essay on beauty with brain

February 2, 2021

How the Brain Responds to Beauty

Scientists search for the neural basis of an enigmatic experience

By Jason Castro

Andriy Onufriyenko Getty Images

Pursued by poets and artists alike, beauty is ever elusive. We seek it in nature, art and philosophy but also in our phones and furniture. We value it beyond reason, look to surround ourselves with it and will even lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it. As philosopher George Santayana observed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty , there is within us “a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it.”

Philosophers such as Santayana have tried for centuries to understand beauty, but perhaps scientists are now ready to try their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, perhaps it can tell us where it is—or where it isn’t. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and their colleagues examined the origin of beauty and argued that it is as enigmatic in our brain as it is in the real world.

There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when 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).

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At the time, Fechner was immersed in the project of “outer psychophysics ”—the search for mathematical relationships between stimuli and their resultant percepts. What both fascinated and eluded him, however, was the much more difficult pursuit of “inner psychophysics”—relating the states of the nervous system to the subjective experiences that accompany them. Despite his experiments with the golden ratio, Fechner continued to believe that beauty was, to a large degree, in the brain of the beholder.

So what part of our brain responds to beauty? The answer depends on whether we see beauty as a single category at all. Brain scientists who favor the idea of such a “beauty center” have hypothesized that it may live in the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or the insula. If this theory prevails, then beauty really could be traced back to a single region of the brain. We would experience beauty in the same way whether we were listening to Franz Schubert song, staring at a Diego Velázquez painting or seeing a doe denning under the starlight.

If the idea of a beauty center is correct, then this would be a considerable victory for theory of functional localization. Under this view—which is both widely held and widely contested—much of what the brain does is the result of highly specialized modules. To simplify the idea a bit, we could imagine assigning Post-it notes to areas of the brain with job descriptions underneath: “pleasure center,” “memory center,” “visual center,” “beauty center.” While some version of this theory is likely true, it’s certainly not the case that any kind of mental state you can describe or intuit is cleanly localized somewhere in the brain. Still, there is excellent evidence, for example, that specific parts of the visual cortex have an exquisite selectivity for motion. Other, nonoverlapping parts are quite clearly activated only by faces. But for every careful study that finds compellingly localized brain function, there are many more that have failed to match a region with a concrete job description.

Rather than potentially add to the mix of inconclusive, underpowered studies about whether the perception of beauty is localized to some specific brain area in their recent investigation, the Tsinghua University researchers opted to do a meta-analysis. They pooled data from many already published studies to see if a consistent result emerged. 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 faces and visual art were taken to be different kinds of beautiful things, and this allowed for a conceptually straightforward test of the beauty center hypothesis. If transcendent, capital-B beauty was really something common to faces and visual art and was processed in the capital-B-beauty region of the brain, then this area should show up across studies, regardless of the specific thing being seen as beautiful. If no such region was found, then faces and visual art would more likely be, as parents say of their children, each beautiful in its own way.

The technique used to analyze the pooled data is known as activation likelihood estimation (ALE). Underneath a bit of statistical formality, it is an intuitive idea: we have more trust in things that have more votes. ALE takes each of the 49 studies to be a fuzzy, error-prone report of a specific location in the brain—roughly speaking, the particular spot that “lit up” when the experiment was conducted, together with a surrounding cloud of uncertainty. The size of this cloud of uncertainty was large if the study had few participants and small if there were many of them, thus modeling the confidence that comes from collecting more data. These 49 points and their clouds were then all merged into a composite statistical map, giving an integrated picture of brain activation across many studies and a means for saying how confident we are in the consensus across experiments. If a single small region was glowing red-hot after the merge (all clouds were small and close together), that would mean it was reliably activated across all the different studies.

Performing this analysis, the research team found that beautiful visual art and beautiful faces each reliably elicited activity in well-defined brain regions. No surprises here: it is hoped that the brain is doing something when you’re looking at a visual stimulus. The regions were almost completely nonoverlapping, however, which challenged the idea that a common beauty center was activated. 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.

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.

Jason Castro is an associate professor and chair of the neuroscience program at Bates College.

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Perception and Deception: Human Beauty and the Brain

Human physical characteristics and their perception by the brain are under pressure by natural selection to optimize reproductive success. Men and women have different strategies to appear attractive and have different interests in identifying beauty in people. Nevertheless, men and women from all cultures agree on who is and who is not attractive, and throughout the world attractive people show greater acquisition of resources and greater reproductive success than others. The brain employs at least three modules, composed of interconnected brain regions, to judge facial attractiveness: one for identification, one for interpretation and one for valuing. Key elements that go into the judgment are age and health, as well as symmetry, averageness, face and body proportions, facial color and texture. These elements are all Costly Signals of reproductive fitness because they are difficult to fake. However, people deceive others using tricks such as coloring hair, cosmetics and clothing styles, while at the same time they also focus on detecting fakes. People may also deceive themselves, especially about their own attractiveness, and use self-signally actions to demonstrate to themselves their own true value. The neuroscience of beauty is best understood by considering the evolutionary pressures to maximize reproductive fitness.

1. Introduction

Human nature includes a desire to be attractive, and historically much of the fine arts are depictions of human beauty. Much time, money and emotional energy are spent in improving our appearance to reach a goal of beauty. People feel better about themselves when they think they are attractive to others. We devote portions of our brains to evaluating characteristics of attractiveness that are remarkably similar among cultures. Our bodies are shaped not only for function but also to match the image of attractiveness to others.

The simple answer that “beauty is for attracting mates” is no longer sufficient to explain the wealth of data on human preferences for beauty. Attractiveness is part of our status ranking among our same-sex peers, and we actively deceive others and ourselves about our personal appearance.

This review is crafted to place the study of personal appearance and beauty in the context of evolutionary biology. This theoretical framework best explains the quirkiness, universality and unexpected behaviors of people striving to be attractive and seeking out beautiful people.

2. The Evolutionary Biology of Beauty

The principle of evolutionary biology is that when there is genetic variation within a population of a characteristic that improves the individual’s chance of survival and reproduction (sending its genes into several succeeding generations), that characteristic with the best improvement will be naturally selected over other forms and becomes more common within the population. Eventually that characteristic phenotype will become nearly universal, and the genetic variant producing the favored phenotype will become “fixed” in the population.

Some phenotypes improve an individual’s acquisition of food, such as running stamina or manual dexterity. However, those phenotypes that directly improve the chances of reproduction, such as attracting mates and obtaining help in raising children, are under even stronger selection pressure, since they directly influence the frequency with which those genes are passed to the next generation.

2.1. Reproductive Strategy

Men and women have different strategies for reproductive success that were honed during tens of thousands of prehistoric years. Women seek men for partners who will contribute material resources as well as good genes to their children, while men seek one or more female partners with good genes, some of whom they may provide with resources. The strategy of each sex includes advertising to potential mates, and competing members of the same sex, to demonstrate that he or she is valuable (reviewed in [ 1 ]). The display of these traits is called “attractiveness” or “beauty”.

2.2. Universality of Attractiveness Judgements

Assessments of attractiveness are surprisingly similar between men and women and among groups of people. A meta-analysis, covering 919 studies and over 15,000 observers, reported that people agree, both within cultures and across cultures, who is attractive and who is not [ 2 ]. Men and women as well as people of all ages agree on who is attractive. This strongly suggests that judgments of physical attractiveness are hard-wired in human genetics, likely fixed at an early stage in our evolution. These assessment tools are available at a remarkably early stage of human development. Six-month-old infants gazed longer at faces judged by adults as attractive and spent less time looking at faces that were judged as not attractive [ 3 ].

2.3. Attractive People Succeed

Judgments of attractiveness have real consequences because they are cues of a person’s health and fitness, which indicate the ability to donate good genes and successfully raise children. Attractiveness is the most important predictor of who gets the preferred choice in mates [ 4 ]. In fact, in the modern world, physical attractiveness is significantly associated with reproductive success [ 5 ]. A woman who chooses a male partner who contributes not only good genetic material but also provides resources will on average be more successful than a woman without such support [ 6 ].

This means that attractiveness and the ability to accurately detect attractiveness are under evolutionary selective pressure. Therefore, it is not surprising that the brain has developed specialized systems to accurately assess attractiveness characteristics, such as age, health and reproductive potential.

3. The Neuroscience of Facial Recognition

3.1. brain loci.

The most extensive research on the brain regions used in assessing beauty has been reported for facial recognition [ 7 ] and less research has been reported on body judgments [ 8 ]. Brain loci used to judge the beauty of faces are distinct in distribution and activation intensity from those used to assess the beauty of non-facial visual art [ 9 ], reflecting the evolutionary salience of facial beauty. While a few loci have been linked together to suggest a pathway for the evaluation of beauty, this is not to suggest that this is the only way the brain makes these judgments and, under special conditions, the plasticity of the brain may invoke other regions to participate in reaching assessments.

The brain uses at least three modules, or cognitive domains, in deciding the value of attractiveness. The occipital and temporal regions of the cortex are used first to process face views [ 10 ]. The inferior occipital gyri (IOG) perceives facial features and passes the information to the fusiform face area (FFA) of the fusiform gyrus (FG) for facial recognition [ 11 ]. The FFA recognizes and processes the location of facial features (especially the eyes, nose, and mouth) and their spacing [ 12 ]. People have distinct eye movement patterns (scan path routines) when they judge unfamiliar faces [ 13 ], and they simultaneously engage the FFA region during this routine [ 14 ]. Damage to the FFA causes prosopagnosia, a condition in which patients are unable to recognize faces by sight or accurately judge facial attractiveness, although they can recognize the same people by voice [ 9 , 15 ]. The FG very quickly responds more strongly to attractive faces than unattractive ones [ 16 ], suggesting that the ease of recognition of attractive features occurs perhaps even before the rest of the brain is included in the evaluation.

The IOG connects to the second module, including the superior temporal sulcus (STS) for interpretation of facial movement, such as eye gaze, lip movement and facial expressions [ 8 ]. The FFA and IOG then interact with other brain regions, such as the occipital face area (OFA) and the ventral anterior temporal lobes (vATLs) for feature abstraction and assessment [ 17 ], and the amygdala, insula and limbic system for the emotional content of facial expressions and movement [ 8 ].

Information from the STS is also passed to the third module, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), including the nucleus accumbens, for making judgments of beauty and producing the neurological rewards (dopamine and other neurotransmitters) for finding it [ 18 ]. The OFC responds with greater activity to attractive versus unattractive faces [ 6 ]. When men were shown faces of beautiful women while their brains were scanned by fMRI, the attractive faces specifically activated the nucleus accumbens in the caudate region of the brain, when compared to viewing average faces [ 19 ]. Transcranial stimulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) increased the perceived attractiveness of faces but did not affect other facial judgments such as age [ 20 ]. These studies suggest that the value but not the features of the face are decided in these third module cortical regions.

Human bodies, both self and others, are selectively perceived in the temporal lobes by the extrastriate body area (EBA) and the fusiform body area (FBA), whether they are full body representations, stick figures or silhouettes [ 21 ]. The OFC, particularly the nucleus accumbens and anterior cingulate cortex, are then used in judging the beauty of nude bodies [ 22 ]. Similar regions of the brain are used in evaluating sculptures and similarly posed real human bodies [ 23 ].

3.2. Gender-Specific Brain Activation

Male and female brains activate differently while evaluating appearance and beauty, consistent with their differences in reproductive strategy. For heterosexuals, opposite-sex faces stimulate assessment and reward brain systems, such as the amygdala, cingulate and insular cortices, more than same-sex faces, signifying they hold greater salience [ 6 ]. Both heterosexual men and women favor viewing attractive faces, but men willingly expend more effort to view beautiful women’s than men’s faces, while women spend less energy, and equivalent amounts, to view both beautiful men’s and women’s faces [ 24 ]. Men show slower response times to beautiful faces than women, evidencing greater cognitive load while processing attractive faces [ 25 ]. Consistent with this, brain imaging studies show that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) of male subjects is more sensitive to physical attributes, such as the youthfulness and gender of faces, than female subjects [ 26 ].

4. Appearance and Beauty Judgments

4.1. gender differences in attractiveness features and perception.

The sex hormones, testosterone in men and estrogen in women, largely drive the body and facial features that define attractiveness, and also reshape the brain to detect and value these features. The onset of puberty ramps up hormone levels and reshapes the male and female bodies. Men increase their shoulder to waist ratio, their beards grow, and their jawlines become more pronounced. For women, breasts develop, the hips to waist ratio increases, and their jawlines and facial features become softer. Several regions of the brain express either estrogen/progesterone receptors or androgen receptors, and brain structure and responses are, therefore, on different developmental trajectories in men and women beginning in puberty [ 6 ].

Women are so attuned to the facial features of men that simply by looking at their photographs they can correctly rank order a group of men based on their saliva testosterone level [ 27 ]. Interestingly, while a woman tends to prefer a man with high testosterone for an affair, she prefers a little less testosterone for a long-term mate, and her parents (who might have to help take care of any babies if the man leaves) tend to prefer even a little less testosterone [ 28 ]. Exaggerating the masculinity of men’s pictures actually makes them less attractive [ 26 ].

On the other hand, estrogen monotonically drives female beauty [ 29 ]. Panels of men and women were shown women’s faces that were morphed to exaggerate feminized features, and 95% of men and women decided that the feminization of women’s faces made them more attractive. The same result was found for faces of European, African and Asian descent [ 30 ]. In another study, estrogen was measured in women over the course of their monthly cycles. Both men and other women rated their attractiveness. Women with higher estrogen levels had higher ratings of femininity, attractiveness and health. Interestingly, when the women wore color cosmetics, the correlation disappeared, suggesting that makeup literally “makes up” for lower estrogen levels [ 31 ].

