of the brain, and shows which are most active. The recruits rated each piece as “beautiful,” “indifferent,” or “ugly.”
The scans showed that one part of their brains lit up more strongly when they experienced beautiful images or music than when they experienced ugly or indifferent ones – the medial orbitofrontal cortex or mOFC.
Several studies have linked the mOFC to beauty, but this is a sizeable part of the brain with many roles. It’s also involved in our emotions, our feelings of reward and pleasure, and our ability to make decisions. Nonetheless, Ishizu and Zeki found that one specific area, which they call “field A1” consistently, lit up when people experienced beauty.
The images and music were accompanied by changes in other parts of the brain as well, but only the mOFC reacted to beauty in both forms. And the more beautiful the volunteers found their experiences, the more active their mOFCs were. That is not to say that the buzz of neurons in this area produces feelings of beauty; merely that the two go hand-in-hand.
On the one hand, it’s not exactly shocking that beauty can be sourced to the cortex. Where else would it be? Like disgust or delight, beauty is a visceral emotion, a pleasure that Nabokov described as being synonymous with “the the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.” That beauty can be localized to the mOFC only reminds us that it’s part of the pleasure spectrum, since that brain area has consistently been implicated in the recognition of delightful things, from the taste of an expensive wine to the luxurious touch of cashmere.
But why does beauty exist? What’s the point of marveling at a Rembrandt self portrait or a Bach fugue? To paraphrase Auden, beauty makes nothing happen. Unlike our more primal indulgences, the pleasure of perceiving beauty doesn’t ensure that we consume calories or procreate. Rather, the only thing beauty guarantees is that we’ll stare for too long at some lovely looking thing. Museums are not exactly adaptive.
