Aesthetics is a field of philosophy that interested in beauty. Although it is field of philosophy people try to make connections with science because beauty affects us ourselves. Neuroaesthetics is a field that tries to understand the relationship between aesthetics and perception. We know that everything we sense has meaning in the brain and we perceive in different ways due to firing neurons. When different neurons become active the perception changes. When we see beautiful things, first we focus on visual features, but the question is how we feel pleasure when we see aesthetic things. Visual cortex is the structure processes faces, views, art works. One of the important brain structure for neuroaesthetics is medial orbitofrontal cortex which is for processing positive feelings when beautiful things are seen. Additionally, hippocampus is related because of its relation with memory. Perception of beauty is related to past experiences and emotional processes as well. Of course, there are other factors that affect beauty perception such as cultural factors and social interactions. Culture can shape the beauty standards for people. Other people’s preferences have also impact on beauty perception because people can think that other people’s perception is true. It can be said that beauty perception is complicated because it consists of many factors. Fechner was famous psychophysicist and he is founder of experimental aesthetics since the 19th century. He believes that pleasure and discontent are necessity for better analysis in aesthetic. Contemporary neuroscience claims that medial orbitofrontal cortex shows differences in fMRI scans.
However, studying neuroaesthetics is not that simple due to methodological issues. For instance, when studying neuroaesthetics options are generally limited so measure the options not the perception. Positive findings are new research claims that beauty perception is distributed to many brain regions that are related to perception, reward, decision making and emotions. So attributing beauty perception only medial orbitofrontal cortex will not be true. In brief, neuroaesthetics is a interdisciplinary that investigates the beauty and art works’ effect on brain activity, perceptional processes with neuroscientific methods.