When Edmund Burke ( 1757) published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, of which our title is an imitation, he was removed by centuries from early speculations on the origins of the sublime and its experience. Sublime and beautiful experiences thus appear to engage separate and distinct brain systems. The results revealed a distinctly different pattern of brain activity from that obtained with the experience of beauty, with none of the areas active with the latter experience also active during experience of the sublime. This allowed us to select, for each subject, five sets of stimuli-from ones experienced as very sublime to those experienced as not at all sublime-which subjects viewed and re-rated in the scanner while their brain activity was imaged. Prior to the experiment, they viewed pictures of landscapes, which they rated on a scale of 1–5, with 5 being the most sublime and 1 being the least. 21 subjects participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. We wanted to chart the pattern of brain activity which correlates with the declared intensity of experience of the sublime, and to learn whether it differs from the pattern that correlates with the experience of beauty, reported in our previous studies (e.g., Ishizu and Zeki, 2011).

Philosophies of aesthetics have posited that experience of the sublime-commonly but not exclusively derived from scenes of natural grandeur-is distinct from that of beauty and is a counterpoint to it.

Brain Tests by Edmund Shaftesbury