Mathematical beauty activates same brain region as great art or music
People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty.
In a new paper published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain activity of 15 mathematicians when they viewed mathematical formulae that they had previously rated as beautiful, neutral or ugly.
The results showed that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain – namely the medial orbito-frontal cortex – as the experience of beauty derived from art or music.
In the study, each subject was given 60 mathematical formulae to review at leisure and rate on a scale of -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) according to how beautiful they experienced them to be. Two weeks later they were asked to re-rate them while in an fMRI scanner.
The formulae most consistently rated as beautiful (both before and during the scans) were Leonhard Euler’s identity, the Pythagorean identity and the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Leonhard Euler’s identity links five fundamental mathematical constants with three basic arithmetic operations each occurring once and the beauty of this equation has been likened to that of the soliloquy in Hamlet.
Mathematicians judged Srinivasa Ramanujan’s infinite series and Riemann’s functional equation as the ugliest.
Professor Semir Zeki, lead author of the paper from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, said: "We have found that, as with the experience of visual or musical beauty, the activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to be – even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, one which has been debated since classical times, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified."
Link to the paper:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00068/abstract
Reference:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=138907&CultureCode=en
Image via Wikimedia Commons
I think the common factor is elegance. Robust simplicity.
ReplyDeleteWell learning math entails a gradual buildup of knowledge, going from having no idea how something works to feeling like it is a part of you. Or maybe is just the simplicity and elegance, after all you can describe an entire phenomena just in one equation...or set of equations.
ReplyDeleteSymmetry and repetition Important mechanisms in the brain to distinguish from the random chaos of the world.
ReplyDeleteI don't see beauty in math formulas.
ReplyDeleteThe notion that truth must be beautiful (elegant, simple, etc.) seems to indicate a precedence of theory over measurement.
ReplyDeleteWell, I had not once asked myself -- what is common to all things we perceive as beautiful? My answers were:
ReplyDeleteThe things that are beautiful:
(1) associate with perceived higher potential for surrvival (e.g., a green horizon with mountains, woods and blue sky indicate the presence of natural resources, a beautiful girl lets anticipate fine offsprings, even randomly spread bright colors may still be signaling the abundance of resources for life)
(2) associate with predictability (e.g., smooth curves for which you can write equations let you be more in control of nature, Hubble space photographs which coincide with predictions of physical theories let you feel more confident in the same way)
It is not surprising that mathematical formulae evoke beauty responses, if you imagine what they represent.
Math formulae are like secret codes for me...behind every code there are multiple possibilities and variables.
ReplyDeleteyou are a mathematical beauty formula.
ReplyDeleteBarry Craft You would appreciate this. :)
ReplyDeleteThat is a very interesting perspective Kristin Craft !
ReplyDeleteI have seen it over and over again,mathematic and music go hand
ReplyDeletein hand.