4.2. Age Perception

Youth is a major component of facial attractiveness [ 32 ] and underlies most of the specific characteristics people look for in judging attractiveness. Older faces are judged as less attractive, less likeable, less distinctive, and less energetic [ 33 ]. The appearance of aging past the prime of life is an assault on self-esteem and confidence [ 34 ].

In particular, age is used, along with other skin and body signs, to assess standing in the community, desirability as a partner, and reproductive potential [ 35 , 36 ]. Traditionally, men more than women tend to accumulate resources with age (which makes them more attractive partners), while women more than men tend to lose fertility with age. As a result, the sharp decline in attractiveness with women’s age after menopause is largely driven by male perception, while the perception of increased power of men with age is predominantly due to female opinions [ 37 ].

People are exquisitely sensitive to the age of others and are excellent judges of each other’s age, with a correlation coefficient of perceived to actual age of 0.95 [ 38 ]. Just by viewing a swatch of skin people are able to correctly judge age, with a correlation coefficient of more than 0.60 [ 39 ]. The most important factors in judging age from facial images are the size of the eyes and the lips, and the evenness of skin tone, regardless of what that tone might be [ 34 ].

4.3. Health Perception

People use specific cues from the appearance of others to make judgments about that person’s health, including the history as well as the current state of health. Assessments of health often overlap assessments of age in determining beauty, such as in the case of the sclera, or white part of the eyes. Sclera become darker and colored with age or poor health, and the whiteness of sclera are strongly correlated with the perception of youth, health and attractiveness [ 40 ].

4.4. Symmetry

Throughout the animal kingdom, and certainly among people, body symmetry is a strong signal of past and present health. Bilateral symmetry is a sign of the absence of congenital or developmental defect, malnutrition or parasitic infection, all of which are common maladies in subsistence living [ 41 ]. Although minor variations are often of no functional consequence, they do have dramatic impact on the perception of beauty [ 42 ]. The absence of a history of pathology is a good sign of reproductive fitness and the preference for symmetry is culturally universal [ 43 ], suggesting that it is hard-wired into brain judgments by natural selection and not derived from culture.

Women prefer men with symmetrical faces and can select symmetrical men from their scent [ 6 ]. Unfortunately for cologne manufacturers, the scent of androstenone is an unpleasant under-arm smell. Her preference for symmetry is even heightened during a woman’s fertile phase of her monthly cycle [ 44 ], an effect found for several female preferences that is called ovulatory shift .

4.5. Average Features

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and the inventor of fingerprinting, was studying the faces of criminals to identify diagnostic facial features and was the first to report that the average face prepared by composites of criminal faces is more attractive than individual faces [ 45 ]. The preference for the average is found among all cultures [ 46 ] and strengthens as children develop after 5 years of age [ 47 ]. Interestingly, male preference for women’s faces is correlated to facial averageness, but women’s self-perceived attractiveness is not correlated with their averageness [ 48 ].

There may be several reasons for the preference for average facial features. One trivial explanation is that the preparation of composites tends to smooth out asymmetrical or uneven features of individuals. A second is that the very nature of cultural learning favors the most common feature or practice [ 49 ]. A third is that, assuming facial features are under genetic control and are adaptive, natural selection will favor a fitness peak that we perceive as average compared to the less fit facial forms. Finally, the beauty of average may lie in the fact that it is most expected and imposes the least cognitive load to recognize and interpret [ 4 ].

Despite the preference for average, exaggerating some key facial features actually improved the attractiveness of faces [ 26 ], meaning that average is attractive, but unusually endowed faces may be more attractive. This phenomenon (found throughout the animal kingdom) is termed signal shift : a preference for an elemental characteristic, and a heightened preference for the extreme form [ 50 ]. The signal shift response may identify a simple characteristic the brain overweighs in valuing faces. There is a limit to the attractiveness of exaggerated features, and an extreme form that is outside the range of normal experience causes extra work for the brain, which then considers the form weird and ugly.

4.6. Face Proportions

As social creatures, humans read other people’s intentions and emotions in their faces and adjust their behavior accordingly. People also view the face as an important determinant of attractiveness, which is a signal of reproductive fitness. As discussed previously, people of both sexes and nearly all cultures agree on which faces are attractive and which are not. The features people find attractive are shaped in part by sex hormones, including stronger or softer jaw and larger or smaller eye shape [ 51 ]. However, the cognitive processes that determine attractiveness are not always accessible to consciousness. Composites were prepared from a group of college students, one composite from those judged most attractive and another from those judged least attractive [ 26 ]. People who view the two composites side by side can agree on which is more attractive, but it is difficult to put into words which features lead to the decision.

The eyes are a specific target of the human face for social interaction and beauty assessment. The brain uses a special region, the superior temporal sulcus, for the job of following eye movements in others and determining the direction of their view [ 52 ]. This region develops early, and neonates learn within months to follow their mothers’ gaze [ 53 ]. Eye recognition is wired directly into the most fundamental emotional processing unit in the brain—the amygdala [ 54 ].

By contrast, the prominence of the ears and nose are not signals of beauty, because the length of both the ears [ 55 ] and nose [ 56 ] relative to the rest of the face continue to increase with age.

4.7. Body Proportions

Body shape is also a signal of reproductive fitness. People universally have a preference for shape as expressed in the ratio of waist to hips for men of 0.9, and waist to hips for women of 0.7 [ 36 ]. In one study, men were shown pictures of naked women before and after surgery that improved their waist-to-hip ratio to be closer to 0.7 and found that approaching the ideal specifically activated the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulated cortex [ 57 ], regions that are also used in judging the attractiveness of faces. These preferences arise early, with children as young as 3-years-old selecting canonical body shapes over those with altered legs to trunk ratios [ 58 ].

The movement of other people is also of great interest to social humans. The extrastriate body area (EBA) of the occipitotemporal area is selectively activated in evaluating human bodies and movement [ 21 ] and such activation for heterosexuals is greater for opposite-sex bodies than same-sex bodies [ 59 ].

4.8. Foot Size

As women age and bear children, the size of their feet relative to their height increases [ 60 , 61 ]. A proportionately small foot is therefore a signal of youth and untapped reproductive potential. Not surprisingly, both men and women prefer small feet in women. In a series of studies, images of both men and women were altered to increase or decrease the size of the foot relative to height. Observers of the images, both men and women, preferred the natural proportion of foot to height in men over exaggerated smaller or larger feet. But they predominately judged the disproportionately smaller foot of women as more attractive than the natural proportion [ 62 , 63 ]. High heeled women’s shoes achieve the appearance of a smaller foot by raising the heel relative to the toe and shortening the distance from the heel to the toe in the footprint. The shoe generally just covers the toes and not the instep, further accentuating the appearance of a small step.

4.9. Facial Color and Wrinkles

Despite the variation in underlying skin tones, the homogeneity of skin color is correlated with increased attractiveness and appearance of healthiness in every culture examined [ 64 , 65 ]. People who view a cropped image of a cheek were able to accurately judge age, based on the homogeneity of skin tone [ 39 ]. In traditional Chinese medicine, skin color is used as a diagnostic tool for disease [ 66 ].

Among Caucasians, men perceive red tones in women’s faces as more attractive than less red faces because it is viewed as a sign of health. [ 67 ]. For these women, red facial coloration tracks their level of estradiol, and facial coloration may provide men with cues about fertility [ 68 ].

Facial color gradient is also important because as skin color gets darker with age, the color contrast between the hair, eyes and facial skin is reduced [ 69 ]. This is a consistent finding among many ethnic groups, including Caucasians, Chinese, Latin Americans and South Africans [ 70 ] Wrinkling increases with age and sun exposure and is a strong signal for judging age [ 71 ]. The discoloration of skin with age is interpreted as a loss of health, while wrinkling is perceived as a sign of age and loss of fertility [ 71 ].

5. Costly Signals and Deception

5.1. costly signals.

The brain has evolved its focus on these features of attractiveness and beauty because not only are they reliable measures of health and reproductive fitness, but they are (or have been for most of our evolutionary history) difficult to fake. Such features that genuinely signal reproductive fitness are known as Costly Signals [ 72 ]. Costly Signals that are specific to one sex or the other are subject to strong sexual selection. One sex prefers a feature signaling reproductive fitness and chooses partners who have that feature. The next generation produces one sex that favor the Costly Signal and the other sex that displays it. This is called the Green Beard Effect, after the hypothetical example of two sets of genes that co-evolve, one set that produces a green beard in males and another set that prefers a green beard in females. This can lead to the run-away evolution of exaggerated features, such as extraordinarily large elk antlers or peacock feathers. The key element is that the Costly Signal must be biologically difficult to produce, or else fakers without the necessary reproductive fitness will display the feature and gain unwarranted mating opportunities.

Most if not all of the characteristics described here as signs of attractiveness and beauty are Costly Signals. They reflect healthy development, absence of disease, and display the level of sex hormones that reflect fertility. Human culture has added body ornaments and possessions to Costly Signals. These are additional signs of wealth and resource acquisition that also signal reproductive fitness, including decorative clothing and jewelry, lavish housing and luxury possessions.

5.2. Deception

Humans have also devised ways by which they deceive others as to their true reproductive fitness by faking Costly Signals.

5.2.1. Makeup and Cosmetics

Women around the world apply makeup to alter their appearance. Facial recognition by the brain is made more difficult by heavy makeup, especially if the face was first seen without makeup [ 73 ]. Makeup can be so deceptive that it impairs automated facial recognition software [ 74 ].

As noted before, the application of makeup overcomes the influence of fluctuating estrogen levels on perceptions of attractiveness [ 27 ]. By darkening hair color and lightening skin complexion, cosmetics are used to counter this sign of aging by enhancing contrast [ 62 ]. Cosmetics also even out skin tone, and for people shown pictures of both made-up and no makeup faces, the number of eye fixations and dwell time were positively correlated with skin color homogeneity [ 66 ]. Overall, makeup reduces the perceived age of women, and the older the woman, the greater the reduction of the perceived age [ 75 ]. This has significant social benefits, since the use of makeup leads to an increase in the perception of likability, competence and trustworthiness [ 76 ], as well as dominance and prestige [ 77 ].

Eye makeup increases the appearance of the size of women’s eyes [ 78 ] and has the greatest effect on attractiveness as judged by both men and women [ 65 ]. Observers look at the eyes of women with eye makeup 40% longer than women without it, and if the rest of the face is made up, the attention to the eyes increased 80% [ 79 ]. Lipstick, which increases the appearance of the size and accentuates the shape of the lip, increases the time people spend looking at the lips by 26% [ 68 ].

Deception by cosmetics has measurable economic consequences. Male patrons at a French restaurant gave tips more often to waitresses who wore makeup and, when they did tip, they gave them larger amounts of money than to waitresses without makeup. There was no difference for female patrons, even though both male and female patrons thought that the waitresses were more attractive when they wore makeup [ 80 ]. In macroeconomic theory, the Lipstick Effect (first formulated by cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder) is the increase in sales of lipsticks during economic downturns, as women turn to small pleasures to compensate for losses and increase their appearance advantage in a more competitive environment. A review of recessions over the past 50 years confirmed that during downturns women tend to increase their purchase of products that enhance their appearance while decreasing their purchase of non-appearance-enhancing products [ 81 ].

5.2.2. Deception Detection

Maintaining the value of Costly Signals against deception requires that people are able to detect and punish cheating. Within the brain, the frontal lobe and amygdala are key components of the “lie detector”, as demonstrated by a patient with brain damage in this region who was unable to detect cheating, even though otherwise cognitively normal [ 82 ]. The brain is especially attuned to negative information, emphasizing the importance of detecting fakes and posers. Test subjects were significantly more likely to retain and consciously process a human face if it was associated with negative gossip rather than positive or neutral gossip [ 83 ]. Since women have the greater stake in detecting who is or is not faking Costly Signals among potential mates and rivals, it is not surprising that many studies have shown that women outperform men in detecting lies and inferring emotions from subtle cues [ 71 ].

5.3. Self-Deception and Self-Signaling

The best way to convince others of a lie is to believe it yourself, and natural selection is strong enough to build a genetically controlled self-deception mechanism [ 84 ]. Many studies suggest that people are objectively accurate in evaluating others but view themselves with an optimism bias.

5.3.1. Self-Assessment

People agree with a correlation of 0.79 about the attractiveness of others, but correlations between self-ratings and objective measures of individual attractiveness are remarkably low: 0.24 for men and 0.25 for women [ 85 ]. People maintain an image of themselves that is much better than others perceive. For example, photographs of volunteers were morphed to make them progressively more attractive or less attractive. The subjects, both Western Europeans and Asians, were then invited to pick out from the array of pictures the one that was the accurate representation of themselves. The median choice was a picture that was 20% more attractive [ 86 ]. They were also quicker to recognize the more attractive photo than their actual photo, a revealing result considering that people recognize objects more quickly when they match their mental representations.

5.3.2. Self-Deception

The brain can hold a truthful and false belief at the same time because it is composed of domain-specific cognitive modules, each of which evolved for solving a specific problem [ 87 ]. For example, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is integral to processing self-related information but remains quiet when the brain considers non-self-referential information [ 88 ]. These modules are not tightly connected and not all are accessible to consciousness. Often, these modules reach a decision which is only later rationalized by conscious thought [ 89 ].

Facial attractiveness is so salient to people that it can influence unrelated opinions, such as the perception of fairness. In the Ultimatum Game, a player is offered an arbitrary split of money by a proposer, which he can either accept or reject as unfair. Male players accepted offers as fair from attractive women that they rejected when proposed by unattractive women [ 90 ], suggesting that a man can deceive himself into believing an offer is fair just because the proposer is beautiful.

