What is the point of being beautiful?

What is the point of being beautiful?

 Beauty has no obvious use, nor is it easy to see why it is necessary to civilization; yet civilization would be unthinkable without it. 

Sigmund Freud

What is beautiful to you? Is it a Monet painting or a Raphael? Is it the person you love? The way their mind works? The newest fashion trends? Maybe it is simply a flower sitting on your kitchen table.

It seems almost impossible to define this vast and ambivalent thing. We all know it, yet we cannot say exactly what it is.

The question of beauty has been at the center of debate for hundreds of years. Philosophers have not only tussled with the question: what is beautiful? But also the question of what constitutes beauty? 

These fundamental questions about what we point to as beauty has, and continues to, perplex scientists and psychologists along with the myriad of philosophers, historians, and artists that face these same quandaries. The easy part is to say when something is beautiful, but the subject falls apart when we try to say what makes it so. Like seeing  a flower in this moment, that is more beautiful than the same flower a day before, it becomes fugacious to say why. However, the impact of the experience of beauty is undeniable and universally present, but its purpose and sources are where people get stuck. 

The intangibility of beauty has made it difficult to approach in an empirical manner leading scientists to disregard beauty as a topic of study until recently.  Psychologist, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), best known for his hierarchy of needs, was a man before his time. Frustrated by pathologizing and behaviorism dominant in Freudian and behavioral psychology, he came up with a new perspective. Maslow decided that instead of focusing on patients' deficiencies and illnesses, he would study the ways in which they could rise up to their full human potential. He named this type of psychology, humanistic psychology, and in 1961 co-founded The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, a well-respected and cited journal today. 

Later in his career, he discovered an essential part of this pathway to one’s full potential was the need for aesthetic experience, writing that although it was unclear exactly how this functioned, it was clearly a necessary part of our psychological health. The need for aesthetic experience made itself present in Maslow’s practice before it found a place in his theory.

It might seem absurd to think that beauty has such a big effect on our experience, but one of Maslow’s studies shows evidence for the far-reaching importance of aesthetics.

In this study, college students were placed in one of three rooms. There was the Beautiful Room which had large, draped windows, pleasant lighting, comfortable chairs, paintings, and wooden desks and bookcases, and a rug. Then the Average Room was organized and practical, with no extra extravagances much like a standard office space. And lastly, the Ugly Room. The single light fixture was fluorescent and falling apart, there were used mattresses and mops lying around, as well as empty boxes and ashtrays.

In these rooms, the students were given a stack of photographs and asked by a proctor to rate the people in the photographs on a numerical scale from 1-10 rating on their energy and well-being.

After performing the study, they found that the students’ responses substantially varied from one room to the other. The students’ ratings of the photographs were significantly more negative in the Average and Ugly rooms than in the Beautiful room. 

What’s more, the interactions between the students and the proctors administering the exercise were deeply affected by the state of the rooms. In the Average and Ugly rooms their observed behavior was more irritable, fatigued, and prone to complaining.

The participants' experience of, and interactions in, the world were changed dramatically simply by altering the appearance of their environment. This has been reconfirmed by Broken Window Theory which posits that the prevalence of physical disorder creates discomfort to people in that environment. This theory has affected policy decisions in the United States through the 20th and 21th century. 

Although Maslow performed studies such as these and altered his overall theory of human motivation, he could not answer the myriad questions that still remained in the philosophical and scientific study of aesthetics. 

Beauty never really made its breakthrough in science until the early 2000s where it has taken the lead in a number of psychological and neurobiological studies, resulting in the birth of a new field of research called neuroaesthetics.

Neuroaesthetics is the scientific approach to the study of aesthetic perception. It tries to understand what is going on in the brain when we perceive any object which gives rise to a judgment of beauty. This may be an attractive person who walks past you, the ballet you watch every Christmas, or your favorite painting. This approach to beauty nonetheless has faced reproach within the philosophical and artistic communities because of  its brain-based assumptions. In other words, the assumption that our aesthetic experiences are fully perceived and captured in the brain and brain activity. 

One strong critic of the brain based approach to the study of beauty is the philosopher of mind from the University of California, Berkeley, Alva Noë. 

He elucidates the Big Problem of neuroscience and neuroaesthetics--we still do not know what, how, and why consciousness occurs. This most essential problem is one that neuroscience has been wrestling with for decades and still not conquered. In a brain-based model of approaching our questions about consciousness, academics are asking the question: what is the biological account of human experience? Although this question is imperative, the means that we have used so far to answer it have been ineffective. 

The study of aesthetics is the study of experience, but how can we arrive there if we cannot even prove that experience comes from the brain? In this way, neuroaesthetics assumes the hypothesis that you are your brain, but is this the case?

The question of the source of consciousness is not a new one. Almost four-hundred years ago, Descartes was answering this question when he concluded cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) and neuroscience has not taken many steps forward from Descartes in answering this same question. 

Alva Noë’s hesitations, however, are not an imploration to quit neuroscience, rather a call for a new approach to the questions in neuroaesthetics. Nevertheless, such critiques have not stopped neuroscientists from looking at our brains on beauty, and some believe they are getting the first clues to an answer to what is beautiful. 

Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroscience at University College London and a pioneer in the field, found that in the most basic biological forms of beauty (i.e. an attractive person or a beautiful landscape) the medial orbital frontal cortex always lights up. This occurs in response to any form of beauty: mathematical, music, visual, etc. This part of the brain is a section of the prefrontal cortex and is associated with the neurological process of decision making. The ultimate meaning of these findings is still in discussion, but the suggestion is that beauty is a key factor in decision making. This knowledge could lead us much deeper in our understanding of the human motivational system--the work which Maslow started almost a century ago.

Unlike Semir, who sees the experiences of art as directly translating to activation of parts of the brain, Noë relates the engagement with art to having a conversation. To understand a piece of art involves more than just a perception of shapes and colors; there is context, presuppositions, and unintended interpretations that each observer will make. It is like making a joke, sometimes it is funny when you have the inside information, but if you don’t know it, it might just be offensive or make no sense at all. How does the neuroscientist take all of this into account when empirically studying aesthetics?

As we begin to understand how little we know about the thing we call beauty, we can recognize the extent of its elusivity and its importance when understanding ourselves. The next time you look at a sunset and think it is stunning, you will have performed something that is beyond the current knowledge of humankind. It is an act that is still hidden to ourselves, even though we do it effortlessly everyday, yet it may hold the keys to the most fundamental processes through which we experience being alive.