The Master organ: our wrinkly Brain How the Human Brain Perceives Beauty

Author: Emily Jiang

Editors: Yanxi Chen

Artist: Susan Wu

Have you ever deemed someone more or less attractive than another? Whether each person has a preference or not, generally speaking, humans can pretty much agree on who is or isn’t attractive. But, what exactly makes them beautiful, or plain compared to each other? There are actually many factors that humans use to judge beauty, for example, facial and body proportions, age, health, and symmetry

The brain uses three modules to determine a face’s desirability, interpretation, identification, and value. Women’s preferences for recognizing beauty differ from men, and there are specific parts of the brain that are responsible for aesthetic appreciation like artwork and music.

In order for a brain to determine a face’s value of appeal, the occipital and temporal parts of the cortex processes face views first The inferior occipital gyrus(IOG) recognizes facial characteristics and sends the information to the fusiform face area(FFA, which processes the placement of facial features and spacing) of the fusiform gyrus(FG) for facial recognition. When judging unknown faces, people have clear eye-scanning movement patterns while engaging the FFA region at the same time The FG very quickly acknowledges prettier faces than ugly ones While determining the interpretation of eye gaze, lip movement, facial expressions, and other facial movements. The IOG connects to the second module, where the superior temporal sulcus(STS) is included Then the FFA and IOG collaborate with other brain parts, like the occipital face area(OFA) and the ventral anterior temporal lobes(vATLs) for “feature abstraction and assessment, and the amygdala, insula and limbic system for the emotional content of facial expressions and movement.” Then the information from STS is sent to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) along with the nucleus accumbens, to discern beauty and create neurological rewards for finding it

The OFC reacts with more significant activity towards prettier faces than ugly ones. Pretty faces are shown to exactly activate the nucleus accumbens in the caudate region of the brain when men’s brains were scanned by FMRI after being