[man] A professional domino artist is someone
who can set up thousands and thousands of dominoes
to create structures, patterns, images.
[narrator] In 2017, Steve Price led a team
that built a domino display of more than 76,000 pieces.
Smashing a Guinness World Record.
[Price] You can build flat on the ground two-dimensional,
or you can also do 3-D structures like pyramids and walls
and make certain sort of curves and spirals.
[narrator] And his YouTube videos get millions of views.
[Price] The pleasure of watching the dominoes toppling
just comes from knowing how much went into the project.
As the viewer, you get to just watch it all fall into place.
[narrator] Humans love looking at all kinds of things.
Why are millions of people watching videos of cookies getting iced?
Or enjoy looking at a collage made up of 21 cutout images of pimples?
Others like Gothic churches, horses, synchronized swimming,
and of course, other people.
Where do these preferences come from?
And why is beauty something we seek at all?
[man] Art is an individual creative experience.
The greater the knowledge one possesses, the greater will be the experience.
Many photographers owe their success to specialization.
It might be still life,
babies, animals, or fashion.
The Earth, I'm afraid, is in a class by itself.
[laughs]
[man] The placement is exact and symmetrical.
Exactness in details helps in giving the final impression of perfection.
[narrator] For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to explain beauty.
Aristotle said, "Beauty depends on magnitude and order."
Confucius said, "I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty."
Kant said, "The beautiful is that which pleases universally,
without a concept."
In the Renaissance, the seeds of an answer were planted
when an Italian mathematician named a number the Divine Proportion
in a book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci.
Mathematicians have been fixated on this number since ancient times,
because it kept coming up in geometry.
In the 1800s, a German psychologist decided this number
was the universal law of beauty, and today it's known in popular culture
as the golden ratio, with people claiming to find it
in all kinds of human masterpieces all over the world.
But, there's a problem with that.
When people have tried to study it directly,
it's not so clear that everybody responds specifically to the golden rectangle.
[narrator] Study after study has found little evidence
that people are especially drawn to rectangles with this exact proportion.
We do like rectangles though.
It's the best flowing configuration for images from plane to brain.
As in, the fastest shape our brains can process.
Pleasant to look at because it's easy on the eyes.
And many scientists today believe the reason for this
boils down to survival.
More than 150 million years ago, dinosaurs dominated the Earth.
But to understand how humans see the world,
you have to look down at the dinosaur's feet.
That's where our ancestors, small shrew-like mammals,
spent their time and they had a pretty dim view of the world.
They perceived just two colors: blue and red.
They were also nocturnal to evade their better-seeing predators
and constantly scanned their environment horizontally.
And that may be the simple reason we make so many things in that shape today.
Visual beauty is based in vision, of course,
and our vision evolved because it helped us survive.
When the dinosaurs went extinct, our ancestors came out into the light.
And over time, their eyes developed,
opening up all the colors of the rainbow we know today.
And many things we're still visually drawn to
are things that helped our ancestors survive.
Flowers indicated that something might turn into fruit.
Water sources signal the possible bounty of nourishment.
And places of refuge helped us evade predators.
We still like landscapes that resemble where early humans evolved.
Two artists conducted a survey in the 1990s,
to find the most desirable painting in 14 different countries.
They asked questions, like...
"Would you rather see paintings of outdoor or indoor scenes?"
"Which one, if any, of the following types of outdoor scenes appeals to you most?"
and "Would you say that you prefer paintings
in which the people are nude or fully clothed?"
The resulting painting looked like this in the United States.
In France, like this. This was Turkey's. This China's.
This is sometimes referred to as the African savanna hypothesis,
because savanna's have those properties.
[narrator] Blue skies, a sheltering rock of some kind,
something edible growing in a big sweep of water.
Turns out, we're terribly unoriginal creatures.
Part of beauty is just a desire to live.
[chirping]
But not everyone's sold on some kind of explanation for beauty.
I think scientists have been misled,
by the fantastic experience of explaining something,
to think that those kinds of explanations have broad power.
[narrator] In 2017,
Richard Prum published a book
that caused a stir
in the world of evolutionary biology.
In it, he argues that not all beauty is about survival or fitness.
Some of it is arbitrary and even useless.
Take the tail of the peacock...
[Prum] The tail is covered with hundreds of beautiful eye spots,
each one of which includes four or five different colors
created by optical nanostructures in the feathers
that are made up of melanin granules
organized in a crystalline fashion.
[narrator] Female peacocks, they're actually called peahens,
are drawn to these tails.
During courtship display, a male peacock erects his tail
and creates a huge sort of hemisphere
that suspends over the female as he displays.
[narrator] But the tails are heavy and make it harder
for the male peacocks to run and fly.
Their beauty, essentially, is bad for their survival.
[caws]
This even stumped Charles Darwin as he wrote in a letter to a colleague.
