TED on beauty - Fred

Title: How your brain decides what is beautiful - Anjan Chatterjee

https://youtu.be/Wgt8QUHQjw8

 The talk begins with the story of a scientist who wished to composite pictures of criminals' faces, to find the face or phenotype of criminality. What was shocking about the outcome was that this man was attractive, beautiful. This leads Chatterjee to the question, how do we decide what is beautiful?

The finding that average faces are more attractive than the individual faces themselves has been recreated many times.

Symmetric faces are preferable than asymmetric ones. Birth abnormalities, disease, and parasitic infections can lead to asymmetries in plants, animals, and humans.

Hormones, such as estrogen, play an important role by creating a fertile look. Men prefer indicators of youth such as large eyes, narrow chins, and full lips. Conversely, heavier brows, thinner cheeks, and bigger squared-off jaws are more appealing for women in men. The interesting thing here is that testosterone weakens the immune system, so the idea that testosterone-infused features are a fitness indicator does not make sense.

A similar example of a biological handicap can be found in the peacock's extravagant tail. Darwin once wrote that the mere sight of a peacock made him physically ill, as his standing theory of physical selection could not explain this.

A new theory of sexual selection, whereby the female selects the most attractive looking peacock could account for it, but modern science also points out that the peacock is advertising its super-healthy organism (necessary to support such a ludicrous appendage).

Chatterjee covers the brain areas responsible for activation and feelings of pleasure as a result of viewing something beautiful. The brain seems to associate beauty with goodness and intrigue even when not prompted to. Beautiful people are typically seen as more hardworking, intelligent, successful, and kinder even when not the case. This leads to the ugly side of beauty, as even minor facial deformities cause people to be rated as dumber, slower, lazier, etc. Chatterjee argues that this trope is also reinforced by our popular culture, villains often identified by scars or facial marks. 

GI: Discrimination based on birth-given factors.

I believe this is a fascinating look into how humans experience beauty on the reactionary level. Perhaps it would be better to strive away from these in-built adverse feelings to minor abnormalities, which may have served as a precautionary measure thousands of years ago but are simply exclusionary now.