El área cerebral de la percepción estética.

Visual aesthetic perception ("aesthetics") or the capacity to visually perceive a particular attribute added to other features of objects, such as form, color, and movement, was fixed during human evolutionary lineage as a trait not shared with any great ape. Although prefrontal brain expansion is mentioned as responsible for the appearance of such human trait, no current knowledge exists on the role of prefrontal areas in the aesthetic perception. The visual brain consists of "several parallel multistage processing systems, each specialized in a given task such as, color or motion" [Bartels, A. & Zeki, S. (1999) Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. B 265, 2327-2332]. Here we report the results of an experiment carried out with magnetoencephalography which shows that the prefrontal area is selectively activated in humans during the perception of objects qualified as "beautiful" by the participants. Therefore, aesthetics can be hypothetically considered as an attribute perceived by means of a particular brain processing system, in which the prefrontal cortex seems to play a key role.
Camilo J. Cela-Conde *, Gisèle Marty *, Fernando Maestú , Tomás Ortiz , Enric Munar *, Alberto Fernández , Miquel Roca *, Jaume Rosselló *, and Felipe Quesney
*Laboratorio de Sistemática Humana, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Carretera de Valldemossa s/n, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Centro de Magnetoencefalografía Dr. Pérez Modrego, Universidad Complutense, Facultad de Medicina Pabellón 8. Ciudad Universitaria s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain; and Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, QB, Canada H3A 2T5