5.3.3. Self-Signaling

Since the world is a competitive place, people are concerned with their own level of reproductive fitness and social status. However, they cannot know their own status with any certainty, in part because they lie to themselves about their own value. Therefore, they use various signals to themselves to demonstrate their own value [ 91 ], such as overcoming challenges or acquiring costly goods or making generous donations, even when no one else knows about it. Self-signaling explains many behaviors of people in secret, private or anonymous purchasing or charity transactions [ 92 ]. Many efforts by people to alter or improve their appearance beyond what is conventional or apparent to others, such as some types of cosmetic surgery and even piercings or tattooing on body sites covered by hair or clothing, may be understood as a signal to oneself.

6. Conclusions

Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, the famous geneticist, wrote in 1973 that “ nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution ”. Since the human form and the brain co-evolved in the 5 million years since our last common ancestor with the apes, we can say that nothing in beauty makes sense except in light of the brain. Natural selection favors individuals with greater reproductive fitness and also those who display signs of greater fitness, as well as those who can detect them.

The Costly Signals of fitness for humans include health, youth, and ideal proportions. The brain has evolved modules to perceive facial and body shapes, interpret their meaning, and then assign value—beautiful and attractive, or not. Since men and women have different reproductive strategies, and different sex hormones shape their bodies, the brain is tuned to those features driven by these gender-specific development patterns in reaching decisions about attractiveness. A key finding is that men and women of all cultures agree on which men and women are attractive and who are not.

People use cosmetics and surgical procedures to fake Costly Signals, while at the same time they are always on the lookout to detect cheaters. Deceivers are more convincing when they believe the lie themselves, and we have ample evidence of self-deception in beauty. In this fog of competition, people use self-signaling to indicate to themselves their own worth. None of this makes sense except in light of the neuroscience of beauty.

This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Susan Sontag on Beauty vs. Interestingness

By maria popova.

The essay was in part inspired by Pope John Paul II’s response to the news of countless cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: He summoned the American cardinals to the Vatican and attempted to rationalize the situation by stating that “a great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.” In this concerning assertion as a springboard for a broader reflection on our confused attitudes toward beauty, Sontag set out to transcend the common social definition of beauty as “a gladness of the senses” and instead “to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility.”

Sontag writes:

However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of “inner” (as opposed to “outer”) beauty. Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated—fixed—in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.

Arguing that beauty has ceased to be a sufficient standard for art, that “beautiful has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment,” Sontag notes:

The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

And yet there is more to beauty than a lackluster cultural abstraction:

Beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can’t say something is beautiful if you’re not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called “political correctness,” but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.)

Sontag traces the paradoxical and convoluted cultural trajectory of our relationship with beauty:

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and its appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with a social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude. What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as — on the contrary — excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refined judgment, high standards, fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical with oneself. The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty — and the caring about beauty — was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was “interesting.”

To call something “interesting,” however, isn’t always an admission of admiration. (For a crudely illustrative example, my eighth-grade English teacher memorably used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby.”) Turning to photography — perhaps the sharpest focus of Sontag’s cultural contemplation and prescient observation — she considers the complex interplay between interestingness and beauty:

[People] might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where “the interesting” first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and it soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.”

(Curiously, Francis Bacon famously asserted that “the best part of beauty [is that] which a picture cannot express.” )

What we tend to call interesting, Sontag argues, is that which “has not previously been thought beautiful (or good).” And yet the qualitative value of “interesting” is exponentially diminished with the word’s use and overuse — something entirely unsurprising and frequently seen with terms we come to apply too indiscriminately, until they lose their original meaning. (Contemporary case in point: “curation.” ) She writes, echoing her meditation on the creative purpose of boredom from nearly four decades earlier and her concept of “aesthetic consumerism” coined shortly thereafter:

The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring — understood as an absence, an emptiness — implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality. In order to enrich this deprived take on our experiences, one would have to acknowledge a full notion of boredom: depression, rage (suppressed despair). Then one could work toward a full notion of the interesting. But that quality of experience — of feeling — one would probably no longer even want to call interesting.

With her strong distaste for unnecessary polarities , Sontag observes:

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments.

She counters this with a more real, more living definition of beauty:

Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console… From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942: “The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.” Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.

Echoing young Virginia Woolf’s insight about nature, imitation, and the arts , Sontag elegantly brings her point full circle:

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent… Beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous. Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”

All the essays and speeches collected in At the Same Time are treasure troves of timeless wisdom on culture, art, politics, society, and the self. Complement them with Sontag on writing , boredom , sex , censorship , and aphorisms , her radical vision for remixing education , her insight on why lists appeal to us , and her illustrated meditations on art and on love .

— Published April 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/22/susan-sontag-on-beauty-vs-interestingness/ —

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Beauty Perception and Your Brain

Apr 6, 2021

How the brain responds to beauty

Beauty is elusive, and philosophers have tried for centuries to understand it. Now scientists are trying their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, Scientific American looks at how researchers can perhaps tell us where the response to beauty is — or isn’t located in the brain.

How your brain decides what is beautiful

In his TEDMED Talk, cognitive neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee’s research in neuroaesthetics is unraveling the intricate concept of human beauty. Dr. Chatterjee draws on tools of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and art to explain what makes someone aesthetically beautiful and why we’re drawn to beautiful people.

Neuroscience study shows memory can improve with training

Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline in the field of empirical aesthetics that uses neuroscience to understand how we experience beauty in different areas (art, dance, music, etc) at a neurological level. Medium explores this controversial field that continues to evolve, push boundaries, and blur the line between art and science.

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Brain, Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus

• ISBN-10 019751362X
• ISBN-13 978-0197513620
• Publisher Oxford University Press
• Publication date November 26, 2021
• Language English
• Dimensions 9.48 x 1.01 x 6.51 inches
• Print length 280 pages
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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (November 26, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 019751362X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0197513620
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.48 x 1.01 x 6.51 inches
• #879 in Philosophy Aesthetics
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About the author

Anjan chatterjee.

Anjan Chatterjee, MD, FAAN, is a Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Center for Neuroscience and Society. He conducts research in spatial cognition and language, aesthetics, and ethics. He is the President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and is the President of the Society of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology.

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Is there an Aesthetic Brain? A brief essay on the Neuroaesthetic Quantification of beauty

2021, Quantifying bodies and health. Interdisciplinary approaches

It is possible today to determine, with some precision (according to the most recent studies in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology), the areas of the brain and the neural networks involved when an individual contemplates art, when feeling pleasure, or when judging about aesthetic experience. However, many questions remain open. First, the philosophical question about the subjective nature of this kind of judgments. Then, what happens in the mind (or should it be said, in the brain?) of the beholder when contemplating art or judging in favor (or not) of the beauty of an object. And the ultimate question, if we have an aesthetic brain. Another issue that must be addressed is if bioart and especially neuroart can contribute to this analysis and if they can be effectively quantified as art. Thus, this brief essay seeks to provide some understanding about this questions but most importantly about the existence of an aesthetic brain, which may ultimately contribute to open doors to other problems of philosophy such as the hard brain-mind problem.

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Physics of life reviews

Matthew Pelowski

This paper has a rather audacious purpose: to present a comprehensive theory explaining, and further providing hypotheses for the empirical study of, the multiple ways by which people respond to art. Despite common agreement that interaction with art can be based on a compelling, and occasionally profound, psychological experience, the nature of these interactions is still under debate. We propose a model, The Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception (VIMAP), with the goal of resolving the multifarious processes that can occur when we perceive and interact with visual art. Specifically, we focus on the need to integrate bottom-up, artwork-derived processes, which have formed the bulk of previous theoretical and empirical assessments, with top-down mechanisms which can describe how individuals adapt or change within their processing experience, and thus how individuals may come to particularly moving, disturbing, transformative, as well as mundane, results. This is achieved by combi...

In Alfonsina Scarinzi (ed.), Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy. 117-138.

Maria Brincker

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of becoming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, contextual and dynamic specificity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asymmetry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal-directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor notion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework that hopefully can support fruitful interdisciplinary research of aesthetic perception.

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André Aciman: Why Beauty Is So Important to Us

By André Aciman Dec. 7, 2019

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A quest for our better selves

Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.

Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”

We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses.

We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.

Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.

Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.

Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.

We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.

André Aciman is the author of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Find Me.”

The marketing machines of modern life would have us believe that beauty is about physical attributes. With the benefit of the wisdom we have attained after many years spent traversing the planet as conservation photographers, we know otherwise.

Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.

Every day we learn that species, landscapes and indigenous knowledge are vanishing before our eyes. That’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to reminding the world of the fragile beauty of our only home, and to protecting nature, not just for humanity’s sake, but for the benefit of all life on earth.

Committing our time, energy and resources to achieve these goals fills our lives with beauty.

Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen are conservation photographers and the founders of SeaLegacy .

Science enriches us by bringing us beauty in multiple forms.

Sometimes it can be found in the simplest manifestations of nature: the pattern of a nautilus shell; the colors and delicate shapes of a eucalyptus tree in full flower; the telescopic images of swirling galaxies, with their visual message of great mystery and vastness.

Sometimes it is the intricacy of the barely understood dynamics of the world’s molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems that speaks to our imagination and wonder.

Sometimes there is beauty in the simple idea of science pursuing truth, or in the very process of scientific inquiry by which human creativity and ingenuity unveil a pattern within what had looked like chaos and incomprehensibility.

And isn’t there beauty and elegance in the fact that just four DNA nucleotides are patterned to produce the shared genetic information that underlies myriad seemingly unrelated forms of life?

Elizabeth Blackburn is a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

A person’s definition of beauty is an abstract, complicated and highly personal ideal that becomes a guiding light throughout life. We crave what we consider beautiful, and that craving can easily develop into desire, which in turn becomes the fuel that propels us into action. Beauty has the power to spawn aspiration and passion, thus becoming the impetus to achieve our dreams.

In our professional lives as fashion designers, we often deal with beauty as a physical manifestation. But beauty can also be an emotional, creative and deeply spiritual force. Its very essence is polymorphic. It can take on limitless shapes, allowing us to define it by what makes the most sense to us.

We are extremely fortunate to be living at a time when so many examples of beauty are being celebrated and honored, and more inclusive and diverse standards are being set, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or creed. Individuality is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful.

Beauty will always have the power to inspire us. It is that enigmatic, unknowable muse that keeps you striving to be better, to do better, to push harder. And by that definition, what we all need most in today’s world is perhaps simply more beauty.

Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough are the co-founders and designers of Proenza Schouler.

Beauty is just another way the tendency of our society to create hierarchies and segregate people expresses itself. The fact that over the past century certain individuals and businesses realized that it is incredibly lucrative to push upon us ever-changing beauty standards has only made things worse.

The glorification of impossible ideals is the foundation of the diet and beauty industries. And because of it, we find ourselves constantly in flux, spending however much money and time it takes to meet society’s standards. First, we didn’t want ethnic features. Now, we are all about plumping our lips and getting eye lifts in pursuit of a slanted eye. Skin-bleaching treatments and tanning creams. The ideal is constantly moving, and constantly out of reach.

The concept of beauty is a permanent obsession that permeates cultures around the world.

Jameela Jamil is an actress and the founder of the “I Weigh” movement .

The Life of Beauty

The sung blessing of creation

Led her into the human story.

That was the first beauty.

Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice

Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin

Of her birthing cocoon.

Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands

As he held the newborn against his breathing.

Next beauty the moon through the dark window

It was a rocking horse, a wish.

There were many beauties in this age

For everything was immensely itself:

Green greener than the impossibility of green,

the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,

Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her mouth.

She ate well of the next beauty.

Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.

Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly

To hold back her hair.

Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower

Between her legs as she became herself.

Do not forget this beauty she was told.

The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,

Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.

When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.

But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.

When it was beautiful all around and within,

She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.

Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.

Even her bones, said time.

Were tuned to beauty.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.

Beauty is a positive and dynamic energy that has the power to convey emotion and express individuality as well as collectiveness. It can be felt through each of our senses, yet it is more magnificent when it transcends all five.

Over more than 30 years as a chef, I have experienced beauty unfolding through my cooking and in the creation of new dishes. Recipes have shown me that beauty is not a singular ingredient, object or idea, but the sum of the parts. Each dish has an appearance, a flavor, a temperature, a smell, a consistency and a nutritional value, but its triumph is the story all those parts tell together.

When my team and I launched Milan’s Refettorio Ambrosiano, our first community kitchen, in 2015, beauty was the guiding principle in our mission to nourish the homeless. We collaborated with artists, architects, designers and chefs to build a place of warmth, where gestures of hospitality and dignity would be offered to all. What I witnessed by bringing different people and perspectives around the table was the profound ability of beauty to build community. In a welcoming space, our guests had the freedom to imagine who they would like to be and begin to change their lives. In that space, beauty wielded the power of transformation.

When I visit the Refettorios that Food for Soul, the nonprofit I founded, has built around the world over the years, what strikes me as most beautiful is neither a table nor a chair nor a painting on the wall. Beauty is the spontaneity of two strangers breaking bread. It is the proud smile of a man who feels he has a place in the world. It is the emotion of that moment, and its power to fill a room with the celebration of life.

Massimo Bottura is a chef and the founder of Food for Soul .

Who wouldn’t argue that some things are objectively beautiful? Much of what we can see in the natural world would surely qualify: sunsets, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers. Images of these scenes, which please and soothe our senses, are among the most reproduced in all of civilization.

It’s true, of course, that we’re not the only creatures attracted to flowers. Bees and butterflies can’t resist them either — but that’s because they need flowers to survive.

Lying at the opposite end of the beauty spectrum are reptiles. They’ve had it pretty bad. Across decades of science fiction, their countenance has served as the model for a long line of ugly monsters, from Godzilla to the Creature in the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to the Gorn in “Star Trek.”

