Essay Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty

physicist Gustav Fechner was also a poet and art critic. Armed with the tools of science, Fechner sought to reconcile his various interests. He would doubtless be interested by technological developments in neuroscience that have revealed the operations of neurons at cellular resolution and have enabled us to peer almost unnoticed into each other’s working brains. But can these tools advance our understanding of aesthetics beyond Fech-ner’s insights [1]? The nascent field of neuroaesthetics claims it can. Here we consider what questions this new field is poised to answer. We underscore the importance of distinguishing between beauty, art, and perception—terms often conflated by ‘‘aesthetics’’—and identify adjacent fields of neuroscience such as sensation, perception, attention, reward, learning, memory, emotions, and decision making, where discoveries will likely be informative. Aesthetics and Neuroscience Aesthetics has a complex history. The term derives from the Greek ‘‘perception’’ and was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1750 as the study of sensory knowledge