In bringing together the results of the presentations highlighted in this paper, it becomes clear that aesthetic and artistic activities typically involve a network of brain regions distributed over both hemispheres, rather than a specialized area. Functional analysis of these regions suggests that aesthetic appreciation of painting, music and dance involves at least three different kinds of measur- able brain activity: (i) An enhancement of low-level cortical sen- sory processing; (ii) high-level top-down processing and activation of cortical areas involved in evaluative judgment; (iii) an engagement of the reward circuit, including cortical (anterior cingulate, orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal) and subcorti- cal (caudate nucleus, susbtantia nigra, and nucleus accumbens) re- gions, as well.
