Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. Think of a pair of synchronized divers, or the wings on a butterfly, or the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. These are some of the things that most people find visually very pleasing. But why. The answer has to do with symmetry. Most objects in the real
world are symmetrical. This is particularly true of nature, the radial symmetry of a starfish or flower petals, the symmetrical efficiency of a hexagonal honeycomb, or the uniquely symmetrical crystal patterns of a snowflake. In fact, asymmetry is often a sign of illness or danger in the natural world, and of course, human beings are symmetrical, at least mostly and on the outside. You know, some internal organs like the
heart and liver are off center. Decades of research into sexual attraction have proven that both men and women find symmetrical faces sexier than asymmetrical ones. The leading explanation is the physical symmetry is an outward sign of good health, although large scale studies have shown no significant health differences in people with symmetrical or asymmetrical faces. Since severe physical asymmetries are strong indicators of genetic disorders. Our brains might
just be overreacting. The simple explanation for our attraction to symmetry is that it's familiar symmetrical objects and images played by the rules that our brains are programmed to recognize easily. Physicist Alan Lightman wrote about this in his book The Accidental Universe The World You Thought You Knew. He wrote, I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave
order in this strange universe. We find ourselves in the search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and in the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity, Symmetry is elegance.
At the esoteric end of the explanation spectrum, Lightment is saying that the satisfaction we feel at seeing a creatively symmetrical work of art or a perfectly stacked display of soup cans at the grocery store is that the stuff of our brains is inseparable from the stuff of nature. The neurons and synapses in our brains and the processes by which they communicate, connect, and conjure thoughts evolved in parallel to snowflakes and starfish. If nature is symmetrical, then
so are our minds. On the more basic end, the pleasure we get from symmetry could simply be due to our minds need to find patterns and attempt to make sense of things, especially quickly and with a limited data set. Considered the Stalt psychology, named after an influential school of visual perception born in Germany in the nineteen twenties. The famous and famously mistranslated gives Stalt motto is the whole is other than the sum of its parts, not the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our brain is more than a calculator adding up the details of a scene. It's primed to recognize signs of order in the accidental chaos and to follow certain rules or shortcuts to make sense of the world. Symmetry is one of those short cuts. We spoke with Mary Peterson, a psychology professor and director of the Visual Perception Laboratory at the University of Arizona. As she says, the brain doesn't
like things that are accidental. We either learn or born with certain priors or shortcuts that help our brains quickly determined that we're looking at one particular object or another. We also spoke with Johann vachu Launch, an experimental psychologist from Belgium who specializes in visual perception and how our brains organized the constant incoming flow of information. He agrees as symmetry is not just a design principle of the
outside world. He said, you can also see symmetry as one of these major principles driving the self organization of the brain. All these tendencies toward good organization and simple organization are also principles of symmetry in the dynamics of the brain itself. But on the other hand, too much symmetry can be a tad boring. While perfectly symmetrical designs are more pleasing to the brain, they're not necessarily more beautiful.
Both art novices and experts prefer art that strikes, says vocumons an optimal level of stimulation, not too complex, not too simple, not too chaotic, and not too orderly. Indeed, the Japanese have an esthetic principle called quinsey, which is all about creating balance in a composition using asymmetry or irregularity. Today's episode was written by Dave Rouse and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and tons of other brainy topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.