4 ms·

For those who want to skip the fluff: > Tsinghua University researchers opted to do a meta-analysis > The team first combed the literature for all brain-imagi

by skulk 6y ago

For those who want to skip the fluff: > Tsinghua University researchers opted to do a meta-analysis > The team first combed the literature for all brain-imaging studies that investigated people’s neural responses to visual art and faces and that also asked them to report on whether what they saw was beautiful or not. After reviewing the different studies, the researchers were left with data from 49 studies in total, representing experiments from 982 participants. > The technique used to analyze the pooled data is known as activation likelihood estimation (ALE) > Performing this analysis, the research team found that beautiful visual art and beautiful faces each reliably elicited activity in well-defined brain regions > If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium.

mojuba 6y ago
Thanks for the tldr, I knew it was all fluff! Of course what we appreciate in the human faces (and bodies) vs. what we appreciate in art are very different things. Visual arts in this sense can be closer to say music or literature more than human appearance. Art definitely requires context and prior experience. Seeing the most abstract art of the 20th century for example, means very different things to people who have little experience with it vs. those who have seen a lot of it. Same for music. You can't appreciate Miles Davis unless you train your ear to understand avant-garde jazz in general. Then you listen to Miles or you see Rothko (Klee, Picasso, etc etc) and you feel the kind of joy that can be felt only with a certain prior experience. This beauty is relative. By contrast, appreciation of human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural, given to everyone and doesn't require prior experience. Our animal brain seems to be at play here, but I'm not very knowledgeable on how these mechanisms are triggered.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "This beauty is relative...." that doesn't seem to be the right descriptor for what you're relating. a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly (often but not always intentionally), but you can appreciate the context and the ideas around it and find those abstractions beautiful for their cleverness, intricacy, or whatever (as you can find a math equation elegant, or a piece of music passionate). the level to which you appreciate those contexts and ideas would be 'relative'. a lot of human affect contextualizes in a narrow band of difference when zoomed out, but our brains are attuned to those narrow bands (like how radio stations exist in a relatively narrow band of frequencies), which is to say what we find beautiful is mostly similar, and our relativity is relatively slight.
  - mojuba 6y ago
    > a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly? When you say some art is "ugly at a visceral level" you need to show art that's beautiful at the same level. Is Modigliani's depiction of women beautiful or ugly? I'm sure you will hear both if you ask different people. To me it's breathtaking, whatever that means on the ugly-beautiful spectrum. On the other hand, there's a lot of earlier art (anything pre-impressionist basically) that tended to be more photographic and less inventive. You can find objectively beautiful things there but by today's standards they are boring, though you can appreciate this art within the context of the era. I think we should remove all forms of modern art from this debate. Beauty is no longer the goal of art.
    - clairity 6y ago
      > "Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly?" before, you said > "...human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural..." which is the yardstick from which i was extrapolating (that is, natural == visceral). > "Beauty is no longer the goal of art." i agree that modern art is no longer about (natural, visceral) beauty, but rather about conceptual/contextual interestingness. but those aren't relative, those are different yardsticks, hence my attempt to disentangle the two.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Raffaello, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Leonardo... they are not boring to anyone even today. The Nike of Samothrace is spectacular even when you don’t know when and where it comes from. Your impressionist cut off is very arbitrary. I agree that official art abandoned the search for absolute beauty a long time ago (basically with modernism), I just wouldn’t chuck away 2500 years of masterpieces because “realism boring”. In fact, looking at attendance numbers for art events, one could easily make the case that “old and boring” art remains more popular than XX+ century art.
