Beauty Is in the Brain Networks of the Beholder: An Exploratory Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Listening to music while appreciating its beauty is a common activity in daily life. Only a few studies have explored the association between such aesthetic processes with brain activity and the related patterns of brain connectivity states. Here, we exploratorily applied a recent algorithm for extracting the dynamic changes in time-varying functional connectivity (FC) by measuring functional magnetic resonance imaging responses from 36 participants attentively listening to an entire musical piece. A separate behavioral session served to identify the musical passages that were consistently rated as beautiful or nonbeautiful. We found that the FC state that is most recurrent for beautiful musical passages includes the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and visual brain regions. In turn, the two FC states that were most recurrent during listening to nonbeautiful musical passages included mainly brain structures related to sensory processing plus some associative regions. Moreover, the switching probability of a reward network including OFC, visual, and striatal regions was significantly higher during listening to beautiful musical passages, whereas more frequent transitioning occurred for FC states related to auditory, amygdala, and insula regions during listening to nonbeautiful musical passages. The findings of this exploratory study indicate a key contribution of high-order structures implicated in reward evaluation such as OFC and of visual associative areas related to imagery and revealed an enhanced neural communication during listening to aesthetically valenced music. In turn, the findings obtained during listening to nonbeautiful musical passages are interpreted as associated with the neural demands of disentangling its auditory obscurity.