It will look even better once you’ve wired up your brain (Image: Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann)

“Oh yes, darling, it’s fabulous!” Art appreciation classes might help you enthuse over other people’s creative efforts, but zapping your brain might work just as well.

Zaira Cattaneo at the University of Milan Bicocca in Italy and her colleagues showed paintings to 12 people. Each rated the images before and after receiving either transcranial direct current stimulation, which uses electrodes to deliver a small current to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – a brain area involved in processing emotion – or a mock treatment in which no current was used.

Volunteers rated images containing real-world scenes more highly after stimulation. There was no difference in rating after the mock treatment or for abstract art, possibly because it is processed by brain areas other than the DLPFC.


“The effect of stimulation was subtle, but still pretty remarkable considering the participants were basically just putting a battery on their head,” says Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Explaining why we find something beautiful remains elusive. “Stimulating the DLPFC may improve your mood – like looking through rose-coloured glasses,” says Chatterjee.

Neuroaesthetics – the interplay between brain activity and artistic taste – is a young field, says John Hyman, professor of aesthetics at the University of Oxford. “The study of art and aesthetic experience involves difficult and contested concepts. Neuroscience can’t help us to understand these things unless it is combined with philosophy, in other words, with the study of these concepts.”

For now, Cattaneo hopes the technique may help people with anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure, one that sometimes affects people with Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia.

Journal reference: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nst165

This article appeared in print under the headline “Artificially stimulating a love of art”