Editorial: Beauty and the Mind: Cognitive Science of the Sublime

Claudio Lucchiari¹Maria Elide Vanutelli^2*Fernando Echarri³

• ¹Universita degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy
• ²University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
• ³Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

sources, they present a three-dimensional framework-potential, process, and goal-to explain how individuals realize "ideal humanity" through encounters with the sublime. Through examples from classical Chinese painters, the authors show how aesthetic practice simultaneously cultivates moral, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions of the self. Their model integrates art, cognition, and spirituality within cultural psychology, illustrating how sublime beauty may serve as a pathway toward human flourishing and creative consciousness.While philosophical approaches have traditionally linked the sublime to human finitude, psychological research seeks to anchor it in lived experience, exploring its cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences. Recent studies demonstrate that specific aesthetic configurations-such as architectural symmetry-can elicit a subtle sense of harmony that promotes prosocial tendencies, as if perceivers momentarily attune to a larger order (Pizzolante et al., 2025). This line of inquiry suggests that the sublime operates largely below the threshold of conscious awareness, emerging when perceptual and emotional systems achieve a fleeting coherence. Neurocognitive models attribute this integrative capacity to the hippocampus, which synthesizes explicit and implicit information to create unified perceptual experiences (Danckert et al., 2007;Ishizu and Zeki, 2014).Building on these foundations, Kudahl et al. ( 2025) offer a phenomenological investigation of how architecture evokes the sublime. Through literary depictions by Woolf, Neruda, and Miller, they explore the embodied, affective, and atmospheric dimensions of built space. Their Husserlian approach reveals how elevation, solitude, and images of suffering can converge into moments of existential transformation-an aesthetic awakening that transcends mortality. By reading architectural experiences as lived encounters rather than symbolic representations, the study redefines the sublime as a psychological and spatial phenomenon. In doing so, it underscores how architectural atmospheres shape consciousness and emotion through multisensory, bodily participation, reinforcing the notion that sublime experience emerges through perceptual integration and embodied attunement. Taken together, these contributions illustrate the interdisciplinary richness of the psychology of the sublime. Understanding how it operates may illuminate the processes through which humans construct meaning, experience connection, and cultivate well-being. Future research, integrating aesthetic science with neuroscience, phenomenology, and moral philosophy, promises to expand this field toward a comprehensive theory of human flourishing through the experience of the sublime.