No surprise here: women differ from men in the way our brains respond to beauty.  In yet another blow to the attempts to create a gender-neutral society where men and women are basically identical reflections of one another in different clothing, a new study has discovered that when they see beauty (as in a painting in a museum), men’s brains light up in the areas linked to absolute spacial location, while women’s brains activate in areas connected to determining relative location.  It’s a subtle difference that may reflect the evolutionary differences in the two genders.

The study, which can be found here, was conducted at Spain’s Universitat de les Illes Balears and published on February 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was small but provocative.  Ten men and 10 women looked at images of modern and classic paintings, as well as photographs of landscapes, artifacts and urban scenes, while the researchers recorded their reactions with a magnetoencephalograph, which monitors real-time neural activity by measuring magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the brain. This is superior to using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which reads blood flow to brain areas and has been somewhat discredited recently.

Across the board, beauty produced coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in women exclusively.  The reseachers speculate that from an evolutionary and survival perspective, this may stem from differing roles that males and females played in hunter-gatherer societies.  Men were the hunters, and so had to develop strong spatial senses to find and kill prey.  Women, meanwhile, had to survey the landscape for safe tubers, roots, berries and nuts to gather, and so had to use comparison-centric parts of their brains more adept not only at location but memory and analysis.  Fast forward 5000 years and you get different brain responses to beauty.

Interestingly, the differences don’t seem to affect how men and women preceive or react to beauty.  Both sexes described their perceptions in the same way and described beauty as pleasurable and stimulating.  So from a Beauty-Brain Loop perspective, what does this mean for us?  It does suggest that we women are wired to find beauty on more relative, subtle terms in both men and women—it isn’t as absolute as a perfectly chiseled chest in a man or a long pair of legs in a woman.  We’re more apt to think in terms of beauty in categories and to find different types of beauty in our environment, while men’s definition is more narrow.  Hence the male role in the dating scene as the hunter, the search-and-conquer soldier on a mission.

We won’t suggest that a study like this defines anything about how we ultimately see beauty.  First of all, it was small and needs to be replicated on a larger scale.  Second, we don’t believe in being so reductive about women, men or beauty.  We are partially shaped by our hard-wired brains, of course, but also by our experience and our choices.   How we choose to define beauty is ultimately what determines the beauty we see in others and ourselves.

Stay beautiful,

Debi & Eva