Beauty Is In the Brain Of The Beholder

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Women's brains are sexy in a different way from men's.

Sometimes men and women don't see eye to eye.

Now scientists think they know why. At least, in regard to how men and women view beauty.

Researchers at the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain report that men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job.

According to Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers were surprised by the finding.

"It is well known that there are differences between brain activity in women and men in cognitive tasks," said researcher Camilo J. Cela-Conde of the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. "However, why should this kind of difference appear in the case of appreciation of beauty?"

For women, the difference can be put into words-literally: when they consider a visual object, they link it to language. On the other hand, men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object.

However, this doesn't explain why - and how - the human capacity to appreciate beauty evolved.

Says Cela-Conde: "The differences that we have found might relate to the different social roles that, hypothetically, men and women had during human evolution."

The survey included 10 men and 10 women. All were shown paintings and photos of urban scenes and landscapes, and were asked to rate each scene as either "beautiful" or "not beautiful."

At the same time the scientists looked at images of the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in the brains of the men and women.

For the first 300 milliseconds, there was no difference between male and female brains. But from Milliseconds 300 to 700, activity was greater for objects that were rated as "beautiful" than for those that were "not beautiful."

For both sexes, the most active region was the parietal lobe that deals with visual perception, spatial orientation and information processing.

The big difference: it was focused on the right side of the brain in men, while both sides participated in women.

While there are differences between people as to what is beautiful and what isn't, Cela-Conde said they did not find identifiable differences related to sex. "Any person can find beautiful a landscape, a building or a canvas that some others will find awful. But sex has little to do with those differences. Perhaps they relate with other variables, such as age or education. It is curious that, using different neural networks, the final result is very similar in women and men. But this seems to be the case."

February 25, 2009