How the Brain Responds to Beauty
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
> Tsinghua University researchers opted to do a meta-analysis
> The team first combed the literature for all brain-imaging studies that investigated people’s neural responses to visual art and faces and that also asked them to report on whether what they saw was beautiful or not. After reviewing the different studies, the researchers were left with data from 49 studies in total, representing experiments from 982 participants.
> The technique used to analyze the pooled data is known as activation likelihood estimation (ALE)
> Performing this analysis, the research team found that beautiful visual art and beautiful faces each reliably elicited activity in well-defined brain regions
> If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium.
Of course what we appreciate in the human faces (and bodies) vs. what we appreciate in art are very different things. Visual arts in this sense can be closer to say music or literature more than human appearance.
Art definitely requires context and prior experience. Seeing the most abstract art of the 20th century for example, means very different things to people who have little experience with it vs. those who have seen a lot of it. Same for music. You can't appreciate Miles Davis unless you train your ear to understand avant-garde jazz in general. Then you listen to Miles or you see Rothko (Klee, Picasso, etc etc) and you feel the kind of joy that can be felt only with a certain prior experience. This beauty is relative.
By contrast, appreciation of human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural, given to everyone and doesn't require prior experience. Our animal brain seems to be at play here, but I'm not very knowledgeable on how these mechanisms are triggered.
that doesn't seem to be the right descriptor for what you're relating. a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly (often but not always intentionally), but you can appreciate the context and the ideas around it and find those abstractions beautiful for their cleverness, intricacy, or whatever (as you can find a math equation elegant, or a piece of music passionate).
the level to which you appreciate those contexts and ideas would be 'relative'. a lot of human affect contextualizes in a narrow band of difference when zoomed out, but our brains are attuned to those narrow bands (like how radio stations exist in a relatively narrow band of frequencies), which is to say what we find beautiful is mostly similar, and our relativity is relatively slight.
Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly? When you say some art is "ugly at a visceral level" you need to show art that's beautiful at the same level.
Is Modigliani's depiction of women beautiful or ugly? I'm sure you will hear both if you ask different people. To me it's breathtaking, whatever that means on the ugly-beautiful spectrum.
On the other hand, there's a lot of earlier art (anything pre-impressionist basically) that tended to be more photographic and less inventive. You can find objectively beautiful things there but by today's standards they are boring, though you can appreciate this art within the context of the era.
I think we should remove all forms of modern art from this debate. Beauty is no longer the goal of art.
before, you said
> "...human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural..."
which is the yardstick from which i was extrapolating (that is, natural == visceral).
> "Beauty is no longer the goal of art."
i agree that modern art is no longer about (natural, visceral) beauty, but rather about conceptual/contextual interestingness. but those aren't relative, those are different yardsticks, hence my attempt to disentangle the two.
I agree that official art abandoned the search for absolute beauty a long time ago (basically with modernism), I just wouldn’t chuck away 2500 years of masterpieces because “realism boring”. In fact, looking at attendance numbers for art events, one could easily make the case that “old and boring” art remains more popular than XX+ century art.
Yes and most disgracefully.
We can see this in various cross-cultural and historical comparisons where it's not clear that any inherent or obviously individual property should be considered beautiful in a universal sense.
Is foot binding beautiful?
Is clear skin or scarification and body modding beautiful?
What about lighter skin? is it beautiful because it suggests aristocracy and not working in the fields, or is a sun tan beautiful? or does white skin, to use a phrase from darker skinned indigenous populations make people "look like a corpse".
Is it the anorexic, the aenemic, the flushed, the athlete, the labourer, or the obese?
The weirder thing I've noticed talking to people is this IDEA that physical beauty must be objective is so entrenched in some, that they will actively deny or remove reported data points to the contrary (no, he doesn't really think that's beautiful/ he's lying about his perception of that beautiful man/woman).
