Brain Scans Predict Subjective Beauty

When we see an aesthetically pleasing thing, for example a piece of art, our brain lights up.

By further investigating the connection between humans' subjective preferences and brain activity, scientists will someday be able to pinpoint various characteristics that make a painting, musical number or other sensory experience beautiful, researchers said.

"For the first time, we can ask questions about subjective preferences and relate them to activity in the brain," lead researcher Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "There are some people who would prefer [beauty] to remain a mystery, but that's not how scientists view things."

In a previous study, Zeki found that an area in the pleasure and reward center of the brain is more active when people view a painting or hear a piece of music that they think is beautiful, compared with art they didn't find particularly pleasing. Because the brain activity of study participants rose accordingly with their ratings of beauty, the results suggest that scientists can look at the brain to objectively measure an experience that