Experiencing beauty does more than offer the immediate pleasure of a sunset, fine painting or piece of music. It can expand our minds.

By taking the time to contemplate art objects and engage with their beauty, we increase our ability to think outside the box and gain mental expansiveness to consider the bigger picture, a study out of the University of Cambridge has found.

Cambridge psychologists conducted an experiment at Kettle Yard, the university's modern art gallery. They wanted to compare the effects of merely viewing art, as opposed to the process of using the mind in order to evaluate the work. Their study was one of the first of its kind to explore how aesthetic experiences in a gallery or museum can affect our cognitive process and perspective.

“…[E]ngaging with the beauty of art can enhance abstract thinking and promote a different mindset to our everyday patterns of thought, shifting us into a more expansive state of mind.”

The team recruited nearly 190 people to visit the gallery during an exhibition of handmade clay objects by the artist, Lucie Rie. The participants were randomly split into two groups: the so-called “beauty” group was asked to actively consider and then rate the beauty of each ceramic object they viewed, while the second group was asked to match a line drawing of the object with the artwork itself.

All the participants were then tested on how they processed information, specifically whether they did it in a more practical or abstract way. Some of the questions asked were: “Does ‘writing a letter' mean literally putting pen to paper or sharing your thoughts?”; “Is ‘voting' marking a ballot or influencing an election?”; “Is ‘locking a door' inserting a key or securing a house?”

“These tests are designed to gauge whether a person is thinking in an immediate procedural way, as we often do in our day-to-day lives, or is attuned to the deeper meaning and bigger picture of the actions they take,” Elze Sigute Mikalonyte, lead author of the study and a researcher at Cambridge's Department of Psychology, said in a press release.

The study's results:

  • Participants in the “beauty” group scored almost 14 percent higher on average than the control group in abstract thinking.
  • The effect was greater among those participants with an artistic hobby. Those in the beauty group scored over 25 percent higher on average for abstract thinking than those with an artistic hobby in the control group.

    • These days we minimalize our world by spending so much of our time looking down at our screens.

  • Emotional states of the participants were also measured by asking about their feelings while completing the gallery task. Across all participants, those in the beauty group reported an average of 23 percent higher levels of “transformative and self-transcendent feelings” — such as feeling moved, enlightened and inspired — than the control group.
  • People in the beauty group did not report feeling any happier than the control group. This is important because it suggests that it was the engagement with beauty that influenced their abstract thinking, rather than any overall positive feelings generated by the gallery experience.

“Many philosophers throughout history have suggested that engaging with aesthetic beauty involves a special kind of psychological state,” Simone Schnall, senior author of the study, Professor of Experimental Social Psychology at Cambridge and director of the Cambridge Body, Mind, and Behavior Laboratory, said in a press release. “Our research indicates that engaging with the beauty of art can enhance abstract thinking and promote a different mindset to our everyday patterns of thought, shifting us into a more expansive state of mind.”

This process is known as “psychological distancing,” she explained. This means that we're able to snap out of the smaller mental trappings of daily life and are better able to focus on the overall bigger picture.

It turns out that simply visiting a museum can change how we think about our lives which is especially important since these days we minimalize our world by spending so much of our time looking down at our screens.

“People today are often tethered to their devices, and we usually think in very concrete terms when we're doing something on a screen,” Schnall points out.

Interested in expanding your ability to think abstractly by seeing some art? Check out the local news and websites in your area. They often feature events and highlights from the art scene. Some cities and towns have dedicated art walks where multiple galleries open their doors for the event.

The study is published in Empirical Studies of the Arts.