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Does the Experience of Beauty Show Up in the Brain? With Electrodes and a Museum Collection of Artifacts, These Neuroscientists Aim to Find Out
Key takeaways
- Images from: Wahyu via Adobe Stock / Francesco Goretti / public domain “You may open your eyes now,” the researcher says.
- Beneath the tight fabric compressing my skull like a swimming cap, 32 electrodes are primed to catch the firing of neurons in my visual cortex, where information about what I’m seeing is processed in my brain.
- The goal of their experiment, in which I participated as a volunteer, is to understand the biological and neural changes triggered by the aesthetic experience—how the body and brain respond to art.
Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz. Images from: Wahyu via Adobe Stock / Francesco Goretti / public domain “You may open your eyes now,” the researcher says.
Beneath the tight fabric compressing my skull like a swimming cap, 32 electrodes are primed to catch the firing of neurons in my visual cortex, where information about what I’m seeing is processed in my brain. Two more electrodes taped to my clavicles track my heartbeat, and a pair on my left hand gauge my skin’s electrical conductance, or sweat. Wired up, I observe the gold tones and minute engraved lines on the object in front of me—a brass astrolabe used by Galileo himself—as Francesco Goretti hunts for the biological signature of beauty in my body.
Goretti is part of a research team at the new Laboratory of Neuroaesthetics, a collaboration that’s measuring how people react to the beauty of items in the historical and scientific collections at the Galileo Museum in Florence, Italy. The goal of their experiment, in which I participated as a volunteer, is to understand the biological and neural changes triggered by the aesthetic experience—how the body and brain respond to art.