What Makes For A Sexy Landscape?

摘要

Beauty is in the brain of the beholder: it seems the brains of men and women respond differently to beautiful landscapes. This may stem from the varied evolutionary pressures on the two sexes in our hunter-gatherer ancestors.rnA team led by Camilo Cela-Conde of the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma, Majorca, Spain, asked males and females whether photographs of natural and urban landscapes were beautiful or not.rnWhen they looked at a scene they deemed beautiful, both men and women had greater electrical activity in the parietal region, near the top of the brain. In women, this activation occurred in both halves of the brain, but in men it was restricted to the right hemisphere (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900304106).rnThis might reflect evolutionary differences, the team suggest. In early humans, they say, men were hunters who needed mental maps of distance and direction, while women gathered plants for food and oriented themselves using landmarks.