Our Reaction to the BEAUTIFUL as on today-1

 In nature and art Aesthetic behavior is the pursuit of beauty. This is easy to say but difficult to explain, because beauty is such an elusive quality, especially when viewed biologically. It bears no obvious relationship to any of the basic survival patterns of the human animal, such as feeding, mating, sleeping or parental care. And yet it cannot be ignored, because any objective survey of the way people spend their time must include many hours of beauty-reaction. There is no other way it describe the response of men and women who can be found standing silently in front of paintings in an art gallery, or sitting quietly listening to music, or watching dancing or serving wines. In each of these cases the human sense organs are passing impressions to the brain. The receipt of which appears to be the only goal involved. The advanced wine taster even goes so far as to spit out the wine after tasting it, as it to underline that it is his need for beauty that is being quenched and not his thirst.

It is true to say that virtually every human culture expresses itself aesthetically in some way or other, so the need to experience the beauty reaction has a global importance. It is also true to say that there are no absolutes involved. Nothing is considered to be beautiful by all peoples everywhere. Every revered object of beauty is considered ugly by someone, somewhere. This fact makes nonsense of a great deal of authentic theory, and many find it hard to accept. There is so often the feeling that this, or that, particular form of beauty really does have some intrinsic value, some universal validity that simply must be appreciated by everyone. But the final truth is that beauty is in the brain of the beholder and nowhere else.

However a new study has cast serious doubts over the reality of the old saying "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder".

A team of researchers have revealed in a new study that infants just a few hours old showed their preference for attractive faces compared to plain ones. According to, the researchers came to the conclusion after carrying out the study that if photos of an attractive fashion model and a plain-looking woman are kept together, newborns will be drawn towards the prettier face. The finding undermines the theory that people develop the idea of beauty from the experience of interacting with different individuals

In fact, it now appears that everyone is born with a pre-programmed understanding of what makes a person attractive.

"Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder. It's in the eye of the infant right from the moment of birth, and possibly before birth," The Researchers’ team tested infants over aging two days old, but the group also included some born only a few hours earlier. Each baby was held in front of the pictures and closely watched by researchers to the left and right.

The observers followed the baby's eyes and pressed a button whenever the infant looked at the image on their side.  The researchers found that babies generally would flick their gaze between one picture and another, but spent significantly more time looking at the fashion model than the plain-looking woman.

The finding undermines the theory that people develop the idea of beauty from the experience of interacting with different individuals.

If this is so, than how can any statement be made about the biology of beauty? If everyone has their own idea of what is attractive and what is ugly, and these ideas vary from place and time to time, then what can possibly be said about the beauty-reaction of the human species, other than that it is a matter of personnel taste? The answer is that in every instance there do appear to be basic rules operating. These rules leave open the precise nature of the object of beauty, but explained how we come to possess a beauty- reaction in the first place and how it is governed and influenced today.

If we ignore man made artifacts for the moment and concentrate on the response to natural objects; the first discovery to be made is that beauty objects are not isolated phenomena- they comes in-group. They can be classified. Flowers, butterflies, birds, rocks, trees, clouds, all the environmental elements, we find so attractive come in many different shapes, colors and sizes. When we look at anyone specimens we are seeing in our mind’s eye, every other specimen we have met before. When we see a new flower, we see it against our background knowledge of every other flower we have encounters previously. Our brain has started away all the information in a special file labeled ‘flowers’ and soon as our eyes settle on a new one, the visual impact it makes is instantly checked against all that stored data. What we are seeing really only because a flower after this complex compassion has been made.

In other words, the human brain functions as a magnificent. Classifying machine and every time we walk through landscape it is busy feeding in the new experience and comparing them with the old. The brain classifies everything we see. The survival value of this procedure is obvious enough. Our ancient ancestors like other mammals needed to know the details of the world around them. A monkey for instance, has to know many different kinds of trees and bushes in its forest home, and needs to be able to tell which one is poisonous and which thorny. If it is to survive, a monkey has to become a good Botanist. In the same way a lion has to become a good Zoologist, able to tell at a glance which prey species is which, how fast it can run and which escape pattern, it is likely to use.

Early man also had to become a master of observation, with our acute knowledge of every plant and animal, shape, color, pattern, movement, sound and smell. The only way to do this was to develop a powerful urge to classify; everything met with in daily life. It becomes important that it developed its own independent existence. It becomes as basic and distinct as the need to feed, mate or sleep. The human animal is a master classifier of information and almost, only classified information will do, providing it is encountered in the real environment and seen to be part of the world in which she / he lives.

It is hemophilic urge that is at the root of our response to beauty. When we hear a new bird-song for the first time, or walk into a garden, we have not seen before. Our response to the sounds or to the arrangement of flowers may be intensely pleasurable and we have not seen before. Our response to the sounds or to the arrangement of flowers may be intensely pleasurable and we say “How beautiful.” The source of the pleasure seems to be the song itself, or the garden itself, but it is not. It is new experience as checked against all previous experiences in its particular category. The new song is instantaneously compared with all similar songs we have before the garden with all previous gardens we have seen. If we find beauty, it is comparative, not intrinsic, relative not absolute.

But if beautiful is a matter is classifiable relationships then so is ugliness, and it is still necessary to define the difference between the two. The answer lies in the way we have set up “our classes” when classifying the world around us. Each class or category is recognized, because certain sets of objects have common proportions, which make them similar but not identical. Lumping, them together on the basis of their shared properties is the way we arrange them in our minds.

Despite our countries innate modesty, there is no doubt that we are a body-fixated society. From the days of Madhubala, Nargis, Vaheeda Rahman, Sharmila Tagore, Zeenat Aman, Madhuri Dixit, AishwaraRai to Bipasha Basu and Mallika Sherawat today, it’s rather clear what Indian men want. The Male gaze is sometimes appreciative, often critical and always all pervasive.

Attraction, at deep, biological level, is all about survival of the species. So how male react to females stems from their perception of the latter’s health and capability to produce healthy offspring. A high waist-to –hip ratio and large breasts have been visual signals of fertility from time immemorial as well. The importance of physical appearance has been steadily rising since the ‘30s. As the media depict the most beautiful people in society, men and women alike have begun to place far more importance on appearance. For men, this can be to show his social status to other men and as they, cross-culturally, value a woman’s attractiveness not only for her reproductive potential, but also as a sign that they can obtain a high status, attractive woman.