There may be a good reason for our instinctive attraction to some things and distaste for others. If our mammalian ancestors, running underfoot, hadn’t feared reptilian dinosaurs they would have been swiftly eaten. Similarly, nearly everyone would agree that the harmless butterfly is more beautiful than the stinger-equipped bee — with the possible exception of beekeepers.

Risk of bodily harm appears to matter greatly in our collective assessment of what is or is not beautiful. Beauty could very well be a way for our senses to reassure us when we feel safe in a dangerous universe.

If so, I can’t help but wonder how much beauty lies just out of reach, hidden in plain sight, simply because we have no more than five senses with which to experience the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is the author of “Letters From an Astrophysicist.”

Beauty can stop us in our tracks. It can inspire us, move us, bring us to tears. Beauty can create total chaos, and then total clarity. The best kind of beauty changes hearts and minds.

That’s why the bravery of our girls is so beautiful — it can do all these things.

Over the past year, girls have moved us to tears with impassioned speeches about gun control, sexual assault and climate change. They have challenged the status quo and brought us clarity with their vision of the future. They have changed the hearts and minds of generations that are older, but not necessarily wiser.

Girls like Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi are fighting for the environment. Young women like Diana Kris Navarro, a Girls Who Code alumna, are leading efforts against harassment in tech. Girls like Lauren Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, are speaking out against gun violence. The list goes on and on and on.

These girls are wise and brave beyond their years. They speak up because they care, not because they have the attention of a crowd or a camera. And they persist even when they’re told they’re too young, too small, too powerless — because they know they’re not.

Their bravery is beauty, redefined. And it’s what we need now, more than ever.

Reshma Saujani is the founder and chief executive of Girls Who Code and the author of “Brave, Not Perfect.”

I spend most of my waking hours (and many of my nightly dreams) thinking about beauty and its meaning. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to express beauty through design.

I see beauty as something ineffable, and I experience it in many ways. For example, I love gardening. The form and color of the flowers I tend to fill me with awe and joy. The time I spend in my garden frequently influences the shape of my gowns, as well as the objects that I choose to surround myself with. It even brings me closer to the people who have the same passion for it.

As humans, we all are more or less attuned to beauty. And because of this, we all try to engage with it one way or another — be it by being in nature, through poetry or by falling in love. And though our interaction with it can be a solitary affair, in the best cases, it connects people who share the same appreciation for it.

Beauty is what allows us to experience the extraordinary richness of our surroundings. Sensing it is like having a visa to our inner selves and the rest of the world, all at once. The interesting thing about beauty is that there is simply no downside to it: It can only enhance our lives.

Zac Posen is a fashion designer.

“The purpose of sex is procreation,” a straight cisgender man once told me, trying to defend his homophobia. “So that proves that homosexuality is scientifically and biologically wrong. It serves no purpose.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” I then said, “so … what’s the science behind blow jobs?” That shut him up real quick.

I often hear arguments that reduce human existence to a biological function, as if survival or productivity were our sole purpose, and the “bottom line” our final word. That is an attractive stance to take because it requires the least amount of energy or imagination. And for most animals, it’s the only option — the hummingbird sipping nectar is merely satisfying her hunger. She does not know her own beauty; she doesn’t have the capacity to perceive it. But we do. We enjoy art, music, poetry. We build birdfeeders. We plant flowers.

Only humans can seek out and express beauty. Why would we have this unique ability if we weren’t meant to use it? Even quarks, those fundamental parts at the core of life, were originally named after “beauty” and “truth.”

That’s why beauty matters to me. When we find beauty in something, we are making the fullest use of our biological capacities. Another way of putting it: When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.

Constance Wu is a television and film actress.

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• 25th Anniversary

Beauty and the Brain

Cerebral fascinations: We asked our neuroscientists why they find the brain beautiful.

The deeper we look into the brain and the more we understand about it, the more beautiful it appears. Neural circuits perform essential functions by exploiting, in extraordinarily “clever” ways, the remarkable properties of their components — and these components, right down to the molecular level, are as beautiful as the whole. I practice neuroscience for the magical moments when the clouds lift and depthless beauty is revealed.

Dmitri Chklovskii Group Leader, Neuroscience, Center for Computational Biology, Flatiron Institute; Research Associate Professor, NYU Langone Health

What’s beautiful is that in some sense, our neurons are smarter than we are. The brain can perform certain tasks better than all of the artificial intelligence algorithms we have. And this is despite the fact that the algorithms we use are a result of our design, while the brain is a product of this very unpredictable, stochastic process called evolution. Moreover, something so powerful and so fit develops without a central authority and is instead based on local ‘self- organizing’ rules.

Adrienne Fairhal l Executive Committee, Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain; Computational neuroscientist, University of Washington

Since high school, I have been drawn to the beauty and orderliness of physics: the decomposition of the real world, from quanta to galaxies, into mathematics. The messiness and complexity of biology seemed overwhelming. Three seminal experiences — a lecture by Nobel Prize winner Leon Cooper on the development of orientation columns; a wonderful discussion about place cells among biologists, physicists and computer scientists at the Weizmann Institute; and biophysicist Bill Bialek’s gift of a book, Spikes — left me exhilarated that there is underlying regularity in brain dynamics, that physical principles can be applied to tame what seem like impossible levels of detail. It is the most tantalizing and rich mathematical problem that exists.

Gerald Fischbach Distinguished scientist, Simons Foundation

What I find beautiful about the brain are the elements within it — the nerve cells and glia — and how they communicate. There is physical beauty in their shape and how they generate signals, and a mysterious beauty in how signals produce our thoughts and emotions. The biggest mystery is still before us: How do electrical signals in billions of neurons coordinate their activity to produce coherent sensation, movement, emotions, thoughts, memory and creativity? We think we are on track to understand aspects of this question. It is what the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain is trying to do. Positive outcomes at this level would open new unimagined aspects of brain beauty.

Catherine Lord Scientific Advisory Board, Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative; Psychologist, University of California, Los Angeles

The brain is beautiful because its developmental trajectory allows human beings to become the adaptive, creative, socially connected and complex beings we are. Human children acquire basic motor and adaptive functions far more slowly than other species. That relatively slower maturation of the brain allows us to build cognitive and social connections, through experience with caregivers and the wider world that shapes our development throughout our life spans. The brain is so complex that we are only just beginning to find recognizable patterns associated with marked individual differences in development and behavior — related to intellectual disability or autism spectrum disorder, for example. While this is frustrating for clinical scientists, it reflects the multiplicity of levels of function and adaptation and the wealth of possibilities the brain gives us.

William Newsome Executive Committee, Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain; Neurobiologist, Stanford University School of Medicine

The brain is unfathomably complex, containing roughly 100 billion neurons that interact across 100 trillion systems and transmit information via 62,000 miles of wiring — enough to wrap around the Earth’s circumference more than twice. The emergence of our minds from the physical reality of our brains is beautiful, wondrous and perplexing. How complex mental life emerges from the molecular and cellular minutiae of the brain is deeply mysterious. Answers to these fundamental questions will strongly influence how we conceive of ourselves as sentient, thinking beings; how we anticipate our future as the boundary between biological and artificial intelligence blurs; and how we understand and treat psychiatric and neurological condition.

Louis Reichardt Director, Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative

I think it’s amazing that properties of cells that were developed in the Precambrian soup can be exploited to create such a complicated and well-functioning organ in the body. These pathways that were necessary to let single-cell organisms survive somehow created this amazingly complicated and beautifully functional part of the body.

David Tank Director, Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain; Co-director, Princeton Neuroscience Institute

Traditionally, we viewed the structure of neurons, like the branching of a dendritic arbor (famously sketched by neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal), as illustrative of the beauty of the brain. But with new methods, such as connectomics and deep sequencing, we’re starting to see a level of complexity that is so staggering it’s hard to comprehend. It’s awe-inspiring how nature created this structure. How is thinking produced from this complexity? Given this staggering complexity, it’s particularly amazing that the brain builds itself. Not only is it the most complex thing in the known universe, it builds itself. I also find great beauty in the brain in action. With modern technology, we can see the brain at work: We can watch memories being formed and actions being taken. That’s a new kind of beauty that neuroscientists are only recently becoming aware of.

Michael Wigler Investigator, Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative; Molecular biologist, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

This article is part of the “Five Things We Find Beautiful” section of the foundation’s 25th anniversary book.

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Neuroaesthetics explores how our brain perceives and responds to beauty and art. By studying neural processes, it reveals how visual elements, emotions, and cognitive interpretations interact to create aesthetic experiences. This field bridges neuroscience and art, enhancing our understanding of why we find certain things visually appealing and emotionally moving.

Table of Contents

Imagine standing in front of a magnificent painting, feeling a surge of emotions that transcend words. Or listening to a piece of music that sends shivers down your spine, with each note resonating with an inexplicable sense of beauty. What is it about art that captivates us so deeply? This deep question lies at the heart of neuroaesthetics, a field merging art and neuroscience to uncover the secrets behind our aesthetic experiences.

The Quest for Beauty: From Aristotle to Neuroaesthetics

The human race has always been preoccupied with beauty. The philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to give a concrete voice to this fascination. He pondered the nature of beauty and its impact on the human soul, believing that the appreciation of beauty was intrinsic to human nature, a pursuit that elevates the spirit and enriches the mind. Aristotle posited that beauty lies in harmony, proportion, and the orderly arrangement of parts, whether in nature or human creations.

In essence, neuroaesthetics continues Aristotle’s age-old quest for beauty, transforming it into a scientific journey that bridges the gap between the subjective and the objective, the emotional and the empirical. This field celebrates the wonder of art while uncovering the neural threads that weave our aesthetic tapestry, offering a deeper appreciation of the beauty that enriches our lives.

What is Neuroaesthetics?

Neuroaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experiences, bridging neuroscience, psychology, and art. It aims to decode how the brain perceives, processes, and responds to beauty and artistic expressions. Employing advanced neuroscientific techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), eye tracking, and galvanic skin response, researchers in neuroaesthetics map the activity patterns of the brain and body in response to various art forms, including visual arts, music, and literature.

Central to neuroaesthetics is the study of aesthetic perception, focusing on the neural correlates of elements that contribute to beauty, such as symmetry, color, and composition. This field also examines the cognitive and emotional responses elicited by aesthetic stimuli, identifying the neural circuits involved in the pleasure and reward systems of the brain. Additionally, neuroaesthetics explores individual differences in aesthetic appreciation, considering factors like cultural background, personal preferences, and educational influences.

Your Brain on Art

The term “neuroaesthetics” was first popularized by Semir Zeki in the late 1990s. Zeki, a prominent neuroscientist, conducted pioneering research demonstrating how different regions of the brain are involved in the appreciation of visual art (Zeki, 1999). By utilizing brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and EEG, researchers in neuroaesthetics have begun to map out the neural correlates of aesthetic experiences.

One of the primary areas of focus in neuroaesthetics is understanding the role of the brain’s reward system in the perception of beauty. Research has shown that the experience of beauty activates the brain’s reward circuits, including the orbitofrontal cortex and the striatum, which are also involved in processing other pleasurable stimuli (Kawabata & Zeki, 2004). This activation is thought to be linked to the emotional and motivational aspects of aesthetic appreciation.

Another key aspect of neuroaesthetics is the investigation of how specific elements of art, such as symmetry, color, and composition, influence aesthetic judgments. For example, studies have found that symmetrical patterns are often perceived as more attractive, likely due to the brain’s preference for order and predictability (Jacobsen et al., 2006). Similarly, color and contrast have been shown to significantly impact aesthetic preferences and emotional responses (Palmer et al., 2013).

How Your Brain Experiences Beauty: The Aesthetic Triad

The Aesthetic Triad is a model that explains how our brain experiences beauty and art. It involves three main systems: sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge.

• This is about how we automatically react to what we see and experience. For example, when you look at Van Gogh’s swirling paintings, your brain senses movement. Different types of art activate specific brain areas: faces engage the face-recognition part, while landscapes engage the area that processes places.
• This part of the brain deals with our emotional reactions to beauty. Seeing something beautiful can make us feel happy, excited, or even moved. Beautiful faces or images trigger the brain’s reward system, making us feel pleasure without even thinking about it. Areas in the brain like the orbitofrontal cortex light up when we see something we find beautiful, whether it’s a painting, music, or architecture.
• This involves understanding and interpreting what we see. Our brains use context and knowledge to make sense of art. When we see actions in art, like a gesture in a painting, our motor system gets involved, helping us understand the artist’s intent and feel empathy.

How Our Brain Processes Visual Beauty

Our brains break down visual elements like color and movement. When we see a beautiful face or a stunning landscape, different parts of the brain get to work, helping us appreciate the beauty in detail.

How Our Brain Engages with Art

When we see art depicting actions, our brain’s motor system is engaged, making us feel connected to the actions we see. This helps us understand and empathize with the art on a deeper level.

How Beauty Makes Us Feel Good

Seeing something beautiful triggers our brain’s reward system. This happens automatically, making us feel pleasure and happiness. Areas like the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum are activated, showing the strong link between beauty and feeling good.

Leveraging Neuroaesthetics in the Real World

Commercials and advertising .

Emotional engagement is crucial for impactful commercials. Neuroaesthetics reveals how visual and auditory elements evoke strong emotions. Harmonious colors, soothing music, and symmetrical designs can create calm and happiness, while dynamic contrasts and asymmetry can excite and interest viewers. This emotional resonance can lead to stronger brand recall and increased consumer action.

Colors and composition are key to consumer perception. Neuroaesthetics shows that different colors trigger different emotional responses. Blue conveys trust and calmness, while red evokes excitement and urgency. Symmetrical designs are more pleasing as they align with the brain’s preference for order. Using these principles, advertisers can create visually appealing and effective commercials.

Creativity is at the heart of successful advertising. Neuroaesthetics provides insights into generating and perceiving creative ideas. Research indicates that creative individuals have enhanced brain connectivity, facilitating original ideas. Advertisers can leverage this understanding to develop innovative commercials that stand out.

