A: Visual and auditory cortex. The contrasts Visually Beautiful . Musically Beautiful led to widespread activity within visual cortex, while the contrast Musically Beautiful . Visually Beautiful led to widespread activity within auditory cortex. That such a large expanse of visual or auditory cortex should have been active is not surprising because the stimuli, whether visual or auditory, had many different characteristics; for example, the visual stimuli consisted of portraits, landscapes, still lifes and were in color while the musical stimuli had different degrees of melody, and harmony, and some were derived from large-scale orchestral performances while others from smaller ones. The activation of these sensory areas in conjunction with activation of mOFC is important for the theory we advance below.