Notes Towards a (Neurobiological) Definition of Beauty

Abstract

Summary Humans know when they themselves experience beauty, even though the term itself has been difficult to define adequately for a variety of reasons. Given this centuries’ old failure to give an adequate definition of beauty, perhaps the time has come to enquire whether the experience of beauty, regardless of its source, can be defined in neural terms.

Burke's “sensitive” sublime rooted in brain and body versus Kant's transcendental concept in the German Romantic discourse

“…Before focusing on the German debate about the sublime from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and before introducing what we refer to as Edmund Burke's sensitive concept of the sublime, we need to briefly present the results of neurobiological research conducted by Semir Zeki and colleagues (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011, 2014; Zeki, 1998, 1999, 2008, 2019; Zeki, Romaya, Benincasa, & Atiyah, 2014) on the role of the brain in experiencing the beautiful and the sublime (Zeki et al, 2014). Zeki has demonstrated, with brain‐imaging techniques, his revolutionary intuition: The experience of beauty derived from different sources, whether sensory (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011), cognitive (Ishizu & Zeki, 2014), or mathematical (Zeki et al, 2014), correlates with “activity in a given, specific, part of the emotional brain, namely field A1 of the medial orbitofrontal cortex” (Zeki, 2019, p. 108).…”

“…The experience of artefactual and natural beauty is not really dependent on the proportion or characteristics of the object, but on a vague list of qualities, such as variation and color, intervening on the senses. Zeki points out that “the value of Burke's definition lies … in acknowledging explicitly the critical role played by the brain in the experience of beauty” (Zeki, 2019, p. 108).…”

Cognitive entailments among “the true, the good, the beautiful”: a mainland Chinese sample

“…It has been demonstrated in several cultures that one tend to think that beautiful people are good and vice versa (the "beautiful is good" and "good is beautiful" stereotype; Gross & Crofton, 1977;Owens & Ford, 1978;Eagly et al, 1991;Wheeler & Kim, 1997;Little, Burt & Perett, 2006;Han et al, 2018;He et al, 2022) 1 . "Beautiful" and "good" have also received considerable attention in neuroimaging studies: brain regions responsive to aesthetic judgements and moral judgements are shared (Zeki, 2014(Zeki, , 2019, with moral judgement regions including aesthetic judgement regions (Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011;Avram et al, 2013;T. Wang et al, 2015;X.…”

Filosofía experimental ayer y hoy: revisión de una tradición filosófica en proceso de (re)consolidación

“…Este tipo de examen es realizado tanto por filósofos como por científicos. En relación con estos últimos, algunos de ellos son Antonio Damasio (1994) y Frans de Waal (1996) en el ámbito de la ética o Semir Zeki (2019) y Vilayanur Ramachandran (2012) en el ámbito de la estética. En relación con los primeros, en muchos casos se trata de filósofos de la biología o de las ciencias cognitivas que luego de haber realizado numerosos estudios de orden epistemológico, arriesgan hipótesis naturalistas a la hora de elucidar o buscar soluciones a problemas filosóficos de distinto tipo.…”