Neuroaesthetics
nammu.academy · Neuroaesthetics & Brain Health
Beauty
is
medicine.
The neuroscience of why stopping in front of something beautiful is not a luxury — and what it is actually doing to your brain, your inflammation, and your protection against decline.
As most of you know, I live right in the middle of the city centre in Utrecht. In the current housing market crisis, I was one of the lucky ones to get my hands on a room there — and what kind of room. Over the years, I've managed to make it entirely my own. Designed and DIY-ed my own furniture. Painted the art on the walls myself. Chosen everything carefully — aesthetically, but also with the obsessive intentionality of someone who considers her home a health environment as much as a living space. Because I am a biohacker, after all. And yes, it's gorgeous. Even if I say so myself.
But there is one specific thing I love most about it. And it happens every single day, at a different time, at a different angle, depending on the season. The light comes through my windows — Utrecht light, which has a particular quality I can't quite name — and in its own way lands on my furniture. On something I built. On a colour I chose. And everything just becomes, for a moment, complete.
I write it in my journal almost every day, in the gratitude section. Not the apartment in general — this specific moment. The light. The angle. The way it lands.
And there are more of these. Outside the house too. Moments where I stopped in front of something that caught my attention and my eye — a piece of music playing somewhere, a painting I wasn't expecting to be moved by, a particular view of nature even in a bruising city like Utrecht, or just... the way something ordinary suddenly arranges itself into something that stops you. The way light does. The way music does. The way a sentence sometimes does, when it says exactly the right thing in exactly the right order.
I used to think these were just pleasant moments. A small luxury. Something to be grateful for, filed away, and moved on from. Then I started reading the neuroscience. And it turned out that what was happening in those moments was not nothing. Not a break from the productive parts of the day. Not a soft, subjective, unquantifiable feeling that resists scientific scrutiny. It was, in fact, one of the most measurable neurobiological events the body can produce. And it has a name. And it has a mechanism. And it is, by any reasonable definition of the word, protective.
"That awe, wonder, and beauty promote healthier levels of cytokines suggests that the things we do to experience these emotions — a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art — has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy." — Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley
The field is called neuroaesthetics. It's younger than it deserves to be — the term was coined by Semir Zeki in 1999, and it has been building ever since, slowly accumulating the kind of peer-reviewed evidence that makes the people who dismissed beauty as a soft topic increasingly uncomfortable. What it has found, across fMRI studies and immunological assays and longitudinal cohorts, is that aesthetic experience — the genuine kind, the kind that stops you — activates specific neural circuits that overlap significantly with stress reduction, immune regulation, reward processing, and long-term cognitive protection.
Not because beauty is pleasant. Because of what it does, biochemically, to the body that encounters it.
Let's go through it properly.
What happens in the
brain when something
stops you
The first thing to understand is that the brain does not process beauty passively. It doesn't receive it the way a camera receives light. It constructs it — actively, effortfully, using a specific set of neural networks that are among the most evolutionarily significant and metabolically expensive the brain operates.
When you encounter something genuinely beautiful — not merely pleasant, but the kind of thing that actually stops you — three networks activate simultaneously, in a pattern that doesn't occur under ordinary conditions. The reward network, centred on the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens, releases dopamine, endogenous cannabinoids, and opioids in a cocktail that normally responds only to biologically significant stimuli: food, sex, social bonding. The sensory cortex activates in the specific modality of the experience — visual areas for art, auditory areas for music, something more distributed for nature and space. And — most surprisingly, and most significantly — the default mode network lights up.[3]
The default mode network. The same network involved in self-referential thought, emotional processing, memory consolidation, and the integration of meaning. The network that most cognitive tasks suppress, that goes quiet when you're focused on external demands. Beauty activates it. Intense aesthetic experience — the kind where something genuinely moves you — does something almost no other waking experience does: it engages both the external, reward-driven networks and the internal, self-referential ones simultaneously. The result is an experience that is at once deeply personal and deeply biological. You feel it as meaning. The brain is running it as medicine.[3]
The neuroscience — awe, IL-6, and the inflammatory pathway
The most striking finding in this area comes from a 2015 study by Jennifer Stellar, Dacher Keltner, and colleagues at UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto. In two separate experiments involving more than 200 participants, they measured the relationship between discrete positive emotions and levels of interleukin-6 — IL-6 — a key pro-inflammatory cytokine. Positive emotions across the board were associated with lower IL-6. But one emotion was the strongest predictor by a significant margin, even when controlling for relevant personality and health variables.[1]
Awe. The emotion most reliably produced by encountering something vast, beautiful, or transcendent. Not joy. Not contentment. Not pride. Awe. The researchers proposed a mechanism: awe is associated with curiosity and a desire to explore, behavioural patterns antithetical to those of inflammation — where individuals typically withdraw from their environment. The body, in a state of awe, is doing the physiological opposite of what it does when fighting infection or managing chronic stress.[1]
Elevated IL-6 is associated with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and neurodegenerative decline. Chronically high pro-inflammatory cytokines — not the acute response to genuine illness, but the chronic low-grade elevation of a body under sustained stress — are implicated in virtually every condition that disproportionately affects women in midlife and beyond. Awe, measured on a given day, predicted lower IL-6 on that same day. The things you do to experience wonder have a direct influence on the chemistry of inflammation.
