Beauty Is in the Gendered Eye of the Beholder

The brain of the beholder dictates the manner in which beauty will be appreciated. While men process beauty with only the right side of their brains, women employ their entire brain for the activity.<!--break-->

Researchers were surprised at the findings that are detailed in a report published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. According to researcher Camilo J. Cela-Conde of the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, “It is well known that there are differences between brain activity in women and men in cognitive tasks. However, why should this kind of difference appear in the case of appreciation of beauty?” His answer reveals an idea that women link an object to language when they ponder it, whereas men tend to focus on an object’s spatial aspects.

Men appear to focus on "coordinate" spatial awareness that is located in the right side of the brain and involves precision mental mapping with the use of co-ordinates to establish an object's position in space. The "categorical" spatial awareness is located in the left side of the brain and involves evaluating the position of objects in accordance with categories such as above, below, left, and right.

Cela-Conde acknowledged that the explanation of differences in the perception of beauty does not explain why or how the human capacity to appreciate beauty evolved. However, he noted, “The differences that we have found might relate to the different social roles that, hypothetically, men and women had during human evolution.”