Beauty and the Brain: Researchers Look to Psychedelics to further the Study of Neuroaesthetics

In the Cannabis, Health, and Addiction Over the Lifespan (CHAOS) Lab, directed by Kent Hutchison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, researchers are pondering what it means to be beautiful.

Specifically, what’s happening in the brain when beauty is perceived and how that may overlap with the neuroscience of psychedelic substance use.

“We suggest that psychedelics have potential to create an endogenous state akin to the experience of viewing a magnificent work of art, where environmental elements are optimally encoded to extract perceptual, emotional, and semantic information,” the researchers write in a new paper on the potential of neuroaesthetics of the psychedelic state published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

“However, instead of an actual piece of art, a heightened appreciation may be applied to otherwise ordinary objects within the user's environment such as plants, fabrics, or furniture,” they continue.

While the research field of neuroaesthetics is relatively new, the researchers propose that there’s potential for incorporating psychedelics into the work because of how those substances affect the brain. They also say the reverse is true and that learning more about how the brain perceives beauty could help create better psychedelic therapeutic experiences in clinical settings.

"With psychedelics becoming more widely used both inside and outside of clinics, finding ways to make these experiences more beneficial for people is an important direction for research," Hutchison says.

Jake Hooper, a clinical research coordinator for the CHAOS Lab and lead author of the paper, explains the basics of neuroaesthetics and what this specialty may lend to the future of therapeutic psychedelic use.

Let’s start at the beginning. What is neuroaesthetics?

It’s a sub field of cognitive neuroscience and looks at what the neural mechanisms are underlying the experience of beauty, or what we call an aesthetic experience. There’s a range of topics to explore within this field, like what contributes to the perception of beauty according to different cultures or different individual idiosyncrasies. But generally, you can think of it as a map to the neural mechanisms involved in the experience of beauty.

This is an emerging field that’s really taking off right now. What do researchers hope to learn and does that impact health research?

Beyond demystifying the psychological experience, it lends some empirical grounding. There’s been all kinds of philosophical and artistic attention to aesthetics for thousands and thousands of years, and we’re just now starting to apply scientific principles to that study.

We often think of beauty as being in the eye of the beholder. Does that make this an area that’s difficult to apply those scientific principles?

It’s extremely difficult because there is a large degree of variability in what people consider beautiful. But you can consider universal trends and study what phenomena most people would consider beautiful. Of course, there is a limit to how much you can describe with neuroaesthetics, but that’s another part of the field that’s worth looking into and exploring — how different cultural backgrounds or different developmental backgrounds contribute to how people view something as aesthetically pleasing.

In this paper, you write that psychedelics have meaning-enhancing properties. That seems to play right into the heart of neuroaesthetics.

There’s a large body of research that suggests psychedelic substances can contribute to experiences of insight and openness. For example, people sometimes describe “mystical” experiences. When you talk about aesthetic experience in this work, we're not really considering something that's purely sensory. A true aesthetic experience is something that has an emotional dimension, meaningful dimension, a perceptual dimension, and all those things combined create an emergent experience. It's not something that's not necessarily a static thing; it's more of a dynamic process that integrates all those aspects together.

Where do you see this field of research, especially related to psychedelics, going?

One avenue would be to analyze changes in neural activity in different regions of the brain corresponding to the neural activity that also occurs with aesthetic experiences. This could include looking at sensory components, perceptual motor components, and regions involved in emotional appraisal.

There are other interesting overlaps, too. We can look at brain waves and see how they correlate in psychedelic and neuroaesthetic research, or the phenomenon of ego dissolution, which is widespread is psychedelic literature. The latter likely involves a brain network called the default mode network (DMN), a hot topic in neuroscience more broadly, but especially applicable to both psychedelic and neuroaesthetic research.

Is there room for this research to play a part in therapeutics?

Yeah, absolutely. Setting can be extremely important for the therapeutic outcome of a psychedelic experience, so when we talk about setting, we can also talk about the aesthetic quality of the setting. Doing research to modify the beauty of the actual setting that person is in — like being in nature versus indoors, for example, or incorporating more symmetry or harmony — could have implications for the outcome of therapeutic psychedelic use.

So, in other words, what contributes to a “good trip” versus a bad one.

Yeah, exactly. I think that’s an important question for therapeutic uses of psychedelics.

In many ways, this paper provides a road map for understanding the importance of neuroaesthetics and psychedelic research. What’s the big takeaway?

When we are studying art, it's also important to study brain function, and especially changes in brain function.

We can do that systematically with psychedelic substances, rather than just studying people who have damage to their brain. Because these substances are generally considered physiologically safe, we can induce perturbations in brain function, and therefore, study the mechanisms which may create aesthetic experience in, hopefully, a safer way than if you were to do some other sort of invasive methods.