The science of beauty - and why Angus Taylor makes my skin crawl |
"This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has to go."
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- The famous last words of Oscar Wilde the aesthete, on his deathbed in Paris and appalled by the ugliness of his room's décor.
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Turning away for the moment from contemplation of the ugliness of Opposition Leader Angus Taylor's attempts to demonise migrants, I have been learning of beautiful new research being done into the brain's responses to beauty.
My daily feed from the Smithsonian Magazine has just fed me the enthralling article titled Does The Experience of Beauty Show Up In The Brain?.
Manuela Callari opens her story with a swish journalistic flourish that is a thing of beauty in its own right.
"Beneath the tight fabric compressing my skull like a swimming cap, 32 electrodes are primed to catch the firing of neurons in my visual cortex, where information about what I'm seeing is processed in my brain. Two more electrodes taped to my clavicles track my heartbeat, and a pair on my left hand gauge my skin's electrical conductance, or sweat. Wired up, I observe the [beautiful] object in front of me - a brass astrolabe used by Galileo himself - as Francesco Goretti hunts for the biological signature of beauty in my body."
We find that Francesco Goretti is part of a research team at the new Laboratory of Neuroaesthetics, a collaboration that's measuring how people react to the beauty of items held by the Galileo Museum in Florence, Italy.
"The goal of their experiment, in which I participated," Ms Callari continues "is to understand the biological and neural changes triggered by the aesthetic experience".
The researchers want to know how the body and brain respond to beauty and how the body and brain make judgments of what's beautiful and what's not.
Here I........