Neuroarchitecture

Architecture has the power to impact our emotions. Studies show that the design of spaces, like waiting rooms, can influence stress levels. For instance, rooms with natural elements like windows and vegetation tend to induce relaxation, activating brain regions associated with calmness.

Research indicates that these environmental features affect our neurophysiology, potentially reducing stress by altering physiological responses like cortisol levels. However, the exact architectural elements that elicit calm or stress responses remain unclear. Future research aims to explore how individual preferences and personal styles affect these neurophysiological reactions to different architectural designs.

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References: 

• Zeki, S. (1999). Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain . Oxford University Press.
• Dutton, D. (2009). The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution . Bloomsbury Press.
• Kawabata, H., & Zeki, S. (2004). Neural correlates of beauty. Journal of Neurophysiology , 91(4), 1699-1705.
• Jacobsen, T., Schubotz, R. I., Höfel, L., & Cramon, D. Y. (2006). Brain correlates of aesthetic judgment of beauty. NeuroImage , 29(1), 276-285.
• Palmer, S. E., Schloss, K. B., & Sammartino, J. (2013). Visual aesthetics and human preference. Annual Review of Psychology , 64, 77-107.
• Beaty, R. E., Benedek, M., Kaufman, S. B., & Silvia, P. J. (2014). Default and executive network coupling supports creative idea production. Scientific Reports , 4, 3821.

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Cover Story

Beauty is in the mind of the beholder.

• Face Perception
• Physical Appearance
• Sex Differences
• Social Psychology

Many factors can play into personal attractiveness — the way you dress, the way you act, the way you carry yourself, even things that are hard or impossible to change, like social status and wealth, race, and body size and shape. But the first thing we notice when we meet someone is their face. There are faces that launch a thousand ships, and faces that only a mother could love, and we are supremely attuned to tell the difference. The brain, among its many other functions, is a beauty detector.

The brain is such a good beauty detector, in fact, that it can judge the appeal of a face before you’re aware you’ve even seen one. When participants in a recent study were presented with attractive and unattractive faces for only 13 milliseconds, they were able to judge the faces’ attractiveness accurately (that is, in accordance with experimenters’ ratings), even though they were not consciously aware of the stimuli and felt like they were just guessing (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005).

There is no doubt that beauty (which here means both male and female attractiveness) is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, but across individuals and across cultures there is nevertheless considerable agreement about what makes a pretty or handsome face, and the evidence strongly counters the conventional wisdom that attractiveness preferences are mainly acquired through life experience. For one thing, the beauty bias is already present in infancy. Six-month-olds prefer to look at the same relatively attractive faces that adults do (Rubenstein, Kalakanis, & Langlois, 1999).

Truth in Beauty

The question is, is beauty really only skin deep, or does an attractive face actually reflect underlying good qualities? In a few ways, the stereotype that “beautiful is good” does hold. Evolutionary psychology holds that faces really are windows onto certain fundamental and important characteristics indicative of a person’s quality as a romantic partner and as a mate — qualities of health and genes, and even character.

Our faces are sculpted by our hormones. These sex-typical facial features of adult men and women reflect the ratio of testosterone to estrogen or estrogen to testosterone, respectively, acting on the individual during development. We are programmed to be drawn to strong indicators of maleness (for women) and femaleness (for men) partly because they reflect an individual’s health (Fink & Penton-Voak, 2002). The reason hormones equate to health is somewhat counterintuitive. High levels of sex hormones during puberty actually suppress the immune system, raising vulnerability to disease and infection. It sounds like a bad thing. But when a person with a particularly “male” or “female” face makes it to adulthood with all his or her health intact, it means that the person has withstood the potentially debilitating influence of those high hormones. In other words it signifies a more robust constitution.

‘Your Symmetry Lights Up the Room’

No two faces are alike, and no two halves of a face are alike. Countless small variables make faces somewhat asymmetrical – a slightly wider jaw on one side, one eye a fraction of an inch lower than the other, a cheekbone that sticks out just a wee bit more, a dimple on one cheek, etc. Some asymmetries (called directional asymmetries) are common across the population – for example, the left side of most people’s faces is slightly larger than the right. But many asymmetries, called fluctuating asymmetries, arise when one’s unfolding genetic program is perturbed during development, for instance by parasites or other environmental challenges. The slings and arrows of life’s fortunes can literally knock our faces off of kilter, just like a punch to the nose. A symmetrical face, like a particularly masculine or feminine one, is a sign of having stood up better to life’s figurative schoolyard beatings.

Numerous studies have found that when men and women are asked to compare versions of faces that are more versus less symmetrical, the symmetrical ones garner significantly higher ratings of attractiveness, dominance, sexiness, and health, and are perceived to be more desirable as potential mates (Rhodes, Proffitt, Grady, & Sumich, 1998; Shackelford & Larsen, 1997). So as with masculine/feminine features, the appeal of symmetry makes perfect sense to evolutionary psychologists. In a beautiful face, we are really seeing the artistry of good genes. People prefer symmetrical faces even when they can’t actually perceive the symmetry – that is, when only face halves are presented. It may be that symmetry covaries with other desirable characteristics that reflect the same genetic endowment and overall health (Penton-Voak et al., 2001).

It may not be all that surprising that we’d rather mate with a symmetrical Greek god or goddess than with someone who stepped out of a Picasso painting. Less obvious is that a pretty or handsome face is also generally one that is, well, average . When presented with individual faces and a composite of those individual faces, participants will judge the composite as more attractive than the individual, more distinctive faces. And the more faces that contribute to the composite, the more attractive it becomes (Langlois & Roggman, 1990). The most attractive faces appear to be those whose features are closest to the average in the population—that is, more prototypical.

Averageness, like symmetry, reflects a favorable genetic endowment. Those with average features are less likely to be carrying harmful mutations. Additionally, averageness reflects greater heterozygosity — having both a dominant and a recessive allele for given traits, rather than two dominant or two recessive alleles (an advantage that symmetry also reflects). Heterozygosity confers relatively greater resistance to pathogens, in many cases, and thus, along with all the other indicators of resilience, we may be programmed to seek it out through its subtle but telltale signs.

However, it has also been argued that there may be some much simpler cognitive reasons for the preference for averages. Besides faces, people show a preference for average-looking dogs, average-looking birds, and average-looking watches (Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2000). Prototypes are more familiar-looking than less typical examples of a given class of objects, be it the face of a potential mate or the face of a timepiece, and they are easier to process. Easy on the eyes = easy on the brain.

Men and women both show the above preferences when it comes to faces, but in general men’s preferences tend to be more pronounced (Rhodes et al., 1998). Males may place greater importance on physical beauty when it comes to mate choice, while females also attend to characteristics like power and status. But a number of factors contribute to how much — and when — male face characteristics matter to women.

One factor is a woman’s own attractiveness: Preference for masculine and symmetrical features has been shown to be higher for women who regard themselves as more attractive (Little, Burt, Penton-Voak, & Perrett, 2001). Another is time of the month: The degree of women’s preferences for different attractive qualities fluctuates strikingly across the ovulatory cycle.

A group of University of Mexico psychologists have studied women’s shifting preferences for symmetrical men. They have found that this preference (which women can not only see, but even smell in tee-shirts slept in by symmetrical men) increases dramatically around the time of ovulation, when a woman is most fertile and the chance of conception is highest (Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver-Apgar, 2005). So does a woman’s preference for more masculine-looking men. But this preference wanes during other times of the month. Again, evolutionary psychology provides a ready explanation.

Humans, like many other species, are socially monogamous but not necessarily sexually monogamous. When sex might result in getting pregnant, it’s health and fertility that are particularly desirable in a mate. But good genes in the sense of physical health is not the same as good genes in the sense of character, and what makes a good sperm donor may not make the best long-term, nurturing, helpful life partner. The flip side of high testosterone is an increased tendency toward aggression and antisocial behavior, a tendency to compete rather than help. Thus a male with less testosterone, indicated by less masculine features, may invest more in caring for offspring (whether or not he’s the biological father) and so may be better to have around for the long term.

A Thousand Ships

The reason-unseating effect of a beautiful face partly involves the amygdala. Activation of the amygdala, which detects the value of social stimuli, has been associated with greater discounting of all kinds of future rewards, and sure enough, this brain area shows much stronger activation to attractive faces than to more ho-hum ones. (It is actually a U-shaped relationship; the amygdala is also highly activated by unattractive faces; Winston, O’Doherty, Kilner, Perrett, & Dolan, 2007.)

In both men and women, attractive faces cause greater activation in several other brain areas involved in processing of rewards. These include the nucleus accumbens, which also activates in response to rewarding stimuli like money; the medial prefrontal cortex; and the anterior cingulate cortex, which may be involved in shaping future behavior from learning reward outcomes. In men (but not in women), the orbitofrontal cortex, an area that evaluates the reward value of current behaviors, also activates in response to attractive female faces (Cloutier, Heatherton, Whalen, & Kelley, 2008).

Beautify Yourself

Beauty is unfair. Not everyone can be born with great genes. Not everyone can be born symmetrical. Not everyone can be born enticingly, well, average. But obviously there are many factors contributing to attractiveness that are potentially under our control.

Getting enough beauty sleep is something everyone can do to up their beauty quotient. A group of Swedish and Dutch researchers conducted an experiment in which observers rated the attractiveness (as well as health) of participants who were photographed both after a period of sleep deprivation and after a good night’s sleep (Axelsson, 2010). Not surprisingly, individuals who were sleep deprived were rated significantly less attractive than those who were rested. They were also rated less healthy.

And then there are the emotions we project through our faces. Not surprising, positive emotions increase attractiveness. We are drawn to those who smile, for example. As when they wore makeup, women who smiled at men on entering a bar were more likely to be approached and were judged more favorably (Gueguen, 2008a). Even a smile perceived only in the periphery of one’s vision will be seen as more attractive than a face with a neutral expression (Bohrn, Carbon, & Hutzler, 2010). And attractive faces that smile produce even more activity in the orbitofrontal cortex than do attractive faces wearing neutral expressions (O’Doherty et al., 2003).

So here’s the timeless message of psychological science: Be beautiful—or, as beautiful as you can. Smile and sleep and do whatever else you can do to make your face a reward. Among its other social benefits, attractiveness actually invites people to learn what you are made of, in other respects than just genetic fitness. According to a new study at the University of British Columbia (Lorenzo, Biesanz, & Human, 2010), attractive people are actually judged more accurately—at least, closer to a subject’s own self-assessments—than are the less attractive, because it draws others to go beyond the initial impression. “People do judge a book by its cover,” the researchers write, “but a beautiful cover prompts a closer reading.” œ

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physiological distress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 456–466.

Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (2004). Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? Proceedings of the Royal

Society of London B, 271 (Suppl.), S177–S179.

Winston, J.S., O’Doherty, J., Kilner, J.M., Perrett, D.I., & Dolan, R.J. (2007). Brain systems for assessing facial

attractiveness. Neuropsychologia, 45, 195–206.

In the middle, you were saying…

“A group of University of Mexico psychologists have studied women’s shifting preferences for symmetrical men.”

But it should have been University of ‘New’ Mexico.

This is interesting, but it is my opinion that it is not very well researched. The standard of beauty has changed throughout the years and is different in different cultures. Also telling people to “be as beautiful as you can be.” I have finally come to terms with my special beauty and people can see it as I exude confidence. Very biased article and just plain wrong.

Symmetrical people means good genes and that’s equal to beauty (thanks to evolution). That’s beyond cultural preferences. And, as the article itself says: “Beauty is unfair. Not everyone can be born with great genes. Not everyone can be born symmetrical. Not everyone can be born enticingly, well, average. But obviously there are many factors contributing to attractiveness that are potentially under our control”. Your confidence is the factor under you control, has nothing to with how symmetrical you are and has nothing to do with the article’s point (which you’re not getting and seems like you’re bashing the article just because you’re not considered pretty).

“But many asymmetries, called fluctuating asymmetries, arise when one’s unfolding genetic program is perturbed during development, for instance by parasites or other environmental challenges. The slings and arrows of life’s fortunes can literally knock our faces off of kilter, just like a punch to the nose. A symmetrical face, like a particularly masculine or feminine one, is a sign of having stood up better to life’s figurative schoolyard beatings.” What research supports this claim?

my experience of beauty is to be judged more harshly. the expectation that I am perfection in all ways not merely physical appearance, and this has led to much angst esp in relationships. I may be beautiful, but I fart in bed. plus occasionally, plain people both men and women have hated me on sight. the weirdest, is when a manager can’t make eye contact. people project their inadequacies. don’t get me wrong it is fun to have free everything, drinks, jewellry etc. You are all beautiful, own it.

This is fascinating stuff. The relationship between beauty and physical measurement ratios have remained more or less constant through the years and across cultures. Here’s a fun ongoing (NSFW) study that looks at these factors, including the relationships between front, back, and face views. ( http://www.femalebeautystudy.com/ )

Any research here on male baldingness and attractiveness? I’ve read some research using photoshopping to remove hair from people that have full hair and I wonder how computer alterations affects the results. Sometimes it seems that those that look best bald are those that aren’t going bald. I’d like to know if there is truth to that.

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Chemistry Between People: A Sum of Their Connections

Have you ever felt a special “spark” with someone—an intense bond with a potential partner, friend, or colleague? If so, you probably thought you experienced “chemistry.” Literary references to interpersonal chemistry appeared as early as 1590

Love Stories: Adventures in the Study of Attraction

In a nod to Valentine’s Day, researchers including APS Fellows Lisa Diamond, Eli Finkel, Nickola Overall, and Harry Reis share discoveries, challenges, and new directions in the study of love, desire, dating, and commitment.

