[HN Gopher] How the Brain Responds to Beauty
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How the Brain Responds to Beauty
Author : apollinaire
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-02-03 19:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| amelius wrote:
| The last paragraph says it all:
|
| > 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.
| kevbin wrote:
| Scientific American is a shadow of its former self.
| jariel wrote:
| Here's a little wayback machine request to see maybe what's
| changed over time, and whether or not 'things are bad' is maybe
| subjective, but there's an unequivocally different editorial
| focus.
|
| 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...
| alacombe wrote:
| You forgot about 30% of the screen taken by a stupid cookie
| banner (75% of which is totally empty) without 1-click opt-
| out options (ie. dark pattern).
| skulk wrote:
| For those who want to skip the fluff:
|
| > 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.
| mojuba wrote:
| Thanks for the tldr, I knew it was all fluff!
|
| 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.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| well, I think you're demonstrably wrong on the later, such
| that even if we accept there is something like a "universal"
| sense of human beauty (which I'll take as a highly debatable
| point) , there's also a learned/adaptive component that can't
| easily be separated from an individual's experience: it seems
| it can interfere, override or accentuate the first.
|
| 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).
| clairity wrote:
| > "This beauty is _relative_.... "
|
| 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.
| mojuba wrote:
| > a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually
| ugly and modern music sonically ugly
|
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| Raffaello, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Leonardo...
| they are not boring to anyone even today. The Nike of
| Samothrace is spectacular even when you don't know when
| and where it comes from. Your impressionist cut off is
| very arbitrary.
|
| 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| > Beauty is no longer the goal of art.
|
| Yes and most disgracefully.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| I agree with you, mostly. I don't think Rembrandt, or
| Caravaggio, or almost any other pre-impressionists look
| photographic. They're representational, but they're also
| highly stylized. All of the 'Old Masters' exaggerated or
| idealized forms, and exaggerated temperature, gamut, and
| contrast. The number of people that actually meant to
| practice trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) is very small.
| Trompe l'oeil is generally seen as a schtick; if you
| don't have anything original to add, then don't bother.
| clairity wrote:
| > "Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly?"
|
| 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.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _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._
|
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > The historical common assumption was that human neurology
| can be assumed to be quite consistent
|
| 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.
| blindm wrote:
| > Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define
| it
|
| > 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.
| analyst74 wrote:
| In modeling, acting, or even dating, beauty have always been a
| mix of objective features (like things signifying good health)
| and subjective features (features conferring to status, like
| being white).
|
| There are even examples of objective feature colliding with
| subjective feature, resulting in different standard of being
| fit in different regions.
| kevbin wrote:
| > ...entire industries built on the fact that some beauty is
| unquestionable, like in the modelling [sic] 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.
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