ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2014
The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 254 citations in OpenAlex.
- Seeking the "Beauty Center" in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Combined fMRI and eye-tracking evidence on the neural processing of visual ambiguity in photographic aesthetics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The perceptual primacy of feeling: Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Mapping and modeling the semantic space of math concepts.Cognition · 2025Article
- A clearing in the objectivity of aesthetics?Frontiers in neuroimaging · 2023Article
- Judgments of mathematical beauty are resistant to revision through external opinion.PsyCh journal · 2022Article
- Do we enjoy what we sense and perceive? A dissociation between aesthetic appreciation and basic perception of environmental objects or events.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- Universality and superiority in preference for chromatic composition of art paintings.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The Cerebellum and Beauty: The Impact of the Cerebellum in Art Experience and Creativity.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2022Article
- Aesthetic experiences and flourishing in science: A four-country study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Visceromotor roots of aesthetic evaluation of pain in art: an fMRI study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- From Visual Perception to Aesthetic Appeal: Brain Responses to Aesthetically Appealing Natural Landscape Movies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Eros, Beauty, and Phon-Aesthetic Judgements of Language Sound. We Like It Flat and Fast, but Not Melodious. Comparing Phonetic and Acoustic Features of 16 European Languages.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Review of computational neuroaesthetics: bridging the gap between neuroaesthetics and computer science.Brain informatics · 2020Review
- The human quest for discovering mathematical beauty in the arts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Neural correlates of visual aesthetic appreciation: insights from non-invasive brain stimulation.Experimental brain research · 2020Review
- The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Neural correlates of appreciating natural landscape and landscape garden: Evidence from an fMRI study.Brain and behavior · 2019Article
- Intense Beauty Requires Intense Pleasure.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Art and Psychological Well-Being: Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many have written of the experience of mathematical beauty as being comparable to that derived from the greatest art. This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such a highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources. To determine this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the activity in the brains of 15 mathematicians when they viewed mathematical formulae which they had individually rated as beautiful, indifferent or ugly. Results showed that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates parametrically with activity in the same part of the emotional brain, namely field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), as the experience of beauty derived from other sources.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.