Week 6 Blogging Assignment

I was interested in seeing if the perception of beauty, as described in class through the Baroque and Post Modernism period, were different between men and women scientifically. I then found an article that did a study comparing the brains of each while they looked at works of art: paintings, sculptures, etc. What they found was a notable difference between the two. Men seemed to focus more on the location of objects whereas women centered on the "relative values" of the objects. The author, Brandon Keim, of the article, "Beauty Affects Men's and Women's Brains Differently" attributes these differences due to the early hunter-gatherer era. So even though each sex considered beauty differently, the areas of the brain activated in determining so, were still the same. In essence, the brain region were no different between the same sexes. Although a somewhat predicted conclusion, I thought it was interesting to read how they jumped to the hunter-gatherer as a possible explanation for how the different sexes looked for beauty. In that because of the way each sex looked for food as part of our innate survival instincts, humans have developed to look at beauty in that way as well. Grace Huang.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/brainandbeauty/