A scientific study conducted by a research professor from Fudan University in China and Cambridge University in the UK was published in the journal Nature Communications. The authors, Emmanuel A. Stamatikas and Xinyu Liang, investigated how the brain reacts to art and beauty, which is the subject of neuroaesthetics.
People often feel a strong attraction to works of art, such as Joseph Mallord William Turner's painting 'Sunrise over Water' (1825-30), even if they cannot explain the reason for this feeling. Although the common belief is that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' studies show that we collectively share the perception of beauty despite its apparent individuality.
In a recent study, the authors attempted to map this shared aesthetic experience. They found that the brain does not consider the aesthetic experience as a single entity but divides it into two main components. One component deals with what is depicted in the picture—be it a landscape, an object, or a figure. The other component analyzes what pleasure it brings, using the same neural circuits as when perceiving food or money.
These two distinct neural mechanisms combine to form every judgment of beauty we make when viewing visual works. Neuroscientists have long discussed this topic, offering various viewpoints: some focus on perception (how the brain processes composition, contrast, and form), others on evaluation and reward (placing beauty within the brain's value chains), and thirdly, on systems of imagination and self-reflection.
To conduct the study, 34 volunteers viewed 96 traditional Chinese watercolor paintings in a 7T MRI scanner, powerful enough to detect the slightest changes in blood flow indicating brain activity. After the session, each participant rated how the paintings made them feel.
Instead of directly analyzing these raw ratings, the researchers used a tool from a less obvious source—recommendation mechanisms used by services like Netflix and Spotify. These tools, known as collaborative filtering algorithms, are excellent at identifying hidden patterns in people's preferences. Applying them to aesthetic ratings revealed two underlying dimensions in all participants' responses.
The first dimension classified the paintings by their similarity to figures and by their similarity to landscapes, reflecting the conceptual representation of each painting. The second dimension ranked them from least liked to most liked among all participants, serving as a measure of emotional or hedonic value (sensory pleasure from the experience).
Despite its additional contribution to the overall aesthetic experience, the brain kept these two dimensions noticeably separated. Visual content was interpreted through visual pathways—familiar circuits allowing the distinction between a face and a scene. Hedonic value, conversely, was decoded in other, deeper areas of the brain responsible for reward and pleasure. Simply put, the brain seems to judge a visual work using practically the same mechanism it uses to evaluate everything else in the surrounding world.
It was also found that the intensity of encoding this two-dimensional aesthetic picture depended on the person's level of skill in fine arts. Specifically, the difference appeared in the so-called 'default mode network,' a system of connections in the brain associated with imagination, consciousness, self-reflection, and meaning-making—which many important theories place at the center of the aesthetic experience.
These results suggest that beyond simple impact, art education appears to change the way the brain represents beauty from the outset. This latter point is significant. If the aesthetic experience has a measurable structure in the brain, and if the creation and perception of art can transform it, then art education ceases to be merely cultural enrichment and becomes a kind of training that alters the relationship between perception, emotion, and meaning.
Clinical implications follow a similar line. Art-based therapies for depression, trauma, and dementia have long been valued based on intuition and anecdotal evidence. A clearer neural explanation allows us to test and improve them. Finally, since more and more images around us—in advertising, design, and on screens—are generated by machines, knowing how beauty manifests in the human brain is more important than ever.
We are often inclined to view beauty as something purely personal and believe that scientific questions about it are a distraction. Based on pioneering work in neuroaesthetics, our findings suggest the opposite. Beauty has a structure, and this structure speaks to the type of creature we become throughout countless years of evolution. We do not just look at the world; rather, it seems we cannot stop judging it by its beauty.