The Creativity Post:___"The Neuroscience of Mathematical Beauty" 2077

SYNOPSISmathBIG(01) Looking at the brain scans, the researchers found that the experience of mathematical beauty was related to the same part of the brain that has been found in prior studies to be associated with the experience of visual, musical, and moral beauty. Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty” — Bertrand Russell “Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied.” clive bell