Why humans are wired to appreciate beauty

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday you will hear world leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodger, commission editor at BBC Science Focus. A late summer sunset, a peaceful, fervent forest, or a Shakespearean sonnet. These are all things that move us emotionally thanks to what we perceive as their beauty. But why is this so? Why do environments, art, music and even ideas move us so emotionally? In this episode, we're joined by Professor Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist and author to talk about his latest book. Why is the world so beautiful? Our minds in search of nature's rhymes. He tells us how our sense of beauty is likely linked to our evolutionary tendency to seek out the patterns found in nature. Why the appreciation of beauty seems to be unique to humans? And explains how a sense of beauty is anchored in the way that we try to understand the world we live in. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. It's a pleasure. So today we're talking about your latest book. So sort of, first off, sort of given the cultural and political landscape we're living in the moment, lots of people are of the opinion that there's an awful lot of ugliness in the world, like too much. So did this sort of swell of opinion over the last few years have anything to do with your motivation to take this on as a subject? Or is it more kind of an intellectual itch that you wanted to scratch? Well, I wouldn't say it's either of those. It's a topic which has fascinated me since I first started a PhD in psychology 60 years ago. And early on, in my research, I decided that I'd like to do some work on evolutionary aesthetics how the origins of people's animal sense of beauty. So in fact, I started up some experiments with monkeys to see if I could find out what they'd like to listen to or to look at on a screen, thinking, well, there that I then understand something about human appreciation of beauty. I may say the experiments were a complete fella, the only ones, I gave the monkeys musical jazz or bark to listen to, I gave them abstract paintings to look at or beautiful landscapes. They didn't give a toss for any of it. Basically the only thing I could get them was interested and was pictures of food or pictures of other monkeys. So you know, that set me back a bit and I put this project to one side, but I read some stuff about the nature of beauty and it's possibly evolutionary origins, but I went off to work on other topics. And since then, I've spent most of my research time working on the nature of consciousness and the evolution of intelligence. But I thought, yes, you're right, there's been a niche, I wanted to get back to that. I thought if I didn't write the book, no, I never will. So that's why I did it. As you'll see, it's quite a short book, there were a lot of illustrations. You can probably read it in a couple of hours or so, but there's quite a lot packed in there. So let's have a look at the book, then the meat of the book. So it's pretty self-evident that we humans do have an inbuilt appreciation for what we call beauty. And I mean, think for the most part, we don't really consider this much, it's just one of our qualities. But it seems that this is linked in some way with our connection to the natural world. So we'll see like a beautiful sunset of blue sea and mountain range. Yeah, I don't know, a stag standing in the mist or something and say, oh, well, that's really beautiful. So if we start to think about this from an evolutionary basis, I guess we could propose that these feelings of comfort or peace or belonging when we find ourselves in a beautiful scene. A down to the fact that maybe they're mostly the environments in which we're most likely to survive and prosper. I mean, is that a good starting point? Well, it's a starting point, it's a, but I think you can't really get us very far. There have been several conventional approaches today to understanding the evolution of beauty and where people, evolutionary psychologists like me, have looked for obvious benefits from being in the presence of beauty. I'll have to say something I think immediately about what I mean by beauty. It's a very wide term and I use it specifically in this book to refer to why we attracted to certain kinds of patterns, which please us, which seem right, as if that's how the world ought to be. And the particular relationship I kind of patterned I concentrate on is what the perturbed generally Hopkins defined as a rhyme. But he used rhyme in a quite important, as in a rather general way, not just to mean the rhyme between words. I mean, the cat sat on the matters of him, the other kind of rhyme, but Hopkins identified rhyme in the sky, in the clouds, in the flowers, in ideas. Basically, whatever we come across, two or more things which belong together but are yet different from each other and were fascinated by their resemblance and the way in which they belong. No, it doesn't always mean that's going to strike us as being beautiful. The cat sat on the matters, not actually particularly beautiful, although when you compare it to the cat sat on the sofa, you can see, there's something about the cat sat on the map which seems right, whereas the cat sat on the sofa, or the cat sat on the cat, doesn't seem to do it for us. So we immediately clued into the fact that we're interested in this relationship of likeness but with difference and becomes much more, and then if we look more generally, whenever this is occurring, that we're finding this unattractive, including sort of thing to look at how to listen to or to smell or to think about, that raises from your much more general question about why we like those patterns in nature. And you're right, it may be, and I think it clearly is in some cases, because that brings us into the presence of good environments, places which are fed for humans to live in, which are going to nourish and support us. I mean, it's not entirely obvious why a rainbow or particular