By Manuel Fuentes.

Antofagasta, Chile, Apr 11 (EFE).– Looking at a beautiful picture or listening to pleasant music trigger the human brain, which also intensifies its activity in the presence of “moral beauty,” British neurobiologist Semir Zeki said.

“Which neuronal systems get activated when we contemplate beauty? It is a complex question, because beauty is a less tangible concept than, say, colors,” Zeki, a professor at University College London and considered the founder of neuroesthetics, said.

Zeki, who participated in the 3rd Port of Ideas Science Festival in the Chilean city of Antofagasta, said “the reaction before desirable events, people and objects is a response located in the same area of the emotional brain.”

The author of four books and almost 300 articles published internationally, Zeki goes further and argues that the experience of moral beauty, or what is commonly considered to be good acts, also activates the area of the cerebral cortex where visual and auditory stimuli get a response.

“Esthetical judgments can be measured quantitatively,” Zeki, author of “Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain” (1999), said.

“Beauty is, in good part, a quality of the bodies that affects human beings through the senses,” Zeki said, paraphrasing what Irish writer, philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, considered the father of British Liberalism, wrote in 1757.

British art critic Clive Bell, a friend of Bertrand Russell and Virginia Wolf, wondered in his 1914 book, “Art,” what caused emotions in humans when they saw an esthetic quality in a work of art, and what could be the common quality in, say, a church like Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, Gothic cathedrals’ windows and a Cezanne painting. EFE