No Evidence That Women’s Preference for Masculine Faces Is Linked With Hormones

Data from almost 600 participants show that women’s perceptions of male attractiveness do not vary according to their hormone levels, in contrast with some previous research. The study findings are published in Psychological Science, a

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Beauty vs. Brain Debate: Navigating the Controversy

In the perennial discussion of beauty versus brain, opinions sway like a pendulum. This article aims to unravel the complexities of this debate, delving into diverse viewpoints, and ultimately, the harmony between beauty and intelligence.

The Allure of Beauty

Beauty’s influence on perception.

Beauty often acts as a compelling force, influencing how individuals are perceived in various aspects of life. From career opportunities to social interactions, the impact of physical attractiveness cannot be denied.

Beauty’s Societal Privileges

Society tends to accord certain privileges to those deemed beautiful. The doors of opportunity may swing open more readily for individuals with attractive features, a phenomenon that contributes to the perpetuation of beauty-centric ideals.

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The debate on whether beauty is better than brains has been a subject of discussion for a long time. While both beauty and intelligence have their own unique significance, there are several compelling reasons why intelligence is often considered to be more important than beauty. Here are 10 reasons why intelligence is often perceived as an advantage over beauty:

• Intellect is Everlasting : Unlike beauty, which fades with time, intelligence is everlasting and can even shine more with time.
• Enhanceable : While beauty is a gift from God that cannot be improved, intelligence may be enhanced by human effort and the acquisition of worldly knowledge
• Success and Career : In today’s world, intelligence has surpassed beauty. While beauty may initially impress others, it is intelligence that lasts and is essential for success and a successful career
• Professional Sector : In the professional sector, beauty isn’t as important as it once was. Employees must be physically fit for the job and must be able to demonstrate their worth, which is where intelligence comes into play
• Relationships and World Unity : Intelligence preserves relationships and binds the world together as a single entity
• Dominance : Even the most unattractive individuals can have a sharp intelligence and the ability to dominate, while a handsome brainless moron cannot compete in life
• Respect and Job Retention : The brain has the ability to keep a job and acquire respect, which is essential for job retention and career advancement
• Judgment Time : The proper time to judge is when the brain shines like a diamond and paves its way out of a tough situation . Unfortunately, beauty is often dragged into the issue
• Beauty Pageants : Even beauty pageants such as Miss World and Miss Universe are awarded on the basis of intelligence, highlighting the importance of intelligence over beauty

Beauty is Better than Brain Debate

Before exploring the opposing viewpoint, let’s delve deeper into the aspects that make proponents favor beauty over intelligence.

The Significance of Intelligence

The power of cognitive abilities.

Intelligence, often associated with problem-solving, critical thinking, and innovation, holds undeniable importance. A sharp mind contributes to personal and professional success, fostering adaptability in an ever-evolving world.

Intelligence as a Catalyst for Change

Brains drive progress and societal advancements. The power of intellect has propelled humanity forward, from scientific breakthroughs to technological innovations that shape our modern landscape.

Beauty is Better than Brain Debate (Oppose)

Before drawing conclusions, let’s unravel the layers of the opposing argument, shedding light on the aspects that favor intelligence over beauty.

Navigating the Gray Area: Finding Harmony

Embracing both beauty and intelligence.

Rather than perpetuating a binary narrative, recognizing the harmony between beauty and intelligence is essential. Many argue for an integrated approach that values both physical allure and mental prowess.

FAQs: Deciphering the Intricacies of the Debate

• Does physical attractiveness impact career success? Yes, studies suggest that attractive individuals may have advantages in certain career opportunities due to societal biases.
• Can intelligence enhance personal relationships? Intelligence contributes to effective communication and problem-solving, positively influencing personal relationships.
• Is there societal pressure to conform to beauty standards ? Yes, societal expectations often dictate beauty standards, placing undue pressure on individuals to conform to specific physical ideals.
• How do cultural perceptions influence the beauty vs. brain debate? Cultural norms and values play a significant role in shaping perceptions of beauty and intelligence, contributing to varied viewpoints in the debate.
• Can a balance between beauty and intelligence be achieved ? Yes, individuals can strive for a harmonious balance, recognizing the importance of both physical attractiveness and intellectual capabilities.
• Are there instances where beauty or intelligence alone triumphs? While there are situations where one may take precedence, a nuanced approach acknowledges that both beauty and intelligence can contribute to success.

As the beauty vs. brain debate persists, it becomes evident that the dichotomy oversimplifies the complexity of human existence. Embracing both beauty and intelligence allows for a more holistic understanding, fostering a society that values diversity in all its forms.

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Essay on Human Brain

Students are often asked to write an essay on Human Brain in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

100 Words Essay on Human Brain

The human brain: an overview.

The human brain is a complex organ, responsible for all our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It’s made up of billions of nerve cells, or neurons, which communicate through electrical signals.

Parts of the Brain

Brain’s functionality.

The brain is always active, even during sleep. It processes information from our senses, helps us understand the world around us, and makes decisions. It’s truly a remarkable organ!

250 Words Essay on Human Brain

Introduction.

The human brain, a marvel of biological engineering, is the most complex organ in the human body. It is the epicenter of human consciousness, responsible for our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Structure and Function

The brain is divided into three main parts: the cerebrum, cerebellum, and brainstem. The cerebrum, the largest part, is responsible for higher brain functions such as thought, emotion, and sensory processing. The cerebellum coordinates motor functions, while the brainstem controls automatic functions like heart rate and breathing.

Neuroplasticity

A remarkable feature of the brain is its neuroplasticity, the ability to form and reorganize synaptic connections in response to learning, experience, or injury. This adaptability underscores the brain’s capacity for lifelong learning and recovery.

Cognitive Abilities

Cognitive abilities such as memory, attention, and problem-solving are facilitated by the brain’s intricate network of neurons. These abilities enable us to navigate and interpret the world around us, engage in social interactions, and make decisions.

Brain and Technology

Advancements in technology have led to breakthroughs in understanding the brain. Techniques like fMRI and EEG provide detailed insights into brain activity, paving the way for treatments of neurological disorders.

500 Words Essay on Human Brain

Introduction to the human brain.

The human brain, a product of millions of years of evolutionary progression, is a marvel of biological engineering. It is a complex organ, responsible for controlling all the functions of the human body, processing sensory information, and coordinating responses. The brain is an intricate network of billions of neurons, which communicate and work together to generate our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Structural Complexity of the Brain

Neurons: the building blocks.

Neurons, the fundamental units of the brain, transmit information through electrical and chemical signals. They consist of a cell body, dendrites, and an axon. The dendrites receive signals from other neurons, which are then passed through the cell body and down the axon to the next neuron. This communication forms neural networks, the basis for all brain activity.

Brain Plasticity

One of the most fascinating aspects of the human brain is its plasticity, the ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. This adaptability allows us to learn new skills, adapt to changes, and recover from brain injuries. Neuroplasticity underscores the brain’s remarkable capacity for resilience and growth.

The Brain and Consciousness

Future research directions.

Despite significant advances in neuroscience, much about the brain remains a mystery. Key questions about consciousness, memory formation, and the nature of intelligence are yet to be fully answered. The development of advanced neuroimaging techniques and computational models offers exciting possibilities for future research.

In conclusion, the human brain, with its intricate architecture and dynamic functionality, is a testament to the complexity and beauty of human life. As we continue to unravel its mysteries, we deepen our understanding of what it means to be human, highlighting the importance of continued research in this fascinating field.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

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Which Is More Important, Beauty Or Brain (Intelligence)? Answered

• Post author: Edeh Samuel Chukwuemeka ACMC
• Post published: February 25, 2022
• Post category: Fashion Updates and Trends

Which Is More Important Beauty Or Brain?: Success is something that everyone aspires to in their lives. In today’s world, the intellect has surpassed beauty. Beauty will not be enough to attain success and have a successful career. Others will be impressed by your beauty at first, but it is your brains that will last. In a professional sector, beauty isn’t as important as it once was; employees must be physically fit for the job and must be able to demonstrate their worth, so beauty alone won’t get you far in life. Physical beauty is timeless and lasts a lifetime, but mental beauty and intelligence do not. If a person is educated enough, he or she may follow their goals and apply for a decent education and a healthy lifestyle.

The intellect is constantly aided by beauty. Beauty on its alone will never be able to do anything; it is all about your personality. To make greater use of this beauty, you must know what sort of person you are and how to use your intellect. As a result, beauty and intelligence may coexist. We can’t alter our exterior look, but we can absolutely modify our inner appearance, which is a gift from God. Nelson Mandela was a remarkable guy with tremendous thoughts and a lovely spirit, and he was an example of inner beauty. As we progress through this article, we will understand the importance of beauty and brains.

Recommended: Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Woman

Table of Contents

Why is beauty important?

In our lives, we value beauty. Don’t get me wrong: we must dress appropriately while attending an interview or meeting with a boss. It is also important that our personality has a favorable impression. When intelligence and attractiveness are compared, intelligence comes out on top. We naturally value intelligence since it enables one to achieve success, and one cannot achieve success without any form of educational or learning intelligence.

a. For many jobs, beauty is a prerequisite: Being attractive is no longer a luxury; it is a need for many occupations in today’s society. People want their products to be adequately represented by someone who embodies the image they wish to project to the general audience.

Attractive women earn more money in the workplace, hold higher positions, and are more likely to marry. Being attractive is significant because it makes it easier for people to offer you stuff and allows you to live in a higher quality of life. Hiring managers believe that attractive job candidates are more qualified than those who are not. Employers often believe that attractive personnel will bring in more consumers.

b. People are more united when they are surrounded by beauty: When someone attracts the attention of others, it pulls them together. Whether someone has a large number of friends or only one, physical beauty is an important aspect of their interactions.

This is because, in order to be friends, both sides must think the other appealing. When one individual in a group is more appealing than the others, the others are compelled to want to form a greater link with them as well.

Also see: 10 Important Things to look out for in a man

c. Beauty Makes You Feel Confident : Beauty instills self-confidence in a person’s thinking and improves their self-image. It improves your self-confidence when you are more beautiful than other individuals. According to studies, applying minimal makeup boosts people’s confidence by making them feel more beautiful.

You may begin to believe that you are superior to everyone else at anything you do. That self-assurance will make a person feel capable in all areas of life, allowing them to attain more success. You will feel significant if you are gorgeous. This can boost your self-assurance in any situation.

d. People who are attractive are often happier: According to studies, over 90% of women throughout the world are dissatisfied because they do not think they are attractive. As depressing as it may sound, this study suggests that there is a strong link between beauty and happiness. Beautiful individuals are often happier with themselves than their average-looking peers, most likely because they believe they meet society’s expectations. This self-satisfaction spills over to others around them, making them more likable to strangers and friends alike.

Also see: Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Man

e. People are attracted to beauty : Many people believe that by being more attractive than the average person, they would be able to impress the person they are attempting to impress. This may give the impression that the individual is more popular, which may make them joyful. When a person finds someone more appealing than usual, their sentiments towards them may shift. People who are more attractive are often more self-assured as a result of the increased attention they receive from others around them.

Recommended: Major reasons why women don’t participate in politics

Why is Intelligence/brain important?

a. The brain is the most important thing: Beauty fades with time, but the intellect is everlasting, and it polishes and shines even more with time and age. Beauty fades with time, but intelligence does. Being attractive entails being who you are. Being oneself without regard for the opinions of others.

b. Only good fortune can make a person beautiful; on the other hand, the intellect has the power to mold and shape fortune and win hearts.

Recommended: Brain vs Heart, Which Is More Important? Answered

c. The proper time to judge is when the brain shines like a diamond and paves its way out of a tough circumstance; unfortunately, the beauty is dragged into the issue.

d. Beauty is a gift from God that cannot be improved, but the intellect may be enhanced by human effort and the acquisition of worldly knowledge. True efforts are unquestionably successful and govern the world.

e. The brain has the ability to keep a job and acquire respect. The brain preserves relationships and binds the world together as a single entity.

Recommended: Top 10 fearless animals in the world 2022

f. While the brainy may lack beauty, the brain is present in every individual in varying degrees. Even the most unattractive individuals can have a sharp intelligence and the ability to dominate the world, but a handsome brainless moron cannot compete in life.

g. Even beauty pageants such as Miss World and Miss Universe are awarded on the basis of intelligence rather than looks.

Recommended: How to not to be shy or nervous around girls

Which Exactly is More Important, Beauty or Brain?

Would you rather be intelligent and not attractive, or beautiful and not intellectual? Which do you think is the best? In today’s world, having a good head gives you an advantage in a variety of situations, such as getting a job or outwitting competitors. Persons are attracted to people who have brains and are intelligent. That does not need to be attractive. Knowledge is essential no matter where you travel. Being attractive is something to be proud of, but that does not imply boastfulness. People treat you nicely when you are beautiful, and their initial impression of you is positive.

The way you present yourself and how you look are generally the first things people notice. When you apply for a job, your personality might often take precedence over your abilities, especially if the position requires you to interact with customers, such as sales-lady/sales-man, receptionist, and a variety of other occupations. As a result, attractiveness plays a role.

However, most persons with intellect or brains are in more demand. People’s first impressions may alter if you are just attractive and they ask you basic questions to which you are unable to respond. They could remark, “Beauty without brains.” That isn’t a good thing; I’m not saying you have to know everything in order for people to like you. You only need to know enough so that when they ask you a question, you can at least respond with your own perspective.

Recommended: Most profitable skills to learn in 2022

Beauty and intelligence are unmistakable and attractive combinations for success in life. When it comes to beauty vs. intellect, the brain has the upper hand. Although a person’s inner beauty is quite similar to his or her intelligence, exterior appearances alone cannot help a person succeed in life. In comparison to visual appearance and attractiveness, the brain surely has a strong dominance to govern the universe.

