A new study in PNAS Nexus suggests that humans tend to prefer images that are easier for the brain to process. Why? Because they require less energy, thereby making them, in essence, easier to digest.
The brain uses more energy than any other organ in the body, and visual processing alone accounts for nearly half of our energy reserves. For a long time, scientists have known that the visual system is optimized for efficiency. This study has the researchers wondering if our sense of beauty evolved as an energy-saving feature.
To test the idea, researchers analyzed brain scans from people who viewed thousands of images while undergoing fMRI scans. Oxygen consumption across different visual regions served as a proxy for the amount of energy the brain was burning.
The same images were also run through an artificial neural network to estimate computational cost, and rated for aesthetic appeal by over 1,000 online participants.
Looking at Something Beautiful Actually Saves Energy
They found that the more energy it took to process an image, the less people liked it. Visually pleasing images required less metabolic effort, especially in higher-level brain regions responsible for object and face recognition.
This helps explain why people tend to prefer average-looking faces over unusual ones, or why symmetrical designs feel calming. Outliers force the brain to work harder, updating internal models and burning more fuel.
Familiarity is apparently efficient, and efficiency feels good. What exactly makes one image easier to process than another remains an open question, and then there’s the question of individual interpretations of beauty.
Afterall, as the old adage goes: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
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