Where does our Sense of Beauty come from?

Whoever engages with the beautiful has a good soul. Emmanuel Kant said something like that. Hegel said the art we create transcends the beauty of nature, and that is a triumph for humans. But Rick would tell Morty, “Oh, you mean the evolutionary scam that tricks you into making bad decisions. Yeah, super inspiring.”

Now, the more you look into our relationship with beauty, the more there is to discover.

The 4 faces of beauty

Psychologists have identified at least 4 types of beauty that we appreciate^[1]: Natural beauty, Artistic beauty, Moral beauty, and Cognitive beauty (beautiful ideas). All of these forms of beauty have 1 common – shared – neural base in the medial orbital front cortex. It is capable of extracting beauty from a wide range of things. This one region applies the “beauty” tag to things that are processed within other widespread brain regions (where memories are stored).

• Natural beauty is appreciating the stars, the animals, the forests, etc.
• Artistic beauty is the visual art, the sculptures, the divinity in paintings, and the musical sequences that evoke emotions you didn’t know existed.
• Moral beauty is the more abstract beauty that we see when someone shows kindness or something does the most selfless thing without seeking acknowledgment.
• Cognitive beauty (beautiful ideas) is nuanced skilled things like a very well-written code or an algorithm that just revolutionizes how things are done.

Notice how beauty as a concept has perceptual elements (all the things that enter our senses), emotions and values (how you feel about something), and cognition (the ideas). So, these aspects are, in a way, universal, but also modified by culture, experience, and context.

When we scroll online and pause to watch someone extremely skilled doing their thing – a musician, a carpenter, or even uncommon arts like mimicking sounds with the mouth, we are appreciating beauty: artistic & cognitive beauty. When we pause to watch street art performers, we are appreciating artistic & cognitive beauty. We don’t just watch it because we have knowledge about that art/skill, we watch for the beauty in it. Otherwise, we aren’t watching the elegant process of making candy or the beautiful lines drawn on objects to make precision cuts. We notice beauty even when a skill or art is unknown to us, our brains know how to capture that “beauty” vibe. Spotting beauty, even if it is unknown, is an instinct.

Psychological origins of beauty

Beauty standards in physical aesthetics – skin color, hair quality, height, waist/hips, muscles, etc., are essentially subject to change. But, beauty itself is more abstract. Moral beauty and cognitive beauty, for example. There is no “standard” for what someone considers a beautiful gesture or what makes the most stunning lyrical build-up in a song so beautiful.

Then there is the ironic “ugly-sexy” style of beauty – someone who does not have characteristics that meet beauty standards, but something about them makes them highly attractive. It may be their personality, their mannerisms, or just the uniqueness of their physical characteristics. This won’t happen if the concept of beauty is a “template”. Instead, it is more likely that attention-grabbing characteristics and beauty overlap with each other.

However, the roots of beauty may lie in simpler evolutionary advantages. Evolutionary psychologists say things that help us either survive or mate in our far-away history are considered beautiful. Lands that have easy access to prey animals, regions close to water, and plants are beautiful. Physical features that made a particular person get selected for mating and features that suggested the ability to reproduce became physical standards of beauty. Essentially, this reasoning says natural selection or sexual selection in evolution has shaped our understanding of beauty.

But this leaves out the more abstract forms of beauty, like the destructive power of a volcano eruption or the elegance of a single line of code.

There is also a different line of thinking. Most of our sophisticated cognitive and emotional makeup is a more “advanced” version of something more basic. For example, the concept of love in the brain is processed by multiple brain regions that evolved more recently. The interesting thing is that those brain regions sit right on top of brain regions that are involved in lust. So love, in the neural sense, is a massive extension of lust.

So, a small neural structure (more recent) evolves on top of an older neural structure. The older structure tends to be more related to evolution and survival. The more recent one tends to be some form of “abstraction” of the basic thing. So, love is an abstraction of love. This organization is seen across the brain. The brain regions hidden deep inside evolved first and are shared by more animals. The most recent brain region that we primates have – the frontal cortex^[2] – the region just behind the forehead – is responsible for our advanced thinking & reasoning along with a sophisticated mixing of emotions, thoughts, and morals. And this region gives us the ability to appreciate beauty in such a diverse way. This line of thinking allows us to appreciate the ugly-sexy people and also the beauty of raw destructive power. It’s the cognitive & emotional bits attached to more primal beauty that have made us acknowledge odd forms of beauty.

Researchers have consistently observed that women tend to appreciate beauty more than men. This is seen across ages and across cultures, in countries and populations that don’t share social values. A very interesting explanation^[3] comes from a researcher named Richard Prum. He has put forth the “beauty happens” hypothesis which says that our sense of beauty cannot be sufficiently explained by just features that indicate a highly fertile partner or a safe environment.