Edeh Samuel Chukwuemeka, ACMC, is a lawyer and a certified mediator/conciliator in Nigeria. He is also a developer with knowledge in various programming languages. Samuel is determined to leverage his skills in technology, SEO, and legal practice to revolutionize the legal profession worldwide by creating web and mobile applications that simplify legal research. Sam is also passionate about educating and providing valuable information to people.

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My brain doesn’t picture things.

I can’t imagine sights, smells, or sounds. What’s wrong with me?

• By Marco Giancotti
• October 4, 2023

I ’m lying down in a white cylinder barely wider than my body, surrounded on all sides by a mass of sophisticated machinery the size of a small camper van. It’s an fMRI machine, one of the technological marvels of modern neuroscience. Two small inflatable cushions squeeze my temples, keeping my head still.

“We are ready to begin the next batch of exercises,” I hear Dr. Horikawa’s gentle voice saying. We’re underground, in one of the laboratories of Tokyo University’s Faculty of Medicine, Hongo Campus. “Do you feel like proceeding?”

“Yes, let’s go,” I answer.

The machine sets in motion again. A powerful current grows inside the cryogenically cooled wires that coil around me, showering my head with radio waves, knocking the hydrogen atoms inside my head off their original spin axis, and measuring the rate at which the axis recovers afterward. To the sensors around me, I’m now as transparent as a glass of water. Every tiny change of blood flow anywhere inside my brain is being watched and recorded in 3-D.

A few seconds pass, then a synthetic female voice speaks into my ears over the electronic clamor: “top hat.” I close my eyes and I imagine a top hat. A few seconds later a beep tells me I should rate the quality of my mental picture, which I do with a controller in my hand. The voice speaks again: “fire extinguisher,” and I repeat the routine. Next is “butterfly,” then “camel,” then “snowmobile,” and so on, for about 10 minutes, while the system monitors the activation of my brain synapses.

Understanding aphantasia means learning something more about what it means to be human.

For most people, this should be a rather simple exercise, perhaps even satisfying. For me, it’s a considerable strain, because I don’t “see” any of those things. For each and every one of the prompts, I rate my mental image “0” on a 0 to 5 scale, because as soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind. And, although it isn’t the subject of the current experiment, I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head. I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses. I know what a top hat is. I can describe its main characteristics. I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally. What’s wrong with me?

M y whole life, I’ve been aware—sometimes painfully so—of my own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses: A terrible memory, a good sense of direction, and what I felt was a lack of “visual creativity,” among others. I always thought these were just random, disconnected traits, and didn’t think much about them. Who doesn’t have their quirks?

Then, some time in 2021 (not coincidentally, I forget exactly where or when) I read about aphantasia for the first time, and it hit me hard: When people say “picture this scene in your head,” they aren’t speaking metaphorically! People can actually invoke shapes and colors in their minds. The shock of this realization was followed by a piecing together of many of those little idiosyncrasies of mine into a single, coherent phenomenon that fit with the scientific description of the condition. By the time my formal diagnosis came, I was already quite sure I was aphantasic.

I share this trait with many people. Occasional reports of people claiming to be without a “mind’s eye” go back to the 1800s, with several cases briefly mentioned in the scientific literature throughout the 20th century. Yet these cases were ignored by the broader scientific community, relegated to the fringes of the field as outliers or misunderstandings.

It was only in the 2010s that the topic began to attract attention. A man approached Adam Zeman, professor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter, in the United Kingdom, claiming to have lost his mind’s eye following a heart surgery. In 2010, Zeman published a study showing that the man had different brain activation patterns from other subjects when trying to imagine things. 1

This was an interesting case study on its own, but something more surprising followed the publication of Zeman’s paper: Several people contacted him claiming to have had that same condition for as long as they could remember. Zeman and his collaborators assessed their claims using the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), a popular measure of internal visualization quality, and found that these individuals indeed seemed to have little to no ability to visualize at will. The researchers published these findi ngs in 2015, and proposed to call the condition “aphantasia”—literally “the absence of images” in Greek. 2

With this new label, word about aphantasia finally started to spread within the neuroscience community and the broader public. More groups of researchers around the world began studying it, and every year a larger number of papers on the topic reaches scientific journals. We now know that roughly 1 out of 25 people are “aphantasics” (or “aphants,” in internet slang)—a rare condition, but common enough that each of us must know several people in the category.

For those equipped with a trusty inner eye, hearing about aphantasia can be a puzzling experience. How can someone even function as a human being without the ability to imagine pictures and sounds?

The biggest source of confusion with aphantasia comes from the assumption that “imagination” and “forming mental images” are one and the same thing. This is, of course, incorrect. I’m able to imagine anything, except it is all devoid of sensory representations. The imagined objects exist in my mind as interconnected concepts, like bullet lists of facts about things. For example, when I reread the scene in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea where the protagonist battles a giant marlin, I’m able to take in a large amount of information: We’re on his skiff, bobbing on the waves of the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the sun hammering mercilessly on the poor man while he pulls on the line for hours on end. I can reason about the situation, try to predict what could happen next, and relate with the character’s plight.

None of this requires having a picture of the scene in my head. This way of imagining is, perhaps, more abstract than what most people are used to, but not significantly less useful.

A surprising aspect of this is that, for me, the physical “bullet-list concepts” don’t just float haphazardly in nothingness, but are embodied in coherent three-dimensional structures that I can manipulate in my mind. In the scene of the old fisherman, I can imagine moving around the small boat, sitting down next to Santiago, and I can “feel” the monstrous mass of the fish floating near the vessel. This spatial awareness might be what allows me to find my way around my bedroom in darkness: I know where the furniture is and the rough distances between things even without seeing them. The science is still unclear as to why someone like me can form spatial thoughts without the accompanying imagery, but some speculate that it might have something to do with a separation of these functions in and around the visual cortex.

For non-aphants, it’s also hard to imagine how those of us without this sensory mind’s eye remember events if we can’t call to mind images, smells, or sounds. Scientists have begun trying to untangle this difficult question about the brain as well. In a 2015 paper , a group of researchers from the University of Toronto led by psychologist Daniela Palombo identified a new syndrome they called “Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory,” or SDAM for short. 3 People with SDAM lack the ability to relive past experiences in their minds. While this condition is rare among the general population, a preliminary survey hints at a link with aphantasia, with as many as 51 percent of a sample of 2,000 SDAM individuals also having aphantasia.

My own experience is similar. Past episodes of my life—when I can recall them at all—feel distant and non-sensory. SDAM is a new discovery, still unknown to most practicing psychiatrists, so people like me have to rely on self-diagnosis for the time being. But the symptoms described by the researchers match with what I’ve always taken for granted. I would describe my recollections as summaries of key facts rather than first-person “mind movies.” When asked, out of the blue, about an experience I’ve surely had—say, any childhood birthday party—my mind first responds by drawing a blank. It feels as if my episodic memories were filed into a “mental cabinet” without an index. Many memories are in there, somewhere, but retrieving them is a daunting task unless I’m provided with very specific prompts. With some groping work of deduction (where did I live at the time? Who did I hang out with?) I can gather enough hints to bring out some locations and non-visual facts: I had a big party in our countryside garden when I was 11 or 12; there was cake; a lot of kids running around and … that’s about it.

H ow does all of this affect my life? The surprising answer is that it doesn’t, at least not in any debilitating way. To my great relief, people rarely ask me what happened at parties held decades ago. But even when there is a need to describe scenes or people visually, I usually have enough “verbal facts” and eloquence to give a satisfying answer, without the need to replicate the actual pictures in my head.

Among researchers, the consensus seems to be that aphantasia doesn’t meet the criteria to be called a disability , and that aphantasic individuals, in general, are fully functional and just as successful at living their lives and performing in their careers as the rest of the population. This seems to be further supported by a new paper published by two researchers at Sorbonne University. 4 They presented their participants, including many aphantasics, with a series of tasks involving the comparison of shapes, colors, words, faces, and spatial relations in one’s head. Aphantasics were as accurate as the other participants in all the tests, although they took longer to solve the imagery-based tasks, presumably because they used different, less-direct strategies to complete them.

Yet, some of those who discover they have aphantasia despair at the news. I’ve seen people make claims like “my whole life was a lie” and “this must be what ruined my marriage.” While I’m not quite as pessimistic, I can relate with that minority of fellow aphants. Sure, aphantasia and SDAM may not be causing major problems in our daily lives, but wouldn’t their subtle effects compound over time? And could they not be the cause of many of our other more embarrassing weaknesses and shortcomings?

For those equipped with a trusty inner eye, hearing about aphantasia can be a puzzling experience.

For many of us, the aftermath of learning about one’s aphantasia leads to some sort of self-consciousness crisis. Suddenly, your performance in every other aspect of life comes under scrutiny, and blaming your congenital aphantasia for it is almost irresistible. Is drawing without a reference so difficult because of my aphantasia? Could SDAM be why I’m so bad at keeping in touch with people? Would I be less socially awkward without it? Very few of these supposed connections have been tested yet, let alone confirmed by solid scientific studies. Yet almost every aphantasic I’ve talked to does this. But everyone seems to focus their self-doubt on whatever they don’t like about themselves, scapegoating different shortcomings.

I have learned to embrace the diversity of aphantasia, and I hope to spread the word about it. And so does Junichi Takahashi, the first researcher I talked to about my condition. Takahashi is a psychologist at Fukushima University and was one of the first scientists to pay attention to aphantasia in Japan, where I’ve lived since 2011. He set up a website with the VVIQ survey, which is what led me to confirm my suspicions of having aphantasia. I got in touch with him directly and began to learn more about the science behind mental visualization and its absence.

Rather than studying aphantasia as a single phenomenon, Takahashi is trying to bring clarity to its diversity. In July 2023, he and several co-authors published a paper examining subtypes of aphantasia. 5 While most previous studies relied solely on the VVIQ questionnaire to identify aphantasic individuals, Takahashi and his team administered a battery of additional psychological question-sets to the same subjects and analyzed their correlations.

One of these questionnaires probed the vividness of multi-sensory mental imagery, including the sense of hearing, smell, and so on. Can aphantasics mentally replay their parents’ voices or the unique taste of cheesecake? Another questionnaire tested the tendency toward verbally oriented (relying more on words to figure out things) or visually oriented (relying more on images) thinking styles. Yet another one was used to detect “face blindness,” the inability to recognize faces.

Their statistical analysis revealed that all of these factors are somewhat correlated, but none fully. For instance, many of their aphantasic subjects lacked all of their “mind senses,” but some did have the ability to imagine sounds, flavors, or other non-visual sensations. The paper also found that face blindness did occur more often among people with aphantasia (40 percent) than in the control group (20 percent), but is far from being a universal aphantasic trait.

But all this talk of questionnaires and self-reports brings us to the age-old question: How do we know that aphantasia really exists, as opposed to being a form of psychological denial or simply a different interpretation of the same inner experience ?

When aphantasia was first formally proposed, some researchers wondered whether the purported lack of visualization ability might in many cases be, not a congenital trait, but a psychopathological issue, such as neurosis or a defensive response against trauma. A kind of “philosophical language barrier” further complicates the issue: We might be talking about the same thing with different words and, language being the only medium we have to compare inner experiences, we have (or, rather, had) no way of confirming that. Even Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, wondered about this very scenario more than 60 years before aphantasia got its name: If a person claimed they can’t imagine a picture but is still able to draw one, he asked, should we believe that something different is really going on in their head?

Scientists are now finding ways to answer these questions with hard, objective data. “Even before aphantasia became a thing, researchers tried separating people with low VVIQ from those with high VVIQ, and found that the performance at certain tasks is different between the two groups,” Takahashi explained to me. “There is also a lot of research showing a good correlation between VVIQ scores and fMRI scans.” The way the questions are posed in the questionnaire seems to work well enough to pick out individuals with demonstrably different visualization abilities.

Of the groups working on this front, Joel Pearson’s is one of the most active. His team at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, has been researching mental imagery since long before aphantasia became widely known. In 2022, his team even found a measurable physical characteristic of aphantasics. 6 They discovered that, while the pupils of typical people involuntarily contracted when imagining bright shapes, no such response happened to the aphantasic group. In other words, Pearson’s team showed the first physiological difference confirming the reports of people claiming to have aphantasia. It looks like, at least in most cases, something different is happening inside our heads.

Aphantasia is turning out to be a little cornucopia of scientific insights.

And some are trying to go even further. That’s why I periodically get into the fMRI machine in Dr. Horikawa’s lab to get my brain scanned. A researcher at NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan, Tomoyasu Horikawa specializes in using AI to decipher the contents of the human visual cortex. He has recently turned his attention to aphantasia. I connected with him in April 2023, when Takahashi suggested I join Horikawa’s new research project. Horikawa is still collecting data from me and several other people, but preliminary, unpublished analysis indeed shows a quantitative difference in brain activity when aphantasic and typical subjects imagine things. When measuring the “distinctness” of brain activation patterns—how accurately the same patterns are repeated in a subject’s brain when imagining the same object, and how reliably different when imagining different objects—aphantasic subjects seem to score a bit lower. But he says that much more data is necessary to definitely tell. That may turn out to be the best proof of the neural differences between people with and without the condition.

A ll things considered, learning about my aphantasia made me doubly optimistic, both at the collective and personal levels.

In terms of social impact, aphantasia is turning out to be a little cornucopia of scientific insights. Already scientists are working with aphantasics not only to understand the condition itself, but also to shed light on the intricate workings of the human brain in general.

