Amongst scientists, artists, and all other spectators beauty is just as difficult to grasp as it is subjective. A scientist by the name of Norberto M. Grzywacz dives into this concept at the neurological level in his work Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer. Specifically, he explains how the brain interprets beauty in accordance with the response that is elicited from visually pleasing stimuli. Another scientist who provides commentary on this subject is Jason Castro. In his work, How the Brain Responds to Beauty, he describes the conceptual theory behind beauty perception as both a stimulus and a subjective theory.
In relation to the work of Grzywacz, one of the main points of his study is to provide definition to subjective and objective beauty. In the process of explaining this concept, Grzywacz explains the Fluency Theory. The Fluency Theory is a scientific claim dictating that subjective beauty is dependent on the level of difficulty for the brain to process the visual stimulus efficiently. Thus, aspects of visual stimuli that we deem aesthetically pleasing such as smoothness, symmetry, fluidity, etc, are considered visually pleasing to the brain in most cases because visual stimuli that possess these qualities typically require less energy for the brain to process such stimuli. Likewise, visual stimuli that possess the opposite of these qualities such as roughness, asymmetry, rigidity, etc, are considered visually displeasing because they require the brain to expend more energy processing such stimuli in order to completely capture all its fine nuances.
Jason Castro’s work relates to the Fluency Theory in how he describes the brain’s response to beauty as a stimulus. In Castro’s study, he observed the activity of the brain when subjects were viewing visually pleasing artworks versus brain activity when the subjects were viewing human faces. The results of his study displayed that visually pleasing stimuli typically elicited activity in well defined brain regions. However, depending on the type of visual stimuli, the brain would be active in different regions. These results were evidenced by how the participants showed activity in different parts of their brain when they were presented with aesthetic artworks versus human faces respectively. Towards the end of his work, he expressed that perhaps there may be no beauty center of the brain as he hypothesized. However, if there is, it may have been left unidentified by the researchers for methodological issues with their procedure.
Relating these two works together, I theorize that Jason Castro’s error in his hypothesis is that he did not account for how visual pleasing stimuli in itself is subjective. Relating to his procedure, though one presented face may have been deemed visually pleasing by one of the participants, it may not have been visually pleasing for the other participant. Operationally speaking, this would leave too much room for variability in how his subjects’ brain activity respond to visual stimuli. Furthermore, the variability in how each participant viewed the presented stimuli would also breed variability in the brain activity of the participants when they viewed faces and artworks respectively. Thus, a future implication of this error could be for procedure to be manipulated so that the presented stimuli possess more qualities that are evolutionarily considered easier for the brain to process. Visual stimuli possessing qualities of smoothness, symmetry, and fluidity would help to eliminate the variability of how participants interpret the stimuli as these qualities would likely necessitate similar amounts of energy for each brain to process, allowing for more accurate interpretation of why the region of brain activity differs depending on the visual stimulus.
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