On this Earth, people learned to manipulate perception with increasingly sophisticated technologies. Mood, attention, color perception, even the intensity of sensory experiences could be altered.

But one question remained surprisingly difficult: why do some things still feel beautiful?

I became interested in the gap between what can be chemically or technologically manipulated and what seems to emerge naturally from the brain's predictions, memories, emotions, and learned preferences. That question eventually became my field of research: understanding how the brain constructs the experience of beauty.