Rebecca Keogh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Macquarie University, in Australia, for example, has looked into the mechanisms of PTSD by comparing the occurrence of intrusive thoughts between aphantasics and people who can visualize. For Horikawa, aphantasia is a way to isolate the precise neural processes that create mental imagery in the general population. And researchers from the universities of Calgary and Radboud in the Netherlands recently published an arti cle in Nature Reviews Psychology arguing for the use of aphantasia to resolve long-running debates about “embodied cognition”—a theory that treats thinking as a process involving mental simulations of one’s body and sensations, as opposed to only abstract concepts and symbols. The absence of something—like the lack of “inner senses” in aphantasics—can teach us much about the presence of it. This might be the biggest reason why I participate in these experiments: Understanding aphantasia means learning something more about what it means to be human.

In a sense, discovering aphantasia as a scientific topic is a bit like landing on a beach on an unknown continent. We know it’s new, but we have no idea of its geography and size. The binary division between “aphantasic” and “everyone else” might be a short-lived one. The subtype studies of Takahashi and others may lead to a more detailed map of the myriad ways a lack of visualization manifests in people and how they work around it. The brain seems to always have more surprises in store for us, more facets and inter-connections where we previously expected simplicity. We now have an even more interesting landscape to explore.

I would not want to remove the aphantasia even if it were possible.

And as this additional diversity comes into focus, it is easier for us to marvel at the paradox of human cooperation. What would seem like fundamental differences in the way we think—some with pictures, others without—do not lead to fundamental barriers in the way we talk to, connect with, and love each other. We are able to form societies and, through struggle and errors, build thriving communities despite these cognitive differences, and maybe because of them.

On the personal level, my “self-consciousness crisis” is eclipsed by a more powerful “self-knowledge renaissance.” Learning that I have aphantasia gave me the habit of carefully observing my inner experience. It led, among other things, to realizing that I may also have SDAM and mild synesthesia , something that I had never paid any attention to before. It also honed my ability to explain to others what goes on inside me. Armed with these new skills, I can say that I am better at managing myself and at picking the battles that I am best at. I feel like I have gained much and lost nothing.

Lead illustration by FrentaN / Shutterstock

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3. Palombo, D.J., Alain, C., Söderlund, H., Khuu, W., & Levine, B. Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) in healthy adults: A new mnemonic syndrome. Neuropsychologia 72 , 105-118 (2015).

4. Liu, J. & Bartolomeo, P. Probing the unimaginable: The impact of aphantasia on distinct domains of visual mental imagery and visual perception. Cortex 166 , 338-347 (2023).

5. Takahashi, J., et al. Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style. Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023).

6. Kay, L., Keogh, R., Andrillon, T., & Person, J. The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory, and phenomenological imagery strength. eLife 11 , e72484 (2022).

Marco Giancotti

Posted on October 4, 2023

Marco Giancotti is a freelance writer, product manager, and aphant living in Japan. He has graduate degrees in astrophysics and aerospace engineering—both of which happen to rely on equations more than on mental pictures. He is working on an accessible reframing of key science insights on his website, Plankton Valhalla (which, yes, does contain lots of visualizations). Follow him on Twitter @marco_giancotti.

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The Brain on Beauty: Neuroaesthetics

• First Online: 23 November 2019

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• Rhett Diessner 2  

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Semir Zeki coined the word “neuro-esthetics” (neuroaesthetics) in 1999. The first neuroaesthetic study was published in 2000 (Hansen, Brammer, & Calvert), followed by three seminal papers in 2004 (Vartanian & Goel; Kawabati & Zeki; Cela-Conde et al.). Why do we find something beautiful? Evo Psyc might be able to tell us. How do we find things beautiful? Neuroaesthetics sheds light on that. “The aesthetic triad” comprises the interaction of three neural systems to create our aesthetic experiences: the sensory-motor system, the emotion-valuation system, and the knowledge-meaning system (Chatterjee & Vartanian, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 370–375, 2014, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 172–194, 2016). Experiences of beauty involve the pleasure centers and reward circuits of the brain; pleasure may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for experiences of beauty. The medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) may be involved in all or most experiences of beauty (Ishizu & Zeki, PLoS One e21852, 2011). However, caution is warranted in making such a claim. The meta-analytic review by Brown et al. ( NeuroImage 250–258, 2011) indicated that the right anterior insula was the main nexus of all beauty experiences but that different kinds of beauty (taste, scent, visual, auditory) were processed in different parts of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Observing moral beauty may be simultaneously arousing and calming (activating both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems).

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Just kidding. Buss ( 2015 ) describes eight different scientific methodologies that evolutionary psychology uses.

Sheldon the physicist from the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

The Greek word aísthēsis , from which the English word aesthetics is derived, means perception . However, here is much more to an aesthetic experience than simply perceptual pleasure. For example , Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin ( 2004 ) suggest an information processing model of aesthetic experience in five stages: (1) perception, (2) explicit classification, (3) implicit classification, (4) cognitive mastering, and (5) evaluation. I agree that all five of these processes may occur in aesthetic experience, but I disagree with them when they propose that aesthetic emotion is the output of this five-step process. I think aesthetic emotions can occur immediately after the perception stage (and the emotions from that first stage can change to other emotions by the time they get to the fifth stage or any of the other stages).

If they are correct, this has interesting implications for the evolutionary psychology of aesthetics. If we have a part of the brain that is especially dedicated to listening to music, it may mean that listening to music was adaptive and naturally selected. Music has been part and parcel of humanity for a long time.

They used positron emission tomography (PET scan), which is when you shoot someone up with radioactive sugar, and then use a kind of X-ray to see what parts of the brain are giving off the most radiation. Because our brain is only 2% of our body weight, but soaks up 20% (or more) of the sugar we consume, sugar is ideal for PET scans. I’m sure that amount of radiation isn’t enough to hurt you. Hmmm … When I was an undergrad research assistant in Barbara Gordon-Lickey’s neuroscience lab at the University of Oregon in 1979, the first paper I wrote for her (in between helping her drop electrodes into single brain cells of cats), was a review of PET scan studies. Dr. Gordon-Lickey was a student of the Nobel laureates Hubel and Wiesel at Harvard. Did we hurt the cats? No, we were very gentle. But they still lived in cages. Sad face. My wife and I took one home to rehab it after its useful lab life was over. That didn’t work too well. More sad face.

A rush, a thrill, an exhilaration, a titillation.

Hey Bob, Barber’s Adagio!

I thank Oshin Vartanian for sending me a copy of this study. He’s a generous and thoughtful guy.

I apologize for my corrupt use of the male-gaze. In my defense, my wife has been an active feminist since the 1960s and forgives me for my boringly straight sexuality. I was born this way. And then socialized this way. Although she might not forgive me for mentioning her, as she is an introvert and modest person.

Ask and ye shall receive: Ines Schindler, while reading this chapter in draft form, turned me on to a fascinating study. The researchers asked participants to select very moving clips from films. They measured crying (tears), which happens during parasympathetic activation, and goosebumps (piloerection), which occur during sympathetic activation, while the participants watched the moving clips. The tears and goosebumps often occurred together, thus showing simultaneous sympathetic and parasympathetic activation. It appears that moral beauty, and perhaps the moral emotion of elevation, may have been the causal factors: “most of our participants’ excerpts were taken from the genres of drama and romance, and hence from two genres that frequently address societal values and virtues such as altruism, bonding, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, and so forth” (Wassiliwizky , Jacobsen, Heinrich, Schneiderbauer, & Menninghaus, 2017 , p. 10).

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Beauty Interlude Three

Zephyr takes psyche to the mansion of love.

In the last interlude Psyche was about to die by jumping off the top of a craggy cliff. But just as she was about to leap, the god of the West wind, Zephyr (I love the visual and auditory aesthetics of that name) gently lifted her up and lightly set her down in the flowered valley below. She then decides to take a little nap in the dewy soft grass of the meadow (I wonder if she knew of the studies concerning naps boosting the immune system, the stability of emotions, and an increase in cognitive function. Naps rock.).

When she wakes up, she notices much natural beauty. She sees a beautiful park and garden planted with great tall trees; she sees a spring of crystal clear water. Then she notices some architectural beauty—a mansion built by divine art. She looks inside and smells the olfactory beauty of citron-wood ceilings, and beautifully carved ivory ornaments, the walls were of embossed silver. The floors were covered in beautiful mosaics of precious gems and the outer walls were built with golden bricks that shone so brightly with their own radiance that no other lights were needed in the mansion. “She looked at this with much pleasure” (Kenney, 1990 , p. 53; remember that pleasure in the brain is the typical result of experiences of beauty).

The head servant of the mansion tells her this all belongs to her (Eros had built the mansion just for her. Do you think Eros had read Buss’s [ 2015 ] research on how women like men with resources?). She then enjoys a refreshing bath (Fig. 4.3 ).

Bath of Psyche (c.1890 by Frederic, Lord Leighton) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1890s_Frederick_Leighton_-_Bath_of_Psyche.jpg . This painting is owned by the Tate museum in London. Can you believe they don’t have it on display; it’s in storage?! After much emailing and begging I received permission to visit the storage building and study this painting. In storage it is more than 10 feet off the floor and they invited me to use a wobbly 10-foot ladder so I could get close to it. I had a difficult time taking notes, as I was afraid to loosen my death grip on the ladder

Next she encounters gustatory and olfactory beauty as the servants in the mansion served her a delicious dinner; course after course of a royal banquet, a rich feast, were set before her. While the invisible servants brought her tasty dish after tasty dish, and glasses of wine like nectar, invisible singers and musicians courted her with beautiful music. Eventually she grew tired and sated and retired to the master bedroom. In the middle of the night she was awakened by a noise perhaps coming from the window casement. She thought she sensed the presence of someone and grew anxious and trembling and full of dread … And then …. (Next installment of the Myth is at the end of Chap. 5 .)

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Diessner, R. (2019). The Brain on Beauty: Neuroaesthetics. In: Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32333-2_4

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Understanding Auditory Evoked Brain Signal via Physics-informed Embedding Network with Multi-Task Transformer

• Tang, Xuegang
• Xia, Yuling

In the fields of brain-computer interaction and cognitive neuroscience, effective decoding of auditory signals from task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is key to understanding how the brain processes complex auditory information. Although existing methods have enhanced decoding capabilities, limitations remain in information utilization and model representation. To overcome these challenges, we propose an innovative multi-task learning model, Physics-informed Embedding Network with Multi-Task Transformer (PEMT-Net), which enhances decoding performance through physics-informed embedding and deep learning techniques. PEMT-Net consists of two principal components: feature augmentation and classification. For feature augmentation, we propose a novel approach by creating neural embedding graphs via node embedding, utilizing random walks to simulate the physical diffusion of neural information. This method captures both local and non-local information overflow and proposes a position encoding based on relative physical coordinates. In the classification segment, we propose adaptive embedding fusion to maximally capture linear and non-linear characteristics. Furthermore, we propose an innovative parameter-sharing mechanism to optimize the retention and learning of extracted features. Experiments on a specific dataset demonstrate PEMT-Net's significant performance in multi-task auditory signal decoding, surpassing existing methods and offering new insights into the brain's mechanisms for processing complex auditory information.

• Quantitative Biology - Neurons and Cognition;
• Computer Science - Machine Learning;
• Computer Science - Sound;
• Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Audio and Speech Processing

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24 Imaging the Subjective

• Published: November 2021
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Aesthetic experiences can be deeply personal. Given this subjectivity, how can cognitive neuroscience characterize the neural mechanisms supporting intense aesthetic experiences? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Vessel, Starr, and Rubin measured brain responses as observers viewed a diverse set of artworks and rated how aesthetically “moving” they found each artwork. Although individual observers expressed highly divergent aesthetic tastes, imaging results identified several regions consistently more engaged by moving artworks, including nodes of the default-mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions implicated in internally directed mentation. This work increased interest in the DMN and the role of internally directed thought in aesthetic experiences and helped to shift the focus of inquiry from single regions to network interactions. A result of close interaction between humanists and neuroscientists, the paper under discussion captured more of the richness of aesthetic experiences than was common in neuroimaging experiments. The authors hope that this legacy continues to inform future work.

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GEANT 4 Simulation of Different Radiations for Metastatic Brain Tumor Therapy

14 Pages Posted: 5 Jun 2024

Chaimaa El Moujaddidi

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Hicham Harrass

Rajaa sebihi, hamid chakir.

Brain Cancer is one of the of the most difficult types of cancer to cure, the architecture and physiology of the brain present several obstacles to the therapeutic approaches used to treat it.For the application of particles in radiotherapy, the distribution of absorbed dose in the patient has to be determined. A variety of mathematical methods can be applied for calculating the patient's dosage. Before proceeding, a series of dose distributions must be measured under reference circumstances, either to directly input the data into the treatment planning algorithm or to determine the parameters necessary for the generation of functions.From there, we thought to evaluate the effect of different particle beams on the planning of a metastatic brain tumor case utilizing Monte Carlo simulations based on GEANT4. We made an approximate simulation of the human head, by modelling the eyes, the optic nerve, the brain stem and a tumor mass . The calculation has been launched for 10 million events with a range of low and high energies which are 6 to 50 MeV for photons and 6, 25, 50 and 100MeV for neutrons whereas 1 million events have been generated for a proton with a range of energy of 25,50 and 100 MeV, to study the effect of each particle in the different organs by evaluating the dose taken by the target (tumoral meta cerebral mass), whole brain and the organs at risk (eyes, optic nerves, and the brain stem) thus determining the Deposited energy, Equivalent dose and the Effective dose.we focused on the GEANT4 platform validation for different particle-based dosimetric applications in this article. In actuality, it is far more complex and challenging to simulate the movement and interactions of the particles for GEANT4.

Note: Funding declaration: The authors declare that there are no relevant financial or nonfinancial competing interests to the report. Conflict of Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Keywords: GEANT4, Photon, neutron, proton, Deposited dose, metastatic brain tumor

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Chaimaa El Moujaddidi (Contact Author)

Affiliation not provided to ssrn ( email ).

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