Death… It's A Living

In a previous essay, I wrote that death and beauty are correlated with stimuli on the opposite ends of the same dimension: the likelihood of genetic survival. Stimuli that are associated with death or sickness or anything that might decrease the chance that the genes we carry will not survive another generation trigger autonomic responses such as disgust, fear, and the desire to flee. Stimuli that are judged to be beautiful or associated with beauty engender positive emotions and the desire to approach. Beauty is a cue to genetic survival.

As I have only begun to argue, however, reactions to beauty are necessarily more complex than those to death. The reason for this is simple: The difference between life and death is binary, and making the wrong decision or engaging in the wrong behavior at the wrong time might be the last thing the organism ever does. With the stakes being so high, the evolved ability to detect danger is strong. This negativity bias provides us with an unconscious vigilance, without which humans probably wouldn’t have lasted very long—especially during caveperson times when food, water, and shelter were much harder to come by than they are for most of us in the 21^st century.  

Determining whether something is beautiful or not is a less urgent decision; furthermore, if we get it wrong somehow, the consequences are not as dire. Yes, we might have missed a mating opportunity or a chance to eat, but we will live again, likely to have those chances on another day. There is no positivity bias, so the scales are not even. People react faster to dangerous stimuli than they do to positive stimuli.

And yet, we do tend to react faster toward stimuli that are liked, familiar, and beautiful than we do toward stimuli that are neutral, unfamiliar, and unattractive. Why might this be?

The explanation that I favor relies on a mental model of categorization. Although this explanation could become overly complex, we need not discuss neural networks to understand the basics of evaluative perception. Let’s start with that two-word phrase: evaluative perception. For the most part, it is what it sounds like: determining whether an object of perception is liked (or not). It is tempting to believe that the order of events would work like this:

sensation -> perception -> evaluative perception -> action.

In other words, first, the light refracting off the face of a beautiful stranger goes through our eyes until it hits the cells in the back that comprise the retina (this is sensation). The cells in the retina then transduce that light into electrical signals that are transported through and across the neurons that make up the optic nerve, which connects the eyes to the occipital lobe (the portion of the cerebral cortex in the back of the brain, somewhat counterintuitively furthest from the eyes); the brain interprets these signals as a face (this is perception). Then, perhaps another part of the brain such as the frontal lobe, which is involved in decision making, decides that the face is attractive (this is evaluative perception). Lastly, the frontal cortex provides this information to the motor cortex in the parietal lobe and we find ourselves approaching the stranger to determine whether they come here often (that is action).

But this description of the link between sensation and action has too many steps. It is more likely that there is no distinction between perception and evaluation. There is no evidence that humans can perceive anything without evaluating it in some way. Thus, the more likely and straightforward order of events is

sensation -> perception/evaluation -> action.

Thus, after the light is transduced and sent as an electrical signal to the visual cortex, the signal is perceived as, not just a face, but a beautiful face. Once we consciously recognize that we are looking at a beautiful face (only milliseconds after the light has hit our retinas, we can take the appropriate action.

There are several things that must be unpacked here, however. First, how can perception and evaluative perception be the same thing? Wouldn’t that suggest that beauty was an objective property of certain objects and faces that existed to be perceived? If that were true, why would there be variation in attractiveness preferences?

That last question is a variation of the one I find myself answering the most often when strangers on a plane learn what I do for a living.

Stranger: “What do you do?”

Me: “I’m a behavioral scientist.” *Note that I’ve learned to stop saying “psychologist” to avoid conversations that inevitably end awkwardly with “I’m not a therapist, but I know some people you can contact.”

S: “What do you study?”

M: “Lots of things.”

S: “Like…?” *Why don’t these people just leave me alone, I’m using all of my mental power to keep this plane in the air.

M: “Usually perceptions of attractiveness. Trying to figure out what qualities make someone beautiful and what qualities don’t.”

S: “How can that be studied? Isn’t that completely subjective?”

No. It’s not. In fact, decades of psychological research have shown again and again and again that people both between and within cultures agree on who is attractive and who is not. Although there are some differences (you might know that the “ideal” female body differs by weight and shape across cultures and history), the magnitude of these differences is often overstated.