    - cjohnson318 6y ago
      I agree with you, mostly. I don't think Rembrandt, or Caravaggio, or almost any other pre-impressionists look photographic. They're representational, but they're also highly stylized. All of the 'Old Masters' exaggerated or idealized forms, and exaggerated temperature, gamut, and contrast. The number of people that actually meant to practice trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) is very small. Trompe l'oeil is generally seen as a schtick; if you don't have anything original to add, then don't bother.
- ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  well, I think you're demonstrably wrong on the later, such that even if we accept there is something like a "universal" sense of human beauty (which I'll take as a highly debatable point) , there's also a learned/adaptive component that can't easily be separated from an individual's experience: it seems it can interfere, override or accentuate the first. We can see this in various cross-cultural and historical comparisons where it's not clear that any inherent or obviously individual property should be considered beautiful in a universal sense. Is foot binding beautiful? Is clear skin or scarification and body modding beautiful? What about lighter skin? is it beautiful because it suggests aristocracy and not working in the fields, or is a sun tan beautiful? or does white skin, to use a phrase from darker skinned indigenous populations make people "look like a corpse". Is it the anorexic, the aenemic, the flushed, the athlete, the labourer, or the obese? The weirder thing I've noticed talking to people is this IDEA that physical beauty must be objective is so entrenched in some, that they will actively deny or remove reported data points to the contrary (no, he doesn't really think that's beautiful/ he's lying about his perception of that beautiful man/woman).
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium. My problem with such neurological research, and much other research, is that the implications typically derive that an average positive effect among the sample size constitutes a universal positive effect. This is specially dubious in cases such as this where an individual negative effect is impossible to offset it, as there is a zero point. There is no such thing as a negative effect here, the zero point is that the beauty of a face is the same. Thus, assume, for sake of argument, that for 50% of persons, the beauty of the face be the same as that of a painting, and that for 50% it not be. This will measure an average positive effect, and from that there are often made conclusions that there is a universal positive effect. In fact, such average positive effects will be measured with a sufficiently large sample size if the positive effect only exist in 1% of the same size, as again, there is no negative effect possible. The historical common assumption was that human neurology can be assumed to be quite consistent, but I am not so sure in the light that it is often found that neurological research is often no longer reproducible if it even be moved to a different city. This issue is especially something that is near and dear to me, because I've noticed that some of the people I know seem to indeed draw a distinction between humanoid beauty, and beauty of nonhumanoids, and some I know don't. I also see in such people that they seem to be far more interested in a man's clothing and hair than his face, to decide whether they find him beautiful.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > The historical common assumption was that human neurology can be assumed to be quite consistent I feel like this idea that humans are all the same in a given respect is a very commonly made mistake. We know that people react differently to us, but in the moment we often forget.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    It's an assumption that seems to hold more merit for other organs. The brain is quite a plastic organ that adapts to it's surroundings as a man matures. It's as though one be surprised that AlphaZero Chess, and AlphaZero Go to have formed very different neurons from training.
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
> 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. Ok, so on top of a theory of constructed emotion (https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712), we'll need a theory of constructed aesthetics.