cloud formation, thunder clouds or all for that matter, the song of a blackbird will do that for us. It's certainly not obvious why abstract ideas, particular mathematical relationships and ideas between, you know, what seems to, where things seem to support each other at an intellectual academic, abstract level. That's something different, and so I hang on to Hopkins' definition of beauty. It seemed to me, he said that all beauty can by a metaphor be called rhyme. And from far back, the gun realising that that is extraordinarily revealing way of looking at the world and what we find attractive, I kept on finding myself saying yes, of course that's why I like that, all like that. When previously I'd just noticed they were pretty or lovely or attractive, it hadn't seen the underlying relationships. But what I then wanted to do was to say, well, okay, can we explain that in terms of obvious benefits? And so in the book I give lots of examples, and some of them correspond to obvious benefits, the beauty of human bodies, which are well balanced and healthy and so on, obviously why we like that. I mean, when we like to have friends who have rhyming bodies and rhyming characters and rhyming skills and writing ways of talking to us at an hour. level we like to build structures or to use tools which are balanced and symmetrical and have the same running qualities. They just work well for us and as you say we like to live in either landscapes or cityscapes which have good proportion and good repetitive patterns in them. But that'll only take us so far and the world is full of an awful lot of beauty which hasn't no obvious benefit to us at all. And so we've got an explanation of a few of these aspects but not for the wide world of rhyming patterns. Are these things connected? We seem to have a rhyme detector in our heads which is continually on the lat looking for that kind of pattern out there and in the cases we have investigated or psychotic to investigate it, it's interesting that they almost always correspond to stable or healthy or enduring states. We like bodies which are rhyming because they're healthy and represent a good and successful way of living. We like the same about landscapes. We like the same about lighthouses or buildings for that matter. So rhyme in those cases we have looked at always signals stability endurance, something which is going self-supporting structures. Now why should they all converge on that? Well I'm sorry to think as because that's how the world works. The world is based on rhyming structures and it's come to be the world we live in because rhyme is in the DNA of the world we live in. It's the things which now exist are the ones which prove to be stable and to be enduring because they had these internal relationships. And that's of course true of the natural of the biological world. It's true of plants and animals and so on. It's also true of the geophysical world. We find rhymes in the clouds because rhymes clouds which have those particular relationships to each other happen to be stable. We find rhymes in mountains and whirlpools and so on or rhymes even in things which you might call ugly or tornadoes and storms. I take a point that the world is not entirely beautiful. There can be patterns which are which are quite threatening in which none the less are aesthetically very pleasing. So anyway to bring cut the story short I ask myself well is that the answer to right across the board to why we like rhyme? It's because it corresponds to things in the world which have endured and which in which are now present and making up the the world we inhabit. Why should we like to see those things? Well because it is our world and we need to understand it. I mean imagine we're not baby born into this world. The world is full of things. The human world is astonishingly full of things in a way probably nowhere else in the universe. It's something which maybe we can talk about is that you know other worlds if they exist will not be as populated by things as ours is. But our world is full of things ranging from you know caps and dogs and horses to castles to ideas to the things we've already mentioned out there in nature. And that world is one we have to get to grips with pretty quickly soon after we're born. We need to form a model of the world. We need to have a way of understanding how things relate to each other and fit together. And the very beginning of that model has to be an inventory of what kind of things are out there. So the task of a young child, the task of a young animal for that matter, is to figure out that and try and find out make a taxonomy of what kind of things it make up its world, its local world. And one way of doing it, we need to kind of heuristic, I mean I'm sorry to use that technical term, we need a rule of thumb for how to try and discover which things belong together and which things don't. And there is a very simple one. Things which rhyme on the whole are likely to belong to the same category of object. One cat rhymes with another cat, one dog rhymes with another dog, one maple leaf that rhymes with another maple leaf. And they contrast with other animals or other plants or other objects and so on. The English language contains 80,000 common nouns, nouns which stand for things in the world. It's a lot to learn about. We don't all know the names of all of them. We can't all recognize all of them. But from the age of, you know, from when we first start, very early beginnings of language, we're already acquiring new words for things at a rate of maybe 10 a day. And we do that because we'll seek out the evidence of what is in the world which connects to each other, where things connect to each other, where they rhyme. And so I see this as a case of us using kind of training set for our minds. The notion of training sets are rather new one. And because, you know, talk about it in relation to artificial, large language models and so on, AI. But AI's have to be trained on what's out there. They need to discover what things exist in