Put aside the saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder because recent reports suggest that it is in the brain of the beholder.  I’m talking about the difference between men and women and the way they interpret beauty. Have you ever noticed a difference in the way males describe and see beauty from the way that women do? Perhaps you’ve noticed that women have a tendency to talk about and describe what they see as beautiful, whereas men silently admire the beauty in what they see. A recent report suggests that this difference lies in the brain processes that occur when we look at an object.

The report described a study that tested 10 men and 10 women, showing them paintings and photos of urban scenes and landscapes, asking them to rate each scene as either “beautiful” or “not beautiful.”

At the same time the scientists observed the participants’ brain activity produced by electrical currents in the brains of the men and women.

For the first 300 milliseconds, there was no difference between male and female brains, and from 300 to 700 milliseconds activity was greater for objects that were rated as beautiful than for those that were not beautiful.

For both sexes the most active region was the parietal lobe that deals with visual perception, spatial orientation and information processing, but it was focused on the right side of the brain in men while both sides participated in women.

This means that women were also using their left brain hemisphere, as well as the right. It is common knowledge that the left side of the brain is the part of the brain that controls our language skills. Therefore, the women’s observations were linked to their language.  So that when a woman sees something beautiful, they have a desire to describe what they see and share it with another person, whereas when men see beauty they internally focus on the physical properties and what makes it beautiful.

But what does all this mean? Does it really add any value to our existing knowledge? Doesn’t it just sum up what we already know in terms of the difference between men and women; in that men are better at spatial/visual abilities (such as reading a map) and that women are generally better than men at communication and verbal skills. Perhaps this study just gives us some insight into why this is the case. That men and women use different areas of their brains to process the same thing, which results in differences in behaviour.

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