What causes the ache in "achingly beautiful"?

Factual Questions
1

I know it’s probably mostly just a figure of speech, but I know for me there genuinely are times when I see something I find so beautiful I actually do feel a kind of ache - sort of a sore tightness in my chest. It’s similar to the feeling I get when something makes me vaguely sad.

What is happening physically to cause this feeling? And why? Why would a body have a physical reaction like that to something that looks nice? And why would there possibly be any similarity in the way a body feels looking at something lovely and something sad?

2

Well, just so you are not alone, I have felt the same thing before - the tightness/achiness in the chest.

I suspect this is where the idea of your heart being the center of love came from.

I felt it more as an emotional teenager, so hormones might have been involved.

3

I’d say it’d have something to do with Stendhal syndrome

4

Because you can’t have it.

I, too, have had this ache.

5

“Stendhal syndrome”, per Wiki anyway, is just the name for what the OP describes. It doesn’t attempt to tackle the physiological end of things. I’ve felt the same thing and the “soft explosion” in the chest that comes with young love and would be interested in knowing if science has noodled out where those physical sensations come from.

6

Good call. Here’s the Wiki article: Stendhal syndrome - Wikipedia

7

I don’t think I’ve ever had it. Hm. I feel oddly incomplete now. To the museum this weekend! Or failing that, to google for double rainbows!

8

Concur.

9

I think the sadness comes from seeing a thing of great beauty and realizing that such beauty is possible but is hardly ever achieved. Beauty makes normal life seem mundane in contrast.

10

I assume it’s just a rush of hormones. Sometimes that happens to me when I see beauty, but the ache and tightness occurs in another part of my body.

11

Well, maybe so, but the OP is talking about a physical feeling in the chest. The question, surely,is not why we feel particular emotions, but why those emotions give rise to physical feelings in the body, and even particular, reproducible physical feelings in particular parts of the body.

My not-completely-wild guess is that it it is something to do with the sympathetic nervous system, and perhaps certain glands associated with it but I do not know what in detail. Perhaps, beauty is rousing us to action, somehow, but action we cannot actually initiate in the circumstances.

12

To my way of thinking and feeling, the concept of saudade comes close to the ache.

My interpretation of both ideas is something like “homesickness for a place you’ve never been to.”

13

I’ve heard some of us cry when happy because we realize the moment will pass - perhaps it’s related to that? Ephemeral, aching beauty, here now but soon gone.

Also this thread made me listen to fado. :wink:

14

Young love? One can be quite old when the ephemeral impression of artistic perfection lost passes you by.

And the crazy thing is that you, or I, feel it in your chest.

ETA: And it aches.

15

Actually, that is culture-dependent. In the West, since pre-Roman times until the Rensaissance, the organ of the center of love was the liver.

I ::liver:: NY!

16

Some would call it Sehnsucht.

17

I get the ache in my chest thing, too, in addition to a hitch in my breath and a slight speeding up of my heart rate. My take on it is that awe-inspiring beautiful things: mountains, oceans, vast fields of stars in the sky, directly remind me that I’m small and insignificant.
Rationally I can appreciate that and it makes me feel good, but my nervous system still goes right into “scared rabbit” mode, though I’ve associated this reaction with feelings of well-being and pleasure.

18

This might be relevant, but doesn’t discuss how activity in the caudate nucleus translates into a feeling in your chest.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110706195800.htm