The Aesthetic Brain

The Aesthetic Brain takes readers on an exciting journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Using the latest advances in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Anjan Chatterjee investigates how an aesthetic sense is etched into our minds, and explains why artistic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses such fundamental questions as: What is beauty? Is it universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art?

Early on, Chatterjee probes the reasons why we find people, places, and even numbers beautiful, highlighting the important relationship between beauty and pleasure. Examining our pleasures allows him to reveal why we enjoy things like food, sex, and money, and how these rewards relate to our aesthetic encounters. Chatterjee's detailed discussion of beauty and pleasure equips readers to confront essential questions about the nature of art, the problems of defining it, and the challenges of interpreting its modern, non-traditional forms. Replete with facts, anecdotes, and analogies, this lively empirical guide to aesthetics offers scientific answers to fundamental questions without deflating the intrinsic wonders of beauty and art in an affordable paperback edition.


Chatterjee is a neuroscientist, so readers might expect a mechanistic treatise on beauty constructed from PET scans and clinical trials. But he offers no simple marriage of roses and neurons. To begin filling in the blanks left by neuroscience, he draws from anthropology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and personal anecdotes. As Chatterjee reminds us, insight is the goal of science and art. His work succeeds by combining both toward a greater appreciation of the human experience.
--Bryan Bello, Science News

Overall, The Aesthetic Brain offers an intriguing overview of the neural and historical underpinnings of beauty and art.
--Scientific American

[Chatterjee] makes a compelling case that although art and beauty may seem nonessential, they epitomize our search for pleasure and meaning in life.
--Scientific American Mind

[Chatterjee] succinctly outlines the areas of the brain that are active in appreciating facial and body attractiveness and the implications for the evolution of our species. He makes the case for those aspects of liking and walking that relate to art and beauty. In his cogent review of the long history of human artifact-making art, he carefully considers the many definitions of aesthetics, art, and beauty. He examines all the major definitions of these and considers how many of them are found wanting in the wide world of art as it is currently comprised.
--Journal of Clinical Psychiatry