beauty & the brain

a conversation with neuroaesthetician anjan chatterjee

words: samine joudat

If you had to explain to me what makes something beautiful, or what that something makes you feel, you aren’t likely to invoke your brain’s complex ability to process stimuli and run it through a web of networks that process emotion and then attach meaning to them. And yet, as much as we may want to disassociate our perception of what inspires awe with science’s ruthless reification process, our truth is that everything we experience – beauty included – is processed through our neurological systems. The brain, the small organ consuming roughly the equivalent of 20 watts of power, is the magnificent operating system through which the entire human experience is processed. 

The new field of neuroaesthetics, nascent in its development but exploding with ideas, is at the forefront of attempting to understand this complex relationship between our brain and beauty - what it is, how it is experienced, and why it is desired. Among the research pioneers is Doctor Anjan Chatterjee, Elliot Professor and Chief of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital at the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. Chatterjee has written a book, The Aesthetic Brain, as an introduction of sorts into the field and a defense of why it matters. He was gracious to lend his time to us to discuss the subject. Our far reaching conversation began around the basic principles of neurology and the debated basis for an art instinct – the idea that our aesthetic taste is an evolutionary trait that is shaped by natural selection. 

Chatterjee explained that our brain’s ability to perceive aesthetics is driven by a triad of sensation, emotion, and meaning. He says, ‘it looks like aesthetic experiences are implanted through a set of coordinated neural activities that involve both sensory and motor processing, certain aspects of our emotional and reward systems, that’s then overlaid with meaning and experience.’ 

For example, music travels through the auditory system, ballet or dance might trigger a response to biologic motion, and perfume is mediated through the olfactory systems. These are then processed by the reward and pleasure systems, and often also attached with personal meaning – which can be contextual and is typically unique to each individual. 

The active question beyond this configured reality within our reward and emotional systems is whether these experiences converge or not. Chatterjee refers to this as the cited common currency problem – are pleasures always cashed out in the same way in the brain’s reward system? The answer that neuroaesthetics can provide is thus a specific one, at least for now. Is there a commonality among our different experiences of art and beauty as they are processed in the brain’s reward and pleasure systems? That deep and intense experience you might feel when you observe a painting, and I might feel after a film, and Anjan might feel during a musical composition, could be more similar than different among us. 

Anjan explains that such a finding would suggest that our pleasure and reward systems that evolved for food and sex were coopted for other pleasures. However, because of the meaning we attach to aesthetics specifically, it will always remain an individually unique experience. But, to what extent? ‘Part of the point of science is to discover structure in variability or coherence in chaos. A common currency to pleasures would suggest some piece of our subjective experiences is shared by all of us; it is part of what makes us human,’ says Anjan. 

When our talk switches over to the art instinct, Chatterjee has elegant ideas regarding what it is and whether it is present in our biological makeup. To ask whether art is an adaptive trait or not is the wrong question, he says. A better question is under what circumstances does it express an adaptive trait, and under what circumstances does it not. He offers as a metaphor the Bengalese finch, which evolved from the munia bird in Japan. While the munia once relied on its singing ability to attract mates, the process is now irrelevant to the artificially bred Bengalese finch. And yet, the finch’s singing has increased in complexity, variability, and unpredictability as selective pressures have eased. In other words, it has continued to sing even more beautifully even without an evolutionary need to do it.

Anthropologists have made similar claims about social human languages and cultural practices. Like singing for the bird, we as humans might have once had useful purposes for art, such as its ritualistic characteristic that can bring a community together by solidifying communal values and creating social cohesion. But purposes can and have changed for us too, and not all art is the same anymore. Art that is more abstract, such as cubism or impressionism, doesn’t seem to have a direct evolutionary benefit, yet is widely cherished as beautiful and important. 

Chatterjee qualifies this even more by explaining that there is a spectrum of convergence on beauty. When trying to study the perception of beauty, faces tend to have the highest level of agreement among humans. Landscapes are second, followed by architecture, and all the way at the other end sits art. This falls in line with the idea that perception of faces and landscapes are predominantly tied to a long trajectory of evolution, and were most likely driven by instincts possessed by our ancestors that helped them survive and reproduce. On the other hand, architecture and art are much more subjective and tied to cultural context.

“‘Man as Industrial Palace’ by the German polymath Fritz Kahn (September 29, 1888–January 14, 1968)”

Our talk meanders on to the relationship between art and politics, and the larger morality of neuroaesthetics. I challenge Anjan about the notion in his book that freer societies tend to have more variety and creativity present in their art scenes, as opposed to socially repressive societies. Iranian cinema, for one, has thrived over the last few decades as it has mastered the art of subtlety while maneuvering through political challenges. He explains that he believes there to be an ideal range in which there are problems pressuring society but enough freedom to creatively express thoughts and criticism. Societies at either extreme, either too repressive or too free, will tend to have either very little variety and creativity, or too much variability that can lead to incoherence. Our current western cultural moment, we both agreed, might be an instance in which the conditions are ripe for relevant art to thrive. 

When it comes to morality, Anjan believes that to be privy to the way our brain works and processes aesthetics can be extremely useful, and on its own it is value-neutral. Though there are potentially adverse effects, like when popular culture plays on some of our uglier instincts – such as the tendency to associate scars with evil characteristics or ascribe goodness to people perceived to be more attractive – to convey its messages. But, just as is true in behavioral economics, what better than awareness of our own irrational biases to help mitigate them? 

For Anjan, as the field evolves going forward, there is much left to grapple with and understand. Things intriguing him at the moment include the potential temporal nature of beauty (if there are different responses to the same thing at different times) and the aesthetic impact of built environments on our brain.

Speaking with him, what becomes clear is that people in his scientific position have created a space in which science has a productive role to play going forward in understanding our relationship with art and beauty, even while we continue to resist the idea of turning everything we experience into a quantifiable data point, or an algorithm.

Let’s say we come to find that there is a common currency among shared experiences in the brain’s reward and pleasure systems. Why is that important, are there specifically important implications for being able to capture this generalization across people?

We should be clear that even if there were a common currency to all our aesthetic pleasures that does not mean that we have the identical experience. Such a finding would imply that our pleasure systems that evolved for food and sex got coopted for other rarified pleasures. However, given that each of us have varied exposures and memories, our claim that aesthetic experiences are modulated by meaning systems implies that these experiences will always to some extent be individualized. But, to what extent? Part of the point of science is to discover structure in variability or coherence in chaos. A common currency to pleasures would suggest some piece of our subjective experiences is shared by all of us; it is part of what we can claim makes us all human.