Interactive — the awe spectrum: where was your last beauty encounter?
Drag the slider to your last beauty experience and see what was happening in your brain.
The distinction between merely pleasant and genuinely awe-inducing matters neurochemically. Mild aesthetic pleasure activates the reward circuit. Awe — the specific emotion produced by encountering something vast enough to briefly exceed your current frameworks for understanding the world — does something additional. It engages the default mode network, triggers the pro-social neurochemistry associated with a felt sense of connection to something larger than oneself, and produces the measurable cytokine response. The dose-response relationship between the intensity of the aesthetic experience and its immunological effects is an active area of research. The preliminary signal is consistent: bigger awe, bigger effect.[1]
This is why the light through the windows matters. Not because it's grand — it isn't. But because it stops me. It produces, for a few seconds, something that functions like the small, daily version of awe: the perception of something that arranges itself, without warning, into unexpected beauty. The brain notices the unexpectedness. The incongruity resolution. The moment of the ordinary becoming briefly extraordinary. And in that noticing, the chemistry shifts.
Your modality —
and what it does specifically
Not all beauty works the same way neurologically. The modality matters. Visual art, music, nature, pattern and mathematics, human connection — each activates partially distinct neural circuits, and each has a somewhat different neuroprotective profile. The overlap is substantial: all of them engage the reward network, all of them involve the dopaminergic system, all of them reduce cortisol under the right conditions. But the specifics differ, and knowing your dominant modality is the first step toward using this information deliberately rather than just occasionally.
Music is the best-studied. The experience of musical chills — that involuntary goosebump response to a passage of music that is almost too beautiful to hold — involves anatomically distinct dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens during the anticipation of the chill, and again during the chill itself. Two separate dopaminergic events, triggered by the same piece of music, a few seconds apart. The neurological signature of musical chills closely resembles that of other biologically significant reward events — the brain, on some level, treats a melody that moves you as a form of survival-relevant information.[2]
Visual art engages the reward network and the default mode network simultaneously — the pattern that distinguishes genuine aesthetic experience from ordinary visual processing. Research by Edward Vessel at NYU found that artworks rated as most personally moving by participants produced activation in medial prefrontal cortex regions associated with self-referential processing — regions that are essentially quiet during most external tasks. Something in a truly moving image reaches inward. It touches the part of the brain that is most essentially you.[3]
Nature activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the rest-and-digest branch — in a way that built environments largely don't. Attention restoration theory, backed by a substantial body of research, proposes that natural environments restore directed attention capacity by allowing the brain to shift into a mode of effortless, fascinated attention. This is not relaxation in the passive sense. It's a specific neural state — metabolically different from stress, different from focused work, different from rest — that appears to have restorative effects on cognitive fatigue and prefrontal function.[4]
Interactive — your beauty modality and what it does to your brain
The female layer:
estradiol and the hedonic response
Here is the part that is almost never mentioned in coverage of neuroaesthetics — despite being directly relevant to every woman reading this.
The reward response to beauty — the dopaminergic activation, the hedonic pleasure, the felt sense of being moved — is modulated by estradiol. The same hormone that modulates fear extinction, cognitive performance, and stress reactivity also modulates the capacity to experience aesthetic pleasure. And when estradiol declines — as it does in perimenopause and menopause — something measurable happens to the hedonic system.
Research on perimenopausal women has found that reductions in estradiol are associated with anhedonia — reduced motivation to seek out rewarding stimuli, and reduced experience of pleasure from things that were previously pleasurable. The striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the key reward-processing regions that light up during intense aesthetic experience, show reduced activation when estradiol drops. This is not a mood disorder, though it can look like one. It is a neurobiological effect of hormonal transition on the very circuits that make beauty feel like beauty.[5]
What this means is something I want to say carefully, because it cuts in two directions. On one hand: if you are in a phase of hormonal transition and beauty feels less vivid, less arresting, less able to stop you — that is not you becoming jaded or losing something essentially yourself. It is estradiol. The circuits are intact. The capacity is intact. The hormonal support for the experience has changed. On the other hand: the neuroprotective effects of beauty are most accessible when you actively seek aesthetic experience — when you design your environment deliberately, build regular encounters with the modalities that move you most, treat beauty not as a luxury that arrives when conditions are right but as something you engineer, daily, because your brain needs it.
