The Aesthetic Brain
Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - 12:01
in Psychology & Sociology
Why is a rose beautiful? This doesn’t seem like a question for science, yet an emerging field called neuroaesthetics seeks to understand art and beauty from a scientific perspective, by understanding the roots of beauty in the brain.Chatterjee is a neuroscientist, so readers might expect a mechanistic treatise on beauty constructed from PET scans and clinical trials. But he offers no simple marriage of roses and neurons. To begin filling in the blanks left by neuroscience, he draws from anthropology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and personal anecdotes.