CCNY Research Is Studying the Science Behind Beauty
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
By Anna Dovzhenko
“When you find something beautiful, it’s only partly in the object. It’s really about whether or not that object resonated with your internal representation of the world,” says Dr. Edward Vessel, a neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychology at the City College of New York. His research group, the Visual Neuroaesthetics (VisNA) Lab, is studying the psychological and neural basis for things we find beautiful.
VisNA Lab’s team, led by Dr. Vessel, consists of multiple graduate and undergraduate students across different departments. They study how human aesthetic experience, such as the images we find beautiful or the music we enjoy, is processed by the brain. VisNA Lab aims to understand how people experience beauty, creativity and motivation using machine learning and brain imaging to scientifically measure those experiences. Ultimately, the goal of their research is to understand why we like what we like and use it to improve our well-being. Since prehistoric times, people have longed for beauty. From little wood-carved statuettes and cave paintings of animals to graffiti and A24 movies, the human experience is an endless cycle of enjoying beauty and creating art. We make choices based on our aesthetic liking every day: the song we listen to on our way to school, the color of our phone case, and the background image on our laptop. What influences these choices? Would a person who lived 20,000 years ago enjoy the same movie a modern viewer does?
VisNA lab hypothesizes that the way a person relates to art is connected to their lived experiences. The idea is that people might find artwork more pleasing when they can relate to it. At the same time, people are also attracted to new and interesting things. One of the big projects that VisNA lab is running right now is testing a theory aiming to understand how the balance between the relatable and new is what makes aesthetic experience pleasing.“Do we like things that are more familiar or things that are novel? Well, it’s a balance. So, we’re trying to test this hypothesis that when you find something aesthetically appealing, it’s really a learning signal, a teaching signal to your brain about where your own bleeding edges [are]. So what do you know, what don’t you know, and what is kind of on the edge of what you know, where you kind of can learn something new,” says Dr. Vessel about the project.In the future, they want to add brain imaging to this research and relate the data to particular parts of the brain. Brain imaging is going to help them understand how certain parts of the brain change when a person learns and how these changes then impact a person’s perception of beauty. In the past, the lab already used brain imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study brain systems.
One of their findings was the interesting relationship between the Default Mode Network (DMN) and aesthetic experience. The brain’s Default Mode Network is a brain network that usually engages with our internally directed thoughts, like when we daydream, remember the past, or think about ourselves and our future. It normally doesn’t engage with the outside world. The VisNA Lab’s finding was that the Network seems to be engaged when a person finds something visually appealing.
This project is only one of many conducted in the VisNA Lab. Most of the Lab’s research relates to, even though not limited to, visual arts. CCNY students of all departments and majors are welcome to participate in the study using the CCNY Sona System in exchange for either extra credit or cash.
Anna Dovzhenko is a CCNY junior double-majoring in Political Science and Studio Art. She was born and raised in Ukraine and moved to the U.S. in 2022. Anna is curious about the intersection of politics, culture, and science. In her free time, she likes to photograph.
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