According to the 19th-century poet Keats, beauty is truth, truth beauty, and
“that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know”. Modern
neuroscientists beg to differ. They want to know much more. Today the UK’s
largest medical research charity will announce that it is ploughing £1
million into the search for the nerve mechanisms that explain beauty – and
with it love, truth and happiness.
The work is controversial because for the first time, brain researchers are
scientifically measuring abstract concepts that artists, philosophers and
clerics have long regarded as eternal.
The work is being led by Semir Zeki, the Professor of Neurobiology at
University College London – one of a group of scientists who are using
functional MRI brain scanning to study the “neural correlates of subjective
mental states” – in layman’s terms, what happens in the brain when we
experience strong feelings.
Zeki’s research has already revealed that beauty really does have a seat in
the brain. Scanning the brains of volunteers looking at paintings they
classified as ugly or beautiful, he found that beauty engaged a part of the
brain called the orbito-frontal cortex. For Zeki, it was a rejection of
Plato’s view that beauty had an independent existence of its own, but an
affirmation of the more Kantian view that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder. Measuring the truth of beauty “What my studies show,” Zeki
says, “is that when you view a painting you regard to be beautiful, not only
is there activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, but the more beautiful you
perceive something to be, the more activity there is. So what you can say is
that there is now an objective measurement of a subjective feeling. And you
can also say that if you know something to be beautiful, that subjective
opinion is far more important than any objective measurement.
“So for the first time in human history, we are at a point where, if beauty is
truth, you can quantify human truth to such an extent that you can measure
it from person to person.”
Is this a profitable direction for scientific study? The Wellcome Trust has a
long history of trying to bridge the divide between science and arts,
funding arts projects exploring and illustrating science, and mounting
events – for example, its recent exhibition on the heart at the Wellcome
Collection – which put artistic and medical interpretations side by side.
Some might question whether the trust can justify making such a large
investment in a field that doesn’t have an obvious application apart from
satisfying our curiosity. But Wellcome’s senior scientist, John Williams,
who considers grant applications for the trust, says the research may well
ultimately have a clinical relevance.
“A diminution in our ability to appreciate beauty in the world around us is
part of many neurological or psychological conditions – for example
depression,” he says. “And I can foresee a situation where some of the
questions that Zeki is asking could illuminate some of the underpinning
changes that occur with such conditions.
“You’ve also got to recognise that scientific research has to take place
across a spectrum – from people asking very blue-skies questions, like Zeki,
to people asking questions which are much more applied in their nature.”
Art unlocks the mind’s subtle processes
Zeki believes his work will have applications too, but as a new Renaissance
man, they’re ambitious ones. He wants to bring together science, arts and
philosophy to answer questions such as how can we measure beauty
objectively, how are beauty and love related, can we understand how the
brain constructs ideals of beauty, and can we actually use that knowledge to
make people happy?
He is gathering a team of researchers drawn from the arts and humanities, as
well as science, to participate in this ambitious project, guided by an
advisory board including the author A. S. Byatt, and the modern polymath,
physician and opera producer Jonathan Miller. “All human activity is a
product of the brain, so looking at the products of the brain helps you to
understand how the brain is organised,” says Zeki.
Art in particular, provoking as it does strong emotions, is a key to unlocking
the mind’s subtle processes. The work of Bridget Riley, for example,
demonstrates the fact that the part of the brain that processes visual
information (the visual cortex) contains separate pathways for processing
motion, colour and form. In a picture like Movement in Squares (above
left), our appreciation of colour or form becomes confused and lost in the
face of perceived movement.
Zeki’s work complements the work of other neuro specialists using functional
MRI brain scanning to study what happens in the brain when we see things or
experience strong feelings. For example, Hideo Sakata, professor of
neurobiology at Nihon University, Tokyo, has discovered that primates have
brain cells whose specific job is to combine visual depth clues – such as
texture and shading – with our ideas of form and perspective. He says that
the painter Cézanne unwittingly exploited this in his paintings that create
a sense of form out of texture: and it’s what makes them so satisfying to
us.
How are aesthetic pleasure and pain linked?
Now Zeki wants to address profound questions posed by art about how our sense
of beauty, creativity and love relates to the brain’s “reward centres”,
which create our feelings of pleasure.
How is it, for example, that we can find a painting such as Caravaggio’s The
Taking of Christ rewarding, while simultaneously finding it painful? Is
there a relationship between aesthetic pleasure and pain, or at least the
longing that very beautiful things bring?
“I also wonder why we can appreciate some works of art as extremely beautiful,
but not be moved by them. For all its beauty, I’ve never been moved by
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, for example.”
But what if this is all, to use the words of Keats, unweaving a rainbow – a
momentous endeavour that in the end removes the mystery and awe from the
things that make life worth living? Zeki admits that he has pondered this
possibility at length.
“But I don’t see it like that,” he says. “My sense of awe at Michelangelo’s Pietaisn’t
diminished by knowing that there’s a part of my brain that responds to the
human body, and another part that responds to the face. There’s still the
feeling of wonder. What we gain is a knowledge of the characteristics of the
human brain that give us our common humanity.”
In the love zones
Romantic and maternal love activate separate parts of the brain.
Both types of love deactivate regions of the brain associated with
negative emotions, social judgment and assessing other people’s emotions.
This is why lovers suspend critical judgement.
An attractive face engages the part of the brain responsible for beauty:
the orbito-frontal cortex.
The face of a loved one engages areas of the brain that are also engaged by sexual
stimuli.
Brain areas experiencing in love and beauty are anatomically closely
connected. This might explain why they are connected in our lives.