by skulk 6y ago

mojuba 6y ago

Thanks for the tldr, I knew it was all fluff! Of course what we appreciate in the human faces (and bodies) vs. what we appreciate in art are very different things. Visual arts in this sense can be closer to say music or literature more than human appearance. Art definitely requires context and prior experience. Seeing the most abstract art of the 20th century for example, means very different things to people who have little experience with it vs. those who have seen a lot of it. Same for music. You can't appreciate Miles Davis unless you train your ear to understand avant-garde jazz in general. Then you listen to Miles or you see Rothko (Klee, Picasso, etc etc) and you feel the kind of joy that can be felt only with a certain prior experience. This beauty is relative. By contrast, appreciation of human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural, given to everyone and doesn't require prior experience. Our animal brain seems to be at play here, but I'm not very knowledgeable on how these mechanisms are triggered.

clairity 6y ago
> "This beauty is relative...." that doesn't seem to be the right descriptor for what you're relating. a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly (often but not always intentionally), but you can appreciate the context and the ideas around it and find those abstractions beautiful for their cleverness, intricacy, or whatever (as you can find a math equation elegant, or a piece of music passionate). the level to which you appreciate those contexts and ideas would be 'relative'. a lot of human affect contextualizes in a narrow band of difference when zoomed out, but our brains are attuned to those narrow bands (like how radio stations exist in a relatively narrow band of frequencies), which is to say what we find beautiful is mostly similar, and our relativity is relatively slight.
- mojuba 6y ago
  > a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly? When you say some art is "ugly at a visceral level" you need to show art that's beautiful at the same level. Is Modigliani's depiction of women beautiful or ugly? I'm sure you will hear both if you ask different people. To me it's breathtaking, whatever that means on the ugly-beautiful spectrum. On the other hand, there's a lot of earlier art (anything pre-impressionist basically) that tended to be more photographic and less inventive. You can find objectively beautiful things there but by today's standards they are boring, though you can appreciate this art within the context of the era. I think we should remove all forms of modern art from this debate. Beauty is no longer the goal of art.
  - clairity 6y ago
    > "Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly?" before, you said > "...human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural..." which is the yardstick from which i was extrapolating (that is, natural == visceral). > "Beauty is no longer the goal of art." i agree that modern art is no longer about (natural, visceral) beauty, but rather about conceptual/contextual interestingness. but those aren't relative, those are different yardsticks, hence my attempt to disentangle the two.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Raffaello, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Leonardo... they are not boring to anyone even today. The Nike of Samothrace is spectacular even when you don’t know when and where it comes from. Your impressionist cut off is very arbitrary. I agree that official art abandoned the search for absolute beauty a long time ago (basically with modernism), I just wouldn’t chuck away 2500 years of masterpieces because “realism boring”. In fact, looking at attendance numbers for art events, one could easily make the case that “old and boring” art remains more popular than XX+ century art.
  - cjohnson318 6y ago
    I agree with you, mostly. I don't think Rembrandt, or Caravaggio, or almost any other pre-impressionists look photographic. They're representational, but they're also highly stylized. All of the 'Old Masters' exaggerated or idealized forms, and exaggerated temperature, gamut, and contrast. The number of people that actually meant to practice trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) is very small. Trompe l'oeil is generally seen as a schtick; if you don't have anything original to add, then don't bother.
ACow_Adonis 6y ago
well, I think you're demonstrably wrong on the later, such that even if we accept there is something like a "universal" sense of human beauty (which I'll take as a highly debatable point) , there's also a learned/adaptive component that can't easily be separated from an individual's experience: it seems it can interfere, override or accentuate the first. We can see this in various cross-cultural and historical comparisons where it's not clear that any inherent or obviously individual property should be considered beautiful in a universal sense. Is foot binding beautiful? Is clear skin or scarification and body modding beautiful? What about lighter skin? is it beautiful because it suggests aristocracy and not working in the fields, or is a sun tan beautiful? or does white skin, to use a phrase from darker skinned indigenous populations make people "look like a corpse". Is it the anorexic, the aenemic, the flushed, the athlete, the labourer, or the obese? The weirder thing I've noticed talking to people is this IDEA that physical beauty must be objective is so entrenched in some, that they will actively deny or remove reported data points to the contrary (no, he doesn't really think that's beautiful/ he's lying about his perception of that beautiful man/woman).

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

> If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium. My problem with such neurological research, and much other research, is that the implications typically derive that an average positive effect among the sample size constitutes a universal positive effect. This is specially dubious in cases such as this where an individual negative effect is impossible to offset it, as there is a zero point. There is no such thing as a negative effect here, the zero point is that the beauty of a face is the same. Thus, assume, for sake of argument, that for 50% of persons, the beauty of the face be the same as that of a painting, and that for 50% it not be. This will measure an average positive effect, and from that there are often made conclusions that there is a universal positive effect. In fact, such average positive effects will be measured with a sufficiently large sample size if the positive effect only exist in 1% of the same size, as again, there is no negative effect possible. The historical common assumption was that human neurology can be assumed to be quite consistent, but I am not so sure in the light that it is often found that neurological research is often no longer reproducible if it even be moved to a different city. This issue is especially something that is near and dear to me, because I've noticed that some of the people I know seem to indeed draw a distinction between humanoid beauty, and beauty of nonhumanoids, and some I know don't. I also see in such people that they seem to be far more interested in a man's clothing and hair than his face, to decide whether they find him beautiful.

nicoburns 6y ago
> The historical common assumption was that human neurology can be assumed to be quite consistent I feel like this idea that humans are all the same in a given respect is a very commonly made mistake. We know that people react differently to us, but in the moment we often forget.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  It's an assumption that seems to hold more merit for other organs. The brain is quite a plastic organ that adapts to it's surroundings as a man matures. It's as though one be surprised that AlphaZero Chess, and AlphaZero Go to have formed very different neurons from training.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

> 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. Ok, so on top of a theory of constructed emotion (https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712), we'll need a theory of constructed aesthetics.