language environment, which they're trained on and they have to and how that corresponds to the world they made eventually have to navigate. But nobody yet was actually even thought of using in the training of AI the principle which apparently our ancestors long ago hit on, which is look for things which rhyme. They're going to be the basis. They're going to be the things which are likely to correspond to interesting kinds of objects out there. And we see lots of evidence in child development and actually how this how this works and why how children take pleasure in discovering the rhymes. The mom, mother shows her pictures in a picture book of animals and that baby points his finger at yet another example of a bunny which rhymes with the bunny he's already seen. And that's the beginning of it. And it builds and builds on the same principle is exactly why we've come to love the fugues of Bach or the paintings of Cezanne or the pattern of the Alhambra. All of them are full of evidence of what belongs together. Now I said animals may have to do the same. What's interesting is that animals I couldn't find much evidence of animals being interested in complex forms of rhyme at all. I did do some experiments later which I found that monkeys will actually look for common patterns in pictures of animals which they look at. They'll begin eventually to identify pictures of horses or cows or pigs and contrast them especially with pictures of monkeys. But we don't find animals looking at the sunset. I should qualify that. There's some evidence that chimpanzees occasionally have been seen to be apparently staring at the mountains although this sunset with a kind of reverence reveria as if they were really impressed and just bathing in the qualities of patterns they were seeing. But most animals don't do it. Dogs don't give a talk about sunsets. There's no reason to think that birds like birds song apart from the particular bird songs which they happen to be tuned into because they indicate the fitness of their own mates and so on. We've gone much further than animals in appreciating the rhymes of nature. And what's more they seem to move us in ways which we never find in the animal kingdom apart from humans. And so in this book having all the quickly wrist through some early explanations and then come home then on the idea that what we're looking for is patterns which help us to understand the world we live in. I then say yes but why does it, why does it feel so good? What's in nature of the aesthetic emotion as it's been called by philosophers in the past? Why, it's more than just a cognitive act of bringing things together. In Hopkins's original essay he has a discussion between a student and the professor. The professor says you know I proved it to you and I haven't. It's all to do with rhyme and the student says yes sir but isn't there something more to it than that? Isn't there something beyond mere rhyme? It all seems too mathematical to me. And I think he's right. And so what are you doing? The rest of the book is to try and answer what that additional emotional component is. You think you know a browser but Gemini and Chrome that's new. 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If we're talking from an evolutionary basis, this might seem superfluous. Well, I think it's in some sense, it probably is superfluous. I'm not sure if that sense of awe you're talking about has actually been built into us by a natural selection. I think it's a consequence of us looking for these kinds of patterns and sometimes being overwhelmed by them. Or is a slightly frightening immersion to feel? It feels like we're out of control, as if we're in the presence of something we can't understand. As Newton famously said that all his life he'd felt like he was just like a child playing on the seashore, let me find one pebble which was prettier than another, but all the while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. He felt small, he felt humble in the presence of these nature which he couldn't quite grasp. And I think we, or often does involve the sense of not being able to grasp it. I think awe is not entirely an adaptive immersion because it can sometimes make us say, well, okay, that's it, I don't expect to understand it, I'm so too big for me, or I'm too small, and I'll hide away and let the maker who've all this simply take the times of the world I live in. I don't think that's a useful approach, I think thank goodness humans all along don't give in to those feelings of being humble in the face of nature. They want to know how it works. And so we want to take control, we want to understand and the real pleasures come out of seeing, that's how it works, that's how things fit together, that's why things around us have fallen into place in the way they do, and that's the whole nature of sciences to make these discoveries. But the question is, as I said, we use the time, it just feels right. And one of the emotions we certainly feel, I think, is something like gratitude, and now gratitude is a social emotion. Why should we feel gratitude to the mountains or the sky, or for that matter of the mathematical equations which we discover in school, and which somebody seemed to be, you know, for welcoming you, unnecessarily pretty, and to write for us. And I think it's a good question, because what I think leads us is to the idea that wherever we find beauty, we think there must be an artist of some kind behind it. Now many art critics have claimed that it's only when we can detect the hand of an artist behind something that we really find it beautiful, that we experience what Clive Bell called the right aesthetic emotion. He called it when we detect significant form, and that's when he said, we can channel us at where the emotions of the artist who made the thing, which is now before us. And we can see, feel what he did, or she did, and understand why they made the decisions and why the decisions they made are so right and proper, why we wouldn't want to take anything away from it. The great