See that hair

Lisa Wade chose these images — one you may find beautiful, the other disgusting — to illustrate a psychological notion. She writes: “Hair in the drain, like dirt in the house, is out-of-place.  It doesn’t belong there.  In both cases, our reaction is disgust.  Hair on the head, in contrast, is beautiful and becoming.”

Aesthetic Judgment of Beauty (1)

“Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Hideaki Kawabata and Semir Zeki, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 91, 2004, pp. 1699–1705 (http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1152 /jn.00696.2003). The researchers, at University College, London, report: A comparison of ugly versus beautiful produced activity in the motor cortex bilaterally, whereas the contrast ugly versus neutral produced no activity. Thus the areas that are involved […]

Improbable Research