A Brain-Based Theory of Beauty

Mushroom

Mushroom

Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki published recently an interesting paper in PLoS ONE, titled Toward A Brain-Based Theory of Beauty. They write: "We conclude that, as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources–musical and visual–and probably by other sources as well. This has led us to formulate a brain-based theory of beauty."

I wonder what kind of activity these two photographs raise in a human brain - and I wonder also, to what degree beauty can be reduced to levels of brain activation.

Loving big steel objects

Electricity

Berries

Twigs

This morning I head on the radio an interview of a Finnish photographer (I didn't catch the name), who is taking photographs of harbors and things like shipping containers and oil tanks.

The interviewer said something like "So, you want to make these things look beautiful?"

To this the photographer replied: "No. For me they are beautiful. I love big steel objects, for example the rust in the edges of containers."

I wonder why it is so that not everyone sees the beauty of big steel objects.

Anyway, perhaps related to this is the following quote from Plato's Symposium: "[...] drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere."

I'm still learning the basic things about Aperture. Couldn't resist playing with the adjustments in the photographs above. Although finally I did turn down the effects quite a lot.

One funny thing: face recognition in Aperture seems to find faces anywhere - it seems to love landscape photographs.