‘Beauty’ has not just fascinated the common people but also philosophers and great thinkers since antiquity. It has also been one of the most debated words, owing to its varied connotations and subjective nature. Although it was never a standalone discourse in itself, it was studied under the broad umbrella of aesthetics in arts and humanities. Scientists were always skeptic to talk about this term. But nevertheless, many philosophers from pre-historic and post-modern age attempted to explain this seemingly simple yet complex term. Of them, a few notable people who paved the path of bringing ‘beauty’ into the scientific discussion were Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Burke, Kant and Hegel.
Born out of paintings, sculptures and poetry, ‘beauty’ soon entered the laboratory where scientists were trying to quantify this subjective aesthetic appreciation by conducting neuropsychological experiments. These efforts gave rise to a new discipline known as ‘neuroaesthetics’, and scientists like Fechner, Wundt, Helmholtz, among others, are known for laying its founding stones. The 20th century witnessed a union of its kind when ‘beauty’ and ‘brain’ were discussed together. Popular neuroscientists like Changeux, Ramachandran and Zeki performed some seminal work in this direction which was suggesting that ‘beauty’ lies in the brain of the beholder.
On his recent visit to IIT Gandhinagar, Semir Zeki (professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London) gave a public lecture on ‘The Neurobiology of aesthetic experiences and the significance of beauty’. Zeki, who has coined the term neuroaesthetics, has worked extensively in this area and is trying to explore the neural basis underlying the experience of beauty generated by sensory inputs; in other words, looking at the brain areas involved during aesthetic experience. Zeki proposes that visual art is an extension of the functions of the visual brain, i.e. art is trying to achieve what the visual brain is doing. He said during his lecture at IITGN that “the only truth you can be sure of is the subjective truth” and studying the brain can shed some light on the subjective experience of beauty. His work suggests that a region of the brain known as medial orbital frontal cortex is involved when a person experiences beauty. This according to him, points towards the fact that ‘there is a single characteristic which defines beauty and that lies in the brain’. He also added that the brain somehow ‘decides’, ‘filters’ and separately processes ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ stimuli.
Zeki draws a lot of inspiration from Edmund Burke who defined ‘beauty’ back in 1757 as, “Beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by intervention of the senses”. Zeki, therefore, insists that the future work attempting to decipher ‘beauty’ can always look back to the rich history of philosophy and arts and draw valuable insights from that in order to understand the complex nature of ‘beauty’.
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