We come across the concept of beauty every day. Some people are pleasing to our eyes, and some are not. We all like different works of art, different picture outside the window. Have you ever wondered exactly how our brain decides what will seem beautiful to us and what will not?
There are certain parameters that affect our perception of human beauty.
Symmetry. Symmetrical things always seem to us much more beautiful than asymmetric ones. Facial asymmetry can indicate various developmental abnormalities, infections and diseases. Symmetry, as it were, subconsciously hints to us about health.
Averaging. Most likely, if you show you photos of an absolutely average person and a child from people of different races, then the second one will seem more beautiful to you. This is again influenced by evolution. People with genes of different races adapt better to the world around them and have good genetic diversity.
What processes start in the brain when you see an attractive person? The area of the visual cortex in the back of the brain is activated. In addition, the centers of pleasure and reward begin to work. This interaction reinforces the relationship between seeing beauty and pleasure.
By the way, it is interesting that the activity of neurons during the reaction to both kindness and beauty often overlaps. Because of this, a logical chain arises in our head: "beautiful means good." This is the reason for the great success in society of attractive people. Therefore, indeed, it is often easier for beautiful people to move up the career ladder, to make acquaintances. Others subconsciously consider them to be good and smart.
If a person has any developmental anomalies expressed on the face or acquired defects, then the brain associates this with evil. Think of movies and cartoons. After all, it is the villains who are most often painted with a disfigured face. Thus, our perception of beauty influences many social factors. And the fault is none other than our brain - great and terrible.
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The brain determines our choice even before we know about it
New UNSW research suggests that we have less control over our personal choices than we think, and that unconscious brain activity determines our decisions long before we know about them.
An experiment published in Scientific Reports at the Future Consciousness Lab at the UNSW School of Psychology showed that the choice of what to think about can be predicted from patterns of brain activity 11 seconds before people consciously choose what to think about. think.
The experiment consisted of asking people to freely choose between two visual patterns of red and green stripes - one moving horizontally and the other vertically, before consciously imagining them while observing them in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.
Participants were also asked to rate how strongly they felt their imaging models were after their selection, again, while the researchers recorded their brain activity during the process.
As a result, the researchers were not only able to predict which template people would choose, they were also able to predict how strongly participants should rate their visualizations. Using machine learning, the researchers were able to predict participants' volitional choices an average of 11 seconds before their thoughts became conscious.
The regions of the brain that revealed information about future choices were located in the executive regions of the brain, where our conscious decisions are made, as well as in visual and subcortical structures, which suggests an expanded network of regions responsible for generating thoughts.
“As decisions are made about what to think about, the executive regions of the brain choose a stronger thought trail. In other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your options, then your brain is more likely to choose that option, since it is amplified by pre-existing brain activity,”the researchers say.
"This could explain, for example, why thinking about something leads to more thinking about it, as it does in a positive feedback loop."
Interestingly, the subjective strength of future thoughts was also dependent on activity in the early visual cortex, the region of the brain that receives visual information from the outside world. The researchers said this suggests that the current state of activity in areas of perception (which are believed to change randomly) affects how strongly we think about things.
The results raise questions about our sense of volition for our own mental visuals. In addition, the study is the first to reveal the origin and content of involuntary visual thoughts and how they can influence subsequent voluntary conscious imagery.