Neural Correlates of Visual Aesthetics – Beauty as the Coalescence of Stimulus and Internal State

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 7; no. 2; p. e31248
• Main Authors: Jacobs, Richard H. A. H., Renken, Remco, Cornelissen, Frans W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 22.02.2012; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Activation; Adult; Aesthetics; Amygdala; Beauty; Biology; Brain; Brain - physiology; Brain Mapping; Brain research; Coalescence; Coalescing; Cognition & reasoning; Comparative analysis; Correlation; Cortex (cingulate); Esthetics; External stimuli; Female; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Humans; Judgment; Judgments; Laboratories; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Medical imaging; Medicine; Nerve Net - physiology; Neurosciences; Roughness; Semantics; Sensory perception; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Studies; Visual cortex; Visual Perception; Visual stimuli; Netherlands

How do external stimuli and our internal state coalesce to create the distinctive aesthetic pleasures that give vibrance to human experience? Neuroaesthetics has so far focused on the neural correlates of observing beautiful stimuli compared to neutral or ugly stimuli, or on neural correlates of jud...