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Review

The Neuroscience of Beauty

William Edgar Comfort  1 , Ana Luísa Freitas  1
Paulo Sérgio Boggio  1 , Tanja S. H. Wingenbach  2 , Marília Lira da Silveira Coêlho  1 , William Edgar Comfort  1 , Lucas Murrins Marques  3 , Marcus Vinicius C. Alves  4
, editors.
In: Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction: From Theory to Methodology [Internet]. Cham (CH): Springer; 2023. Chapter 4.
.
Affiliations
Review

The Neuroscience of Beauty

William Edgar Comfort et al.

Excerpt

Appreciating beauty is part of everyday life, when we contemplate fine arts, architecture, music, and natural scenes. Aesthetic appreciation, like any ordinary phenomenon of human life, triggers affective and cognitive processes that can provide the subject with sensations of hedonic pleasure and cognitive self-reward (Leder H, Belke B, Oeberst A, Augustin D. Br J Psychol 95(4):489–508, 2004). Although humans share several neuropsychological processes, the experience of aesthetic appreciation is undeniably idiosyncratic, and sometimes it is not that simple to find beauty where we were supposed to find it, and more often the same object can elicit different reactions amongst observers.

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References

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