[travmatt]

"""

When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define.

In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

"""

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/equations-are-art...

[eli_gottlieb]

>The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

From the sound of that, "beauty" evokes a reward response in the part of the brain (medial orbitofrontal cortex) responsible for processing reinforcement learning signals. This is pretty interesting, since it says that the brain can process a reward signal for a very abstract property that probably has very little correlation with direct sensory rewards.