ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2018
The Biological Basis of Mathematical Beauty.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Narrative Scoping Review of Neuroaesthetics and Objective Understanding of Human Appearance.Plastic and reconstructive surgery. Global open · 2025Article
- Brain's geometries for movements and beauty judgments. A contribution of topos geometries.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Beauty in biology: An empirical assessment.Journal of biosciences · 2023Article
- Judgments of mathematical beauty are resistant to revision through external opinion.PsyCh journal · 2022Article
- The role of expertise in the aesthetic evaluation of mathematical equations.Psychological research · 2022Article
- 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
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our past studies have led us to divide sensory experiences, including aesthetic ones derived from sensory sources, into two broad categories: biological and artifactual. The aesthetic experience of biological beauty is dictated by inherited brain concepts, which are resistant to change even in spite of extensive experience. The experience of artifactual beauty on the other hand is determined by post-natally acquired concepts, which are modifiable throughout life by exposure to different experiences (Zeki, 2009; Zeki and Chén, 2016). Hence, in terms of aesthetic rating, biological beauty (in which we include the experience of beautiful faces or human bodies) is characterized by less variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds or the same individual at different times. Artifactual beauty (in which we include the aesthetic experience of human artifacts, such as buildings and cars) is characterized by greater variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic and cultural groupings and by the same individual at different times. In this paper, we present results to show that the experience of mathematical beauty (Zeki et al., 2014), even though it constitutes an extreme example of beauty that is dependent upon (mathematical) culture and learning, is consistent with one of the characteristics of the biological categories, namely a lesser variability in terms of the aesthetic ratings given to mathematical formulae experienced as beautiful.
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