critic and Sgonbrith said that, in the end, all artists want to do is to get it right. Now, that's a very interesting concept to get it right. And we kind of know what they mean, when things are balanced and now seem to be stable and rest in the situation they've come to. But if an artist has to be involved first to feel that kind of emotion, there's a bit of a puzzle here, and Clive Bell grasped it and said, outright, well, sometimes, of course, there isn't an artist when I go out and into the nature and into the forest, and think it's beautiful, or when I see a rainbow, and think it's beautiful, I can't really be thinking it's beautiful, because I can't be relating to the artist. And he says, whoever felt the same kind of emotion for a forest canopy that you feel for, the theater, as you were just describing. Well, the answer is I have, and I think you have. I think forest canopy and mountain ranges and sunsets can have quite the quality of short, cathedral, or over painting, by says, and so we need to explain this. And there's an explanation which is always waiting in the wings, which is, okay, if we need to feel grateful or feel when the presence of an artist, before we'll feel that emotion, then it must be that when we're out in nature, we do feel we're in the presence of an artist. And that comes back to a very old idea, which is that human beings are natural-born creationists. However skeptical they may be intellectually at some level, I mean, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in a creator of God on time, but nonetheless, since I was born, I like everyone else, have always thought, yes, but it's as if there's an artist there. And a supreme artist, whoever has designed in nature, what I feel is that I'm in the presence of an artist who has known, knows what they're doing and has got it right and has got it right in order to convey to me what rightness means. So I find myself, I mean, I'm thinking that in the end, this want to be a social one. I feel kind of grateful and pleased to be in the presence of this superior imaginative designer who has made the world for us, even though intellectually, rationally, I don't believe that there is any such independent artist like that. But nonetheless, it's an unavoidable instinct, I think. And so I think it's central to our appreciation of UT and I'm. That's the reason I think why dogs don't admire sunsets. I don't think they think like that. I don't think they think there is an artist behind them. Quite certain that honeybees don't, when they go see a field of clover, they maybe feel very satisfied that the next meal of Poland's going to be out there for them, but they don't save, think, gosh, and who put it there and why is it there and how come I deserve to be living a world where there's fields of clover. I think we can't help but feel that there's more beauty out there than in a way we deserve. And part of what my book is trying to do is to say why do we feel that and what could lie behind it. And in the end, I argue that there is more beauty, not than we deserve, but more beauty that only we might reasonably expect, but precisely because the world's evolved to be made of things. It may be such an obvious thing to say. I mean, maybe you've never thought about it, why are there so many things out there in the world? It's only because of the forces of evolution and the forces of physics and the laws of physics, which have come together to create a world which isn't more and more full of rhyming objects. And it goes on happening, you know, go back to the big bang and it was all just one big slurry of field forces out of that going to merge molecules and compounds and then life emerged and animals and plants emerged, then eventually humans arrived and they started making things which all rhyme with each other. And so it goes on, of course, also even at the level of ideas. And I think one of the wonderful consequences of that is that we're never going to be finished. There's never going to be a point at which we've done the job of understanding in a way which ends the quest and therefore the world is always going to be more and more beautiful for us. We've always got more water to discover up there and more to contemplate and to be grateful for if I can use that word. So we're lucky enough now where we can go to museums and galleries and see artworks. You know, in some cases, there are thousands of years old. And when you do do that, you think, well, you know, our notions of beauty really haven't changed that much. Well, in some senses, of course, they haven't. I mean, look at the paintings on the walls of the caves in France of Shovey and Las go in, so I made 30, 40,000 years ago by our ancestor artists. They strike us as beautiful as anything which you can find in a contemporary art gallery. In fact, more beautiful in some ways. So yes, those artists and the people who encourage them to make the art must have found the same things beautiful. There are other areas where I think the case. really are not so common. I mean, music is perhaps an example of forms of music which are just and as some cultures in the world really don't appreciate the kind of music, classical music, which we enjoy. We don't necessarily understand or appreciate the kind of music they make and so on. But that's, it's easy to explain that because as I said, we were looking for how the things in our world are made. We adapt our understanding to the things which we encounter. And we have to learn how they work. I think there's many examples that all of us have had when it comes to works about where we didn't really find them beautiful because we didn't understand them. And it has, we have to learn, we have to have it, it's explained so that we begin to see what's going on where we didn't grasp it before. It's obvious in a sense in which we've all grown up into appreciating modernism. I mean, even, you know, most children don't have a clue about why they want to like modern art and they need to be educated, if I don't mean that in a kind of