Beautiful? That depends on your sex
It goes without saying that men and women don’t always see eye-to-eye, but researchers now have evidence that there’s a difference in the ways that male and female brains judge beauty.
The authors of the study, published Monday (2.23.09) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), theorize that this gender difference developed after the evolutionary split between humans and chimpanzees, roughly 4 million years ago.
The team of scientists from Spain used a technique called magnetoencephalography (MGE) to measure brain activity while men and women evaluated the beauty of 400 photographs of paintings from various artistic periods (abstract, classic, impressionist, postimpressionist), landscapes, urban areas and artifacts. The researchers deliberately excluded photographs with close up views of humans or well-known paintings so as to not distort the analysis.
During the test, the participants were asked to indicate a judgment of ‘beautiful’ or ‘not-beautiful’ for each image with a finger point. Later, the same participants ranked the beauty of the images they saw during the test.
The researchers focused their attention on the parietal lobe, a region of the brain well recognized for its role in pulling together and processing sensory information, such as sights, smells and sounds.
For the first 300 milliseconds the test, neither the brains of women or men differed in response to a beautiful versus non-beautiful image. However, after 300 milliseconds, the brain’s response to beauty became clear, with male brains displaying higher activity in the right parietal lobe in response to beautiful images. Like men, the women’s brains showed heightened activity when observing a beautiful image, but this activity appeared in both left and right sides of the brain.
Previous studies of the parietal lobe suggest the right parietal lobe is involved in the processing of coordinate spatial relationships (the distance among objects) while the left lobe assists with the processing of categorical spatial relationships (whether one object is above or below another). The authors suggest that the bilateral parietal lobe activity in women suggests they draw upon categorical information to assess beauty while men use coordinate information.
The researchers speculate that the evolution of the gender differences in response to beauty may have been born out of the exploration techniques of males and females in hunter-gatherer groups. “Tracking animals and foraging for plant food involve different spatial scenarios, and hence, require different kinds of spatial skills,” they write.
