Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Mathematical Minds Stir A Beauty Within

February 15, 2014

Mathematical Minds Stir A Beauty Within

by John Ross

MATHEMATICIAN John Nash was catapulted into the public eye by the film A Beautiful Mind. Now scientists have found that maths activates the same part of the mind that processes beauty.

University College London neurobiologists have discovered that when mathematicians consider aesthetically pleasing formulas it triggers activity in the part of the brain normally stimulated when people contemplate art or music.

“To many of us, mathematical formulae appear dry and inaccessible, but to a mathematician an equation can embody the quintessence of beauty,” said Semir Zeki, lead author of a paper in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“Many have compared the experience of mathematical beauty to that derived from the greatest art.”

The team tested the relationship by asking 15 postgraduate and postdoctoral mathematicians to rate 60 mathematical formulas on a 10-point scale for beauty.

Two weeks later they repeated the exercise inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.

“The experience of mathematical beauty correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex as the experience of beauty derived from other sources,” they found.

This suggested a neurobiological basis to beauty “that is independent of culture and learning”.

Professor Zeki said that, for both maths and art, the strength of the brain activity correlated with the intensity of the experience of beauty.

“This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics which has been debated since classical times, namely, whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified.”

The study also tackled the relationship between beauty and understanding, which Plato considered an essential ingredient for experiencing beauty in its highest forms. But the scans suggested the activity in the brain was not sparked by understanding “but by the experience of beauty alone”.

“(This) raises issues of profound interest for the future that beauty, even in so abstract an area as mathematics, is a pointer to what is true in nature,” the paper says.

“What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists, in spite of going against the principle of simplicity, is its great mathematical beauty.

“By being based on beauty, future mathematical formulations may reveal something about our brain, and (also) about the extent to which our brain organisation reveals something about our universe.”

The theorem consistently rated most beautiful by mathematicians was Euler’s formula, which links trigonometry with the exponential function.

With many thanks to The Australian (pay wall)