I think this is, in fact, what I have been doing in my apartment without fully knowing the mechanism. Not just making it nice. Making it therapeutic.
I wasn't just making it nice. I was, without fully knowing the mechanism, making it therapeutic. The light through the window lands on furniture I built myself — and something in the brain registers that as nourishment.
Interactive — what awe does to inflammatory markers over time
Hover along the curves to see what's happening to IL-6 and the brain at each point.
The inflammation story connects to everything else in the nammu archive. Chronic elevated IL-6 is implicated in depression — a condition that affects women at twice the rate of men. It's implicated in the metabolic dysfunction we covered in the PMOS post. It's implicated in cognitive decline, in accelerated brain ageing, in the conditions that gather around a nervous system that has been under sustained stress without sufficient recovery. Awe, encountered regularly, measurably shifts this chemistry. Not as a cure. Not as a replacement for any other intervention. As a mechanism that runs alongside everything else — inexpensive, accessible, requiring only that you stop in front of something beautiful and let it actually land.
The framing of beauty as a luxury — as something to be pursued after the serious work of health is done, a reward rather than a tool — is, in light of this research, precisely backwards. Beauty is not the dessert. It is one of the most efficient anti-inflammatory interventions the body has access to. And it requires nothing except attention.
The Practice — engineering beauty into your daily neurochemistry
What the science says to actually do
Design your environment for daily awe, not just aesthetics. There is a difference between a space that is pleasant and a space that stops you. The light through my windows stops me because I positioned the furniture to catch it. That's not accident — it's engineering. Identify what produces the stop in your specific case, and arrange your daily environment to encounter it without effort. The brain responds to beauty it doesn't have to seek out as readily as the beauty it finds.
Know your modality and treat it as a non-negotiable. Music, visual art, nature, pattern — whichever produces your most reliable awe response is the one to prioritise. Not because the others don't matter, but because the neural and immunological effects scale with the intensity of the experience. A piece of music that gives you chills is doing something the mildly pleasant playlist is not. Seek the version that moves you, specifically.
Let it land — fully — without immediately contextualising it. The default mode network activation that characterises intense aesthetic experience requires time. It unfolds over seconds, sometimes longer. The habit of immediately reaching for your phone to photograph the beautiful thing, or narrating it to someone else in real time, may interrupt the very neural process that produces the neuroprotective effect. Stop. Let it happen. Let the brain finish what it's doing before you do anything else with it.
In periods of hormonal flux, seek beauty more actively, not less. The estradiol-modulated reduction in hedonic response during perimenopause or post-hormonal contraceptive transition means the experience may feel less vivid than it once did. This is not the time to stop. The circuits are still there. They still respond. The response may need more input to produce the same effect — which is an argument for more deliberate, more frequent encounters with the modalities that have historically moved you most, not fewer.
Make things, not just consume them. The research on neuroaesthetics has focused primarily on encountering beauty — but the neural signature of creating something you find beautiful overlaps significantly with the aesthetic experience circuit. I painted the art on my walls. Built the furniture. Chose the colour of the light it catches. The brain's reward response to making something beautiful may produce the same dopaminergic and anti-inflammatory cascade as encountering it. This is an underresearched area. But the signal is consistent enough to act on.
Every morning, the light comes through the windows at a slightly different angle. Some days it catches the wood. Some days it's just a stripe on the wall. Some days I miss it entirely. But the days I don't — the days I stop, and let it land, and write it in the gratitude section before I write anything else — those are the days I'm doing something that goes beyond appreciation. Something measurable. Something the immunological literature would recognise as an intervention.
I used to think the apartment was a comfort. It is. But it's also a lab. And the experiment running in it, daily, is the same one the neuroaesthetics researchers are running with fMRI machines and cytokine assays — just in miniature, just with furniture I built myself and light I arranged to catch it.
Beauty is not the reward for a healthy life. It is one of the mechanisms by which a healthy life is produced. The brain knows this. It always has. We're just catching up.
With love and science, always —
nammu.academy
References
- Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033
- Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726
- Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: Intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 66. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066
- Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
- Wagg, J., Lorne, C., Jung, Y., Haile, K., Osser, L., Granta, K., Chivers, M., & Eisenlohr-Moul, T. (2023). Hormone sensitivity predicts the beneficial effects of transdermal estradiol on reward-seeking behaviors in perimenopausal women. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 157, 106370. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106370