Stand in front of Turner’s Sun Rising Over Water (1825-30) and something odd tends to happen. The painting holds you, even though observers might struggle to say why. Maybe it is the colour, the balance, the composition, or the strange stillness the artwork seems to carry.

Whatever it is, you feel it long before you can explain why. And the stranger next to you, looking at the same canvas with the same awe in their eyes, very likely feels it too.

We often say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yet show almost anyone a misty Chinese Song-dynasty mountain landscape, or the softly brushed figure of the Mona Lisa, and nearly everyone agrees that something striking is unfolding before them.

Beauty feels intensely private, and, at the same time, we keep discovering that we collectively share it. That contradiction is one of the longstanding puzzles in “neuroaesthetics” – the science of how the brain responds to art and beauty. How does our sense of beauty actually take shape in the brain?

In our latest study, published in Nature Communications, we tried to map that shared experience. We found that instead of representing it as a single entity, the brain instead splits aesthetic experience into two major strands. One strand handles what an image shows, whether a landscape, an object or a........

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