The same regions of the brain are activated when a person either looks at an aesthetically pleasing mathematical formula or at a great work of art, a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found, suggesting there is a neurological basis to beauty.
The brain perceives lots of different things as beautiful, but we tend to think of things like art and music or sensory experiences when describing beautiful experiences. But from a more intellectual standpoint, beauty can refer to mathematical formulae.
In this study, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the brain activity of 15 mathematicians when they viewed 60 mathematical formulae that they had previously described as beautiful, neutral or ugly. They were asked to rate them on a scale of -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) according to how pleasing they were. Two weeks later, they rated the same formulae in an fMRI scanner.
The results showed that the emotional part of the brain, the medial orbito-frontal cortex, which correlates to experiences of art or musical beauty, was also activated by mathematical beauty.
Professor Semir Zeki, the study's lead author from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at University College London, says this report answers a unique question.
"We have found that activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to -- even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified," he said in a press release.
Interestingly enough, Leonhard Euler's identity, the Pythagorean identity and the Cauchy-Riemann equations were the formulae most consistently rated as beautiful both before and during the fMRI scans. Srinivasa Ramanujan's infinite series and Riemann's functional equation were determined to be the ugliest equations, according to the mathematicians.
