‘Brain can perceive beauty even in mathematical formulae’

Samir Zeki delivers 38th T.S Srinivasan endowment oration

What happens in the brain when it is exposed to a beautiful object? Is it possible to understand the responses it generates to beauty? How does the brain react to good music from bad or a mathematical formula?

Samir Zeki, professor of neurasthenics at the University College, London, walked a captivated audience through a series of paintings and audio clips of music to explain that the image is perceived as beautiful when the brain is intensely active.

‘Answers found’

Mr. Zeki, who delivered the 38th T.S Srinivasan endowment oration on ‘Beauty and Your Brain’ here on Sunday, said though beauty is a sensory perception it could trigger responses in the brain. “The question of how the brain reacted to beauty has been asked for over 2,500 years, but it is only in the last 15 years that an answer had been found.”

Aesthetics is not limited to paintings or music. Even a mathematical formula could trigger an intense reaction in the brain, Mr. Zeki said. Mathematicians have become emotional when they describe mathematical formulae. Since mathematicians from various cultures have experienced the beauty of the same formulae, it followed that the logical deductive system in all the brains is the same, he said.

“The common experience of mathematical beauty is revealing something common in the functioning of our brains. Mathematical beauty therefore belongs to the biological category,” Mr. Zeki said. In an experiment when people were given around 300 stimuli of faces, landscapes and flowers they were asked to rate them on a scale of 0-9 for beauty. A similar exercise was followed using music as stimuli. But it was mathematical beauty that changed the concept of beauty, personally, he said. B.N. Gangadhar, director, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, presented the report for the year.