Aenne Brielmann: Aesthetics

Beauty is a big part of our everyday life. Think about your favorite meal, the view from your window or the smell of fresh sheets. All these experiences can be beautiful. Most great philosophers like Aristotle and Kant wrote about beauty. Psychologists started investigating beauty right from the start, too. Gustav Fechner already wrote in 1876 that one can study beauty like any other perception. But the psychologists after him did not want to study beauty. They were more concerned about establishing psychology as ‘hard’ science. This meant that they only studied how people behave, not their feelings or what they think of things. It was not until the 1990s that psychologists started to study beauty again. Researchers who study beauty today call their field empirical aesthetics or neuroaesthetics. Empirical aesthetics studies how people make aesthetic judgments. That is often beauty, but also liking, preference, interest, and many others. A lot of this research asks people how they feel about art, such as paintings, music, and dance. Neuroaesthetics goes one step further. It not only asks people about their feelings but at the same time measures how their brain responds. One branch of this new aesthetics research asks: What makes things on average more beautiful? Three things seem to be beautiful to most people. 1) Most people prefer round to angular objects. 2) Most people like symmetric objects more than asymmetric ones. 3) In most cultures, people like blue and green best of all colors. But these average rules do not apply to every object or every person. In the best case for these rules, they are about as important as a person’s individual taste. That is the case of faces. On the opposite end, general rules only explain 10% of people’s responses to abstract art. How then, can we understand beauty using science? A second branch of empirical aesthetics does not see differences in people’s taste as an obstacle. It wants to find out what beauty experiences have in common beyond differences in the objects that people find beautiful. These researchers find that beauty goes hand in hand with pleasure. When one is high, so is the other. If an object cannot produce pleasure, there is no beauty. If a person cannot experience pleasure, there is no beauty either. Brain-imaging studies draw a similar picture. When people experience beauty, the same brain regions are active as when they enjoy food or money. So, is beauty any different from other pleasures at all? Yes, the research shows that only intense pleasure is beauty. And we also find that the brain responds in a different way to such intense pleasure. When we look at something very beautiful, a network of areas in the brain that is linked to self-reflection is activated, too.

Paper can be found here: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30766-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982218307668%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Video by Aenne  (aenne.brielmann@nyu.edu) explaining her work

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