I found the left picture special and beautiful since it’s the first time I have seen snow consecutively in a few days, and Atlanta doesn’t snow every year. And the right one is a beautiful sunrise that I captured when I pulled an all-nighter.

Have you ever stared at a painting or heard a song and felt an instant, almost electric sense of pleasure? 

That feeling might not just be poetic—it might be neurological.

I’ve always loved art, but I never questioned why certain pieces moved me. I remember I read a blog before, the author described his experience as follows: “During a museum visit last year, I found myself captivated by a seemingly simple painting: a misty landscape with perfect symmetry. It felt peaceful like it was ‘speaking’ to something in me. Turns out, it was.”

I had a similar experience at the Chiayi Art Museum in Taiwan. I came across a piece by Chen Cheng-po, a renowned Taiwanese modernist. His painting Sunset in Tamsui captured the reflection of the sun over the river, mirrored almost perfectly across the water’s surface.

It reminded me of a photo I might take on a calm evening—but on canvas, it felt deeper, more intimate. I realized later that it wasn’t just the colors or the landscape—it was the symmetry. Research in neuroaesthetics suggests that symmetry taps into an ancient brain response tied to survival and pleasure. I wasn’t just seeing beauty; my brain was rewarding me for it.

Sunset in Tamsui – Chen Cheng-Po (1935)

That “something” was likely my orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)—a part of the brain’s reward system. When we perceive something as beautiful, whether it’s a painting, a face, or even a mathematical equation, the OFC lights up. Neuroaesthetics is a field that studies this exact connection between art and brain chemistry.

A 2004 study by Kawabata and Zeki used fMRI to explore how participants responded to different paintings. The more “beautiful” the subject rated the art, the more active their OFC became. Fascinatingly, this reaction wasn’t limited to specific styles—classical portraits and abstract patterns could both evoke strong neural activity.

This made me rethink how personal beauty really is. The fact that we all light up to different stimuli doesn’t make beauty arbitrary—it makes it deeply personal. For me, it’s the balance of symmetry and mood. For others, it might be chaos, texture, or color.

I now see beauty not just as something aesthetic, but as something that connects emotion to cognition, biology to culture.

So the next time you get goosebumps from a song or stare at a painting for too long, don’t just thank the artist. Thank your brain.

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Reference
Kawabata H, Zeki S. 2004. Neural correlates of beauty. J Neurophysiol 91:1699–1705.

Ishizu T, Zeki S. 2011. Toward a brain-based theory of beauty. PLoS ONE 6(7):e21852.

Chatterjee A. 2014. The aesthetic brain: how we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art. Oxford University Press.