Attractiveness is not Subjective or Objective

Imagine that the person sitting next to be on the plane claims, “My wife says Brad Pitt is more attractive than George Clooney, but I think Clooney is much more attractive” (I’ve heard a variation of this statement, offered as proof of the subjectiveness of beauty, many times from many people on many planes). I concede that individual preferences in the attractiveness of individuals exists. But wouldn’t you, imaginary person on the plane, say that both men are actually quite attractive? Much more so than say, Steve Buscemi? (Sorry Steve! Fargo is still my favorite movie!) The point is, we tend to differ in our preferences for the attractiveness of people in the same strata of beauty, but we all agree who is and who is not attractive.

If you ask people in a remote Asian village (without access to much Western culture) to judge the attractiveness of both Asian and white faces (and you ask rural white people with little to no experience with Asian people to do the same), you’ll find that Asian people rate Asian faces as more attractive than white faces, whereas white participants will rate white faces as more attractive than Asian faces. However, if you ask these same participants to rank order the faces of each race from most attractive to least attractive, both samples will produce the same orders. Asian people might (on average) prefer Asian faces but they are not confused about who the most and least attractive white people are; the same of course is true of white participants, though in reverse.

So, does that mean that beauty is an objective property because people essentially agree on what it is they see? No, but not because of something specific to beauty. Beauty is not an objective property of any object or person, not because beauty is in the eye of the beholder (it isn’t) or beauty is on the inside (um, no). Beauty is not an objective property because there are no such thing as objective properties.

Perception is a lie.

That might sound crazy and conspiratorial, but it’s the truth and relatively unchallenged in the perceptual sciences. Remember: Neither our eyes nor our brains reveal the truth. What they reveal are genetic survival cues. But the conspiracy goes deeper than that. It’s not just that our brain is providing genetic survival cues, it is also showing us what it wants us to see. A visual demonstration will help.

This image shows Reddit user superkirbz13’s piece of bacon, but also a piece of bacon with a familiar shape. If you can’t see it yet, I’ll tell you.

You probably saw it the first time around because you’ve seen pictures of seahorses before. If you it took you until seeing the image of the seahorse, that’s fine too. Now, go back and look at the bacon. For all of us, it now looks like a seahorse. We aren’t confused and think we are looking at a real seahorse, but we will forever see a seahorse when we see that image of bacon. We can’t unsee it.

I mean that quite literally: we can’t unsee it. Once the perception has happened (“hey, that strip of bacon looks like a seahorse!”), it has forever changed our brain. And more specifically, our brain has changed what we see. How?

In my earlier description of the pathway of sensation, I described what I think a majority of people already know: that the visual cortex not only receives signals from the eyes, but it sends signals to other parts of the brain during perception. What I think most people don’t realize is that there are even more neurons in the cortex sending information back to the visual cortex. This suggests that parts of the brain not directly involve in sight are telling the the visual cortex what to see.

This strange system likely evolved as a way to improve cognitive efficiency. Think about all of the things in the universe that a human being is likely to see in their lifetimes. I have no idea how many things exist in the universe, but I do know humans can live successful, if perhaps slightly less fulfilled lives, having seen only a small fraction of them. Thus, our eyes and the rest of our visual system are most useful to us if they can quickly identify common sensations. In fact, speed of identification is much more valuable than accuracy of identification. (Remember, using my son’s role-playing game analogy, we can’t be both speedy and accurate because that would require additional eons of evolution. Maybe someday—but probably not.)

Therefore, the brain speeds up perception by telling the eyes, “Oh, it’s this. You’ve seen this before.” And that’s what we see. We don’t see a seahorse in that bacon because there really is a seahorse or because the bacon is objectively like a seahorse. We see it because our brain is trying to speed things up for us and use fewer cognitive resources. Resources that could be used for other more important things like finding food or sex or avoiding danger.

At the risk of anthropomorphizing the brain too much (or maybe this is impossible… the brain is what anthropomorphizes us), the brain wants things to be easy. It likes things that are easy. Things that are easy are processed quickly. They are done and dusted. Seen it: seahorse. Boom. Over. Next.

What is easiest on the eyes? Beauty. Why? That will come in another post.

-The Plague Doctor