To understand his reasoning, we have to go back to a nasty thing seen in the animal kingdom. Prum notes that over 30% of infant baboons and gorillas die by their own species’ male’s hands. Sometimes, the adult male primates kill the infants to bring the mother back into a sexually receptive state.

Prum’s argument is that this sort of danger is reduced when females value abstract forms of beauty like “kind behavior.” This sort of beauty becomes the more important beauty because a “beautiful male” by that standard, “a kind male”, will not kill their own species’ children.

Then, evolution can carry this moral beauty (kind behavior) and physical beauty (physical fitness) ahead and evolve into its more sophisticated cognitive and artistic form. Cognitive and artistic beauty can indicate primal physical/natural and moral beauty because we have a common brain region processing all forms of beauty. Now that the basic conditions to appreciate beauty are set in place, culture or feeling rewarded for beauty can only enhance it.

Beauty makes the brain prioritize information

One line of research whose poster child is the “kiki bouba effect” shows that humans have very sophisticated abstract thinking mechanisms. Essentially, we can connect sounds to colors and taste to visual textures. We use these associations to change the aesthetics of food by modifying its color or playing with lighting to modify the whole experience of eating. The same abstraction lets us think in complex metaphors and relate different ideas together. So, this abstraction ability is quite a useful cognitive process that helped us progress from making stone tools to cribbing about how the AI we created to do our jobs is taking jobs.

Another advantage is purely cognitive but more of an accidental cognitive benefit. In his book “The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity^[4]“, the author highlights that appreciating aesthetics is its own goal. We don’t necessarily find beauty to survive better, but finding beauty gives us a massive dose of basic and complex information that helps us survive. Look at an example cited in the book.

In many experiments, cats that grew up with fewer “lines” in the environment, failed to recognize lines. That means a lack of lines in the environment made them cognitively deficient in recognizing lines. This happens with words, too; not having words to recognize something can often prevent us from recognizing that thing (it’s called hypo-cognition). Similarly, the information we get through beautiful things enhances our cognition indirectly because the beautiful thing feeds our brain with tiny little bits of information during the time we appreciate beauty. The beautiful music, or the beautiful work of visual design, shows us things that we may not have seen before. It’s an indirect, ultra-micro automatic acquisition of cognitive building-blocks – the opposite of actively learning a skill.

That new learning spreads across other domains in the brain through that abstraction. So, engaging with aesthetics boosts cognition in subtle but powerful ways – it brings to our attention something great.

Appreciating beauty may be a direct short-cut to fuel our curiosity. Consider this – something stands out, and you want to know what it is. But there are millions of such things that stand out. How do you filter them out? One solution is paying attention to something that stands out AND is also beautiful. Now, suddenly, our brain knows what to focus on in an endless stream of stimuli that compete for our attention.

Beauty calms us yet energizes us

The same researchers, in their review paper^[5], say that beauty has an ironic benefit – it calms us but also energizes us, paradoxically. Seeing something beautiful – a great idea at work – can make everyone energetic. This energy is not just psychological – researchers have observed that engaging with beautiful things can increase breathing and heart rate. It works as a soft adrenaline rush. Similarly, research has also shown that beauty can soothe the mind.

Evidence shows^[6] that appreciating beauty and excellence is positively associated with improved well-being, improved life satisfaction, positive emotions, and better recovery from negative mental states.

It’s that moment when you notice something beautiful, something that moves you, something that gets your undivided attention. That moment makes you forget about everything bad for a split second. You are immersed in that beauty, and nothing in the universe can separate you from it.

So, beauty, like music, can regulate emotions. But above this ironic effect, researchers say that engaging with beauty makes us, as a civilization, flourish.

Can beauty make us flourish?

Let’s start simple – we pay a premium for beauty – we pay more for beautiful-looking products, food, and hotel rooms. We expect our taxes to make our environment more beautiful. Beautiful people (natural/physical beauty) get more likes online. People with insane skills (artistic beauty) get a lot of visibility online. We take pride in our beautiful histories, and landscapes & people. And, to contrast, we pay less for ugly products, and we throw garbage where things are already ugly.

Beauty acts as an incentive. We tend to protect that which is beautiful. If we actively seek it out, we will eventually want to keep that beauty, or enhance it, acknowledge it, or share it. Although there isn’t much research on this, it’s a strong hypothesis that engaging and acknowledging beauty can help us preserve the beauty and seek it out.

I believe Kant got it right, engaging with beauty indicates a good soul. But the way we enforce and hold unrealistic beauty standards, I’d go with Rick Sanchez. And, also, beauty has made me spend too much time on Instagram.

P.S. Kant, Hegel, or Rick did not say any of that verbatim; that’s my interpretation of their work.

P.P.S. Yes, Rick Sanchez is a credible philosopher.

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