My problem with such neurological research, and much other research, is that the implications typically derive that an average positive effect among the sample size constitutes a universal positive effect. This is specially dubious in cases such as this where an individual negative effect is impossible to offset it, as there is a zero point.
There is no such thing as a negative effect here, the zero point is that the beauty of a face is the same.
Thus, assume, for sake of argument, that for 50% of persons, the beauty of the face be the same as that of a painting, and that for 50% it not be.
This will measure an average positive effect, and from that there are often made conclusions that there is a universal positive effect. In fact, such average positive effects will be measured with a sufficiently large sample size if the positive effect only exist in 1% of the same size, as again, there is no negative effect possible.
The historical common assumption was that human neurology can be assumed to be quite consistent, but I am not so sure in the light that it is often found that neurological research is often no longer reproducible if it even be moved to a different city.
This issue is especially something that is near and dear to me, because I've noticed that some of the people I know seem to indeed draw a distinction between humanoid beauty, and beauty of nonhumanoids, and some I know don't. I also see in such people that they seem to be far more interested in a man's clothing and hair than his face, to decide whether they find him beautiful.
I feel like this idea that humans are all the same in a given respect is a very commonly made mistake. We know that people react differently to us, but in the moment we often forget.
The brain is quite a plastic organ that adapts to it's surroundings as a man matures.
It's as though one be surprised that AlphaZero Chess, and AlphaZero Go to have formed very different neurons from training.
Is it though? People are different sizes, shapes, colours. They have different metabolism and food tolerances. Their immune systems differ. They have different blood types. And so on and so forth. Certainly there are lots of commonalities, but there are lots of differences too.
Ok, so on top of a theory of constructed emotion (https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712), we'll need a theory of constructed aesthetics.
> German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion to the golden ratio (if you’re curious, that ratio is about 1.6:1)
Glad it mentioned the Golden Ratio and beauty seemingly being in the 'eye of the beholder' as mentioned here:
> Despite his experiments with the golden ratio, Fechner continued to believe that beauty was, to a large degree, in the brain of the beholder.
IMHO Beauty can be subjective, but there are entire industries built on the fact that some beauty is unquestionable, like in the modeling/fashion industry.
There are unquestionably beautiful models. But the modeling industry is as transactional as any other. The industry confers the status of beautiful on many people and things that are in no way beautiful.
There are even examples of objective feature colliding with subjective feature, resulting in different standard of being fit in different regions.
Really great book that touches on the meta-analysis in this article and much more
Today [1]
2003 [2]
At this moment, on the front page more than 1/2 the headlines are sociopolitical commentaries and populist stuff:
"From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter" "Amanda Gorman's Climate Poem, Act Now Now Now" "Astronomer believes Aliens have already visited" "The Shard Psychosis of Donald Trump and his Loyalists" "The Science of Spiritual Narcissism"
In 2003:
"Nanotubes" "The Holographic Universe" "Delphic Oracle inhaling vapours" (A little populist) "Asteroid Watchers" "The ignoble savage: science reveals the heart of humanities darkness"
At least in terms of what they put on the cover, things have obviously evolved a bit.
As for How the Brain Responds to Beauty, well that's a legit age-old question, we're still lingering with viewpoints from Greek Antiquity on that one.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030804003306/http://scientific...
> It’s possible the hypothesized beauty center actually does exist and just failed to show up for a variety of methodological reasons. And to be sure, this one analysis hardly settles a question as profound and difficult as this one. Yet that raises an important point: What are we trying to accomplish here? Why do we care if beauty is one thing in the brain or 10? Would the latter make beauty 10 times more marvelous or diminish it 10-fold? More pertinent: How do we understand beauty differently if we know where to point to it in the brain? It will probably be many years, perhaps even generations, before we have something like a neuroscience of aesthetics that both physiologists and humanists will find truly compelling. But we can be sure that beauty’s seductions will keep calling us back to this messy, intriguing and unmapped place in the interim.