Wed 11 Oct 2006
It’s our second show for the week and our voices are starting to sound husky from talking too much. We barely have time to talk about wedding reality TV before getting down to a discussion of art and the brain. That’s pretty much all there is to say about this show, so if these show notes are too short for your taste, just read the show notes from show 44 again.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:14 am
Very interesting! You didn’t cover symmetry. The brain also finds symmetry very attractive at a subconsious level. And not just in art; from faces to home handyman jobs it is sought after.
Here’s an Amateur Cognitive Science experiment: Take a photo of yourself, cut it in half and then make a copies of the halves, reverse each one and stick the same halves back together. You will make two symmetrical faces, one being your ‘left face’ and one being your ‘right face’. Both are supposed to be more attractive to the opposite sex than your normal face. Weirdly, one will also be be more attractive than the other.
Good genes result in features that are more symmetrical, and I’ve heard it argued that this is what drives the evolutionary pressure to seek symmetry out in potential mates and why we find it so pleasing.
A different effect is when you take a lot of faces and merge them all together on a computer. The end result is an average face, which is more attractive than any of the individual faces. I don’t know the suggested reasoning behind this, though, especially as most of the celebrities we admire have unusual, striking faces.
October 12th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Good to have you back, Zebulon!
I briefly mentioned symmetry when I listed what the different ‘workers’ in the ‘factory’ of perception might be looking for. What you say about attractiveness is right (although facial symmetry is more associated with healthy development than healthy genes - things like parasite infestation in a child during growth or a mother during pregnancy tend to produce uneven development). But there are important provisos.
Firstly, as you say, the most attractive people tend not to have faces which look like the average of everyone else. In general, it seems to be the case that regular faces are more attractive up to a point, but unusual faces are attractive beyond that.
A commonsense explanation for this has been put forward which is that, if you blend a whole lot of faces together, irregularities and exaggerations on individual faces will be wiped out by the movement towards a mid-point. Therefore, while one person’s nose might be too big and another’s too small, adding them together produces something less noticable. Also, things like skin blemishes will be removed into the bargain. The result is therefore a pretty inoffensive face without anything too out of the ordinary on it. If you saw it in the street, you’d think it was pretty appealing. However, people who are very attractive tend to have striking features which are themselves unusual and exaggerated. These people will always be the most attractive. So there’s only so much you can say about simple symmetry (although lateral symmetry is, I think, always important).
Another explanation for our desire to see symmetry is that it’s part of a more general need to see order and pattern in our environment. For example, if there’s a leopard hiding in the undergrowth, its markings might make it initially invisible to us. But if our eyes are attuned to pattern and symmetry, our brains will pick out that the shape of those ‘leaves’ over there are too symmetrical to be leaves because the blotches of colour on the leopard’s fur are mirrored on either side of its body, and things like eyes and ears match up in a pair. That way, we know to leg it before things get unpleasant for us.
October 13th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Very interesting Amateur Cognitive Science. I’m glad I’m not the only one who knows about the tiny men living inside my eyeballs.
Also, keep the short tossed-off theme song. It serves as a reminder to us all about the little engine that could, that the grandest redwood can sprout from the smallest seedling… or something.
October 13th, 2006 at 10:06 am
The interesting thing about the smiley face is that it doesn’t seem to appear at any time in any other culture. To us, the two dots over the curved line are so obviously a smiling face, but I don’t think people completely unexposed to western culture would recognize it as such. (The smiley face was, in my opinion, Forest Gump’s greatest contribution.)
October 13th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
I think the propensity to see faces in even the most rudimentary markings is pretty universal, even if the smiley face it culturally specific. Some of the oldest art known (and possibly the oldest art there is) makes use of existing natural features to create a face. So, for example, some Fred Flintstone type sees a rock with an indentation above a line and then draws or bores another indentation in order to give another ‘eye’ to the face he imagines in the rock’s shape.
October 13th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Great job of conveying all that ACS, kids. Wonderfully intriguing. It syncs with a course I took in perception in collij/university a while back.
You might enjoy reading about ‘grandmother cells.’ The term and the theory have a fun history. Wiki entry here.
October 14th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Also, prosopagnosia ties into this discussion quite nicely.