2011-06-11

On the idea that beauty is something objective

Scientific studies regularly appear whose conclusions are validating the hypotheses that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but instead is an objective reality that is inscribed in the biology of life.

Here are links to the two last stories that capted my attention:

- Visual art: I just read an article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian titled "The ecstasy of art" in which he states: "A scientific study claims to have shown that beautiful paintings produce the same brain activity we feel when we see someone we love: biologically, great art is pure joy. It's nice to have scientific confirmation of something I already knew."

"Berns reexamined the functional magnetic resonance imaging scans his group had collected from 27 adolescents in 2007, looking for regions of the brain where neural activity during a 15-second clip of a song correlated with the subject's likeability ratings. Two regions stood out: the orbitofrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. "That was a good check that we were on the right track, because we knew from a ton of other studies that those regions are heavily linked to reward and anticipation," Berns says. "

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