We studied the brain activity that correlates with the experience of beauty derived from two different sensory sources, visual and auditory stimuli, with the aim of learning whether activity in the same brain area(s) correlates with the experience of beauty when derived from different sources.
Activity in the brains of 21 participants from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds was studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants rated pictures of paintings and musical excerpts on a scale of 1-9 before the scanning experiment. This allowed us to select three sets of stimuli - beautiful, indifferent and ugly - which subjects viewed and listened to, and rated in the fMRI scanner according to how beautiful they perceived each stimulus was, by pressing buttons at the end of each presentation.
Among the several areas that were active with each type of stimulus, only the medial orbit-frontal cortex (mOFC) was significantly active when subjects experienced beauty in both visual and musical domains. A conjunction analysis to determine brain activity that was common to the experience of visual and musical beauty revealed that the same part of the mOFC correlated with the experience of beauty in both modalities. Moreover, we have found that the strength of activation in this area was proportional to the strength of the declared intensity of the experience of beauty.
We conclude that, as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent to any specific modality but can be activated by at least two sources - visual and musical stimuli. In addition, our results reinforce earlier findings that the subjective experience of beauty can be objectively ascertained and its intensity quantitatively determined by measuring activity in the mOFC using brain imaging techniques.

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