BEAUTIFUL EVOLUTION

How did humans come to appreciate beauty? What is its evolutionary significance? It turns out that a beautiful painting is just like a beautiful mate, a beautiful peach, a beautiful song, a beautiful day… they are all good for us biologically. Neuroimaging studies have shown that our brains’ responses to aesthetics, in whatever form, are similar.

Another weird thing neuroscientists have discovered is that the part of our brain that processes beauty, the anterior fistula, is the same part that processes pain and disgust. Cerebral yin-yang. It’s an evaluation center—weighing whether something we are sensing will bring us pleasure or displeasure, rapture or horror.

Is that why local peaches look, smell, and taste better to us in summer than imported peaches do in the winter—because they are better for us nutritionally then? But then why are some things beautiful to some people and the same things ugly to others? Why do we interpret beauty differently? Why might what is beautiful now be something we will later think is unattractive?

Either way, regardless of how it all works, connecting with what is beautiful now is good for us, no matter what we think is beautiful now.