condescending way, but they have to see what the artist meant by why he or she made those choices. And so we find people going taking particular specialties and finding them becoming connoisseurs of particular kinds of patterns and particular areas of art. Not only of art, but of other things, people can become connoisseurs of the natural world, of course. They can become collectors of beetles or butterflies or birds eggs and divert their whole life to just appreciating the patterns in just that one relatively small domain. Or in the non-natural world, we can become obsessed by postage stamps or letter boxes or whatever it may be. And I know, I mean, philosophers don't like me using the word aesthetic about that, but I think the immersion which a stamp collector can feel when he sees how the stamp sees brought together, fit together into all the different patterns involving nationality and value, technique they were made, the age of them and so on. There's endless things to explore there, endlessly more things to discover. And as the great physiologist, Ivan Pavlov said a long time ago, and it can drive people mad. I mean, people can divert their whole lives to looking for patterns, to the neglect of everything else. I was amused to find a quotation and newspaper by someone who was talking about eras spotters. Eras spotters are not so common as they used to be, but you used to, if you're going to Heathrow Airport about 14 years ago, you'd find the roofs thronged with people with notebooks jotting down the numbers of the planes which were arriving. And the director of this, of the end of this shop for eras spotters said, there are some people who do nothing else than eras spot. They're not married or anything like that. No, that's really not entirely adaptive. I mean, someone who does nothing other than eras spot and isn't married or anything like that is probably destined for extinction. So here's a case where an evolved tendency has gone off the rails. But again, we shouldn't be surprised. Lots of our evolved tendencies can go wrong when presented with super stimuli as we might call them, postage symptoms or are in a sense, or botecs can seem to us super stimuli, just as pornography can, and so people can, instead of exploiting their sexilurgies in ways which are, of course, adaptive can become completely hooked on forms of sex, which actually aren't adaptive at all. No nature took some risks in designing us the way she did, and or natural selection, I should say, and it sometimes goes wrong. But on the whole, these search for patterns are delight we take in finding new examples and bringing them together in collections in becoming connoisseurs of that particular field is what's driven us to the extraordinary lengths of intellectual excitement and adventure, which which has been characteristic of human species. And without use here, I think we never have got that. Yeah, so just one final question then. You mentioned AI there earlier. And so there's a huge debate about AI, well, almost all areas of life and culture at the moment, but particularly with art, you know, a lot of people are saying, well, AI will never be able to create art, never be able to create, you know, by extrapolating that. Anything, you know, genuinely beautiful, of worth, like a humor artist can, or like nature can. I mean, what's your take on that? Well, I think it's snobbishness, I have to say. I think it's just wrong. I think AI has done and will create great works of art, which we will continue, or some people will continue to deride because they haven't got the hand of a human artist behind them. And therefore, as Fry said, of nature, they can't really be beautiful if there's no artist involved. But there's been experimental work recently, which has shown that if you trick people into believing that a work of art made by AI is actually the work of a human artist, they will appreciate it, and maybe it's a major work and be very moved by it. If you trick them into, saying, into believing that a human work of art made by a major human artist was actually made by a machine, they'll say, well, yeah, I can see, I can see it's pretty, but it doesn't really mean anything, and it doesn't move me in any way. So it all depends on how we look at them. And just as, as I said, when we look out of nature and believe there's an artist there, when there really isn't, it allows us to find it beautiful. I think we'll find AI constructions beautiful and should do because AI is unbelievably inventive. I mean, and it's also got a training set, which goes beyond anything any of us can ever hope to have. So I'm not worried that AI is taking art down the wrong path. I think I'm worried about the way in which it may be making it difficult for other, for real human artists to make a living, and that's an entirely separate issue, and the one which we need to think about at a social level, and make sure there is, as a, no doubt at the moment still is, a real for great artists to go beyond anything AI can do at the moment, but AI will certainly is already writing beautiful music, and that's not trying to write it off as just AI. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Fakers. That was Professor Nicholas Humphrey. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book. If you'd like to or you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Fakers. If you've enjoyed this podcast, why not take your curiosity a step further with BBC Science Fakers magazine. Receive an extra £5 off when you subscribe using the code SF5 off. For more details see the show description. The current issue of BBC Science Fakers magazine is out now. Pick up a copy of your favourite magazines or download it on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. Verse the air. Then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods even they can't screw up. Have you met my kid? This is your home road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon limited time offer new members only. 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