Beauty
A few weeks ago, I was talking with an interior stylist; a job I didn’t really know existed until mere hours before I talked to someone with said job. Interior stylists are the people who make the photo shoots for house renovations look gorgeous and style everything so that it looks warm and inviting and wonderful. They style for events and photo shoots. They make things beautiful and allow the photographer to capture that moment of beauty, keeping it alive forever.
As I was talking with this interior stylist I watched her make some floral arrangements. She talked while she worked, moving branches and stems around casually, and stopping every few moments to check on her progress. It looked so effortless, even though I knew, we both knew, that learning to do arrangements like that meant knowing what materials to put together, what type of container to choose, and finally how to get them to sit together in a way that was, honestly, stunning. But anyway, as she worked, she chatted. And at one point she said, “I think that’s why I’m here, as silly as it might sound. I think I’m here to make things beautiful. Like that’s why I was put here.” I didn’t think it was silly at all, and I told her so.
The power of beauty
Beauty is universal, subjective, powerful. I have been struck with such beauty at times that it has absolutely captivated me. A few years ago, I got the chance to travel to Finland in the summer. It was honestly one of the best few days of my life so far. We had friends, we had food, we had wine, we had the near eternal summer sun. And at 2am, I got out of the sauna at the place where we were staying, and I jumped into the lake. It knocked the wind out of me, just like it had been doing the entire day when I’d gone from the heat to the cold and then running back to the heat. But as I surfaced on the lake and opened my eyes, the sky was purple. A deep, backlit purple. The sun had dipped just at the horizon but not below, and it made the sky glow. And off in front of me I could see the little island in the middle of the lake, with its evergreen trees silhouetted against that violet light. And directly in front of me bats swooped down near the water to feed. This 30 seconds is imprinted on my mind and it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
But what is beauty?
And what is its hold over us? Ultimately, beauty is just something that we find pleasing to look at or experience. We often think about looking at something beautiful, but we’ve all heard music that was so perfect it made you cry, or smelled something so wonderful you couldn’t stop thinking about it. These are also forms of beauty. But it is so, so subjective. From people to buildings to nature to smells. Everything. Something I find beautiful you may find fine or even disgusting.
Neuroaesthetics works to understand beauty and its impact on the brain. It’s the study of the biology of beauty. It’s a fairly new field, and it’s working to understand what happens to our brains when we see something beautiful.
How our brains process beautiful things
Beauty is processed differently depending on what you’re looking at. When we see a beautiful face, the left ventral striatum is activated. When we see beautiful art the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC) is activated. That means different areas of the brain light up depending on whether or not the beautiful subject is a person or a thing. However, both areas activate the reward and pleasure centers of our brain such in the medial orbital prefrontal cortex.
In fact, when people listen to music that they consider beautiful, their medial orbital prefrontal cortex lights up, too. This area of the brain seems to be consistently associated with a person finding something beautiful, and then that area of the brain “talks” to other areas to help us interpret if the beauty we are experiencing makes us happy, joyful, sad, nostalgic, etc. That’s why we can find a sad song or painting beautiful, even though it doesn’t bring us joy.
The areas of the brain that lights up when we see a beautiful face is linked more closely to our primary reward system. A primary reward system is more instinctive, and often related to our survival, like food and physical attraction. The areas that light up when we see a beautiful object, art, or music activates our secondary pleasure and reward system. The secondary reward system are things that we learn to get pleasure from, like money.
Natural areas like parks, forests, oceans, deserts, also activate areas in the prefrontal cortex associated with relaxation. The same thing happens when we look at flowers. Studies have shown that hospital patients that have a window view of trees and greenery recover more quickly than patients without a view of nature. Natural sounds and scenes were also shown to lower research participants’ heart rates after a stressful examination. Our brain basically processes nature as both relaxing and beautiful.
Why beauty exists
But that leaves the question of why? Well, beauty activates the pleasure and reward systems so that we want to mate, which means survival of the species. That makes sense. But why have a secondary pleasure and reward system? Very, very generally, the pleasure and reward system work together to spark curiosity and motivate you into action. The brain creates a cycle of craving, curiosity, action, and satisfaction. Because beauty activates our pleasure and reward centers, we become motivated to seek out similar things. Beauty pushes us to keep looking, be curious, seek it out. In the end, beauty truly does move us.
Want to learn more?
These are (some) of the things I watched and read to write this piece.
Neuroaesthetics: Why the brain loves pretty things How your brain decides what is beautiful
Our brains have two distinct beauty centres
Beauty and the Brain: The Emerging Field of Neuroaesthetics
Building, Beauty, and the Brain: A Neuroscience of Architectural Experience
How nature nurtures: Amygdala activity decreases as the result of a one-hour walk in nature
Design and Nature Reimagined: Connecting to nature through sound