[Prum] "Whenever I gaze at a feather from the tail of a peacock,
it makes me sick!"
He was troubled by the fact that adaptation by natural selection
could not describe the evolution of ornaments that would not help
in the struggle for survival.
He proposed the theory of sexual selection and what he was hypothesizing,
was that mate choice is really about the subjective experiences of animals.
[narrator] And it's not just the peacock that has seemingly unhelpful ornaments.
There's the flame bowerbird and his waving cape.
The sage grouse and his inflatable yellow chest.
The great frigatebird and his ballooning red throat pouch.
The shoebill and his bill that looks like a shoe.
[Prum] So, there aren't any birds in the world today
that don't exhibit the radiation,
the elaboration, the diversification of preference.
It's about pleasure.
Pleasure is the motivation that drives the choices that animals make.
[narrator] In the human brain, that's what beauty is: pleasure.
[Chatterjee] So our view, is that the combined activation of visual cortex
and these reward systems together
is the biologic signature of our response to beauty.
[narrator] Three main neurotransmitter systems are involved.
First, the dopamine system.
The dopamine system seems to be about our desires and our wanting things.
[narrator] A surge of dopamine can literally move us.
It is what motivates us to approach things that we find attractive.
[narrator] Beauty can also activate our endocannabinoid and opioid systems.
The same systems that are activated by consuming cannabis or opioids.
They seem to be the core experience of pleasure.
[narrator] But peahens evolved
to find pleasure in the same kind of peacock tail.
Explaining all the pleasure humans get from beauty is harder,
because we don't all agree.
It was once a sign of beauty in Japan to dye your teeth black.
It was once a sign of beauty in Europe to pluck out all your eyelashes.
In America today, some consider it a sign of beauty to stain, spray,
mist, burn, or mousse your skin bronze.
We humans are deeply cultural creatures.
We're influenced by our social environment,
and we take variation in that environment and we incorporate it into ourselves.
Aesthetic preferences are established psychologically through development,
through exposure, and through individual innovation.
[Stoller] Of course, we're all kind of culturally conditioned
depending on our context.
But, I think I'm always trying to ask myself,
"Why do I think that? Where does that come from?"
[Price] The culture of domino art is definitely based around the internet.
There is a very big niche community for people who enjoy this sort of thing.
One hundred fifty years ago, impressionist paintings,
they had a hard time breaking into the scene.
Now, if you survey most Americans,
people tend to say they like impressionist artwork the most.
Our brains haven't changed in 150 years,
and yet these kinds of population-based preferences have changed dramatically.
Right? So, that has to be from what we're exposed.
[narrator] Take color.
In the USA today, pink is often associated with young girls.
But it 1927, when Time magazine surveyed ten major American department stores,
half said pink was the color for boys.
That shift happened over the following decades.
Thanks in part, to toy marketing campaigns in the 1980s.
I love you, My Little Pony.
[narrator] And dark yellow.
One study found that babies' eyes linger the longest on this color.
But adults around the world
consistently rank
this as their least popular color.
A leading theory is that as we grow up,
we learn to associate this shade with unpleasant things.
There are complicated ways in which our experiences, our education,
and also the structure of a society
can have an influence on what one regards is attractive.
You can look at a painting of a monarch
and just be amazed at the opulence or the beauty.
On the other hand, if the whole notion of monarchy is disturbing to you,
then you're not going to find it beautiful.
How to get a sense of what certain people find satisfying is really hard,
which is why scientists
generally tend to focus on the things that most people get pleasure out of.
[narrator] There isn't robust research yet
to explain why some people see beauty in this...
or this...
But researchers studying the brain
during moments of peak aesthetic experience
believe they may have found a clue in an area of the brain called the DMN.
The DMN is the Default Mode Network.
So you can almost think of it as the idling state of the brain.
[narrator] In brain scans
when people are asked to do a task or think about something specific,
this area of the brain quiets down.
The DMN actually lights up when we aren't doing a specific task
and our minds turn inward.
They probably reflect a kind of internal state,
when you're kind of spacing out, when you're mind's wandering,
when you're self-reflective.
[narrator] In a few recent experiments,
people were presented with images of art from a variety of cultural traditions.
And something surprising happened.
The DMN region in their brains lit up.
But, only when they were looking
at the paintings they said moved them the most.
It is triggering a whole set of associations
and thoughts in our own brain,
which is a kind of free play of our own imagination.
[narrator] The researchers believe this is evidence
that our experience of beauty
involves connecting our senses and emotions with something personal.
Our sense of self.
There's something about being moved by paintings
that forces us to be self-reflective.
That may be the biologic signature
of what it means to feel moved by a painting.
[narrator] Which could help explain why we're draw to and moved by
the same kind of images, even as our memories slip away.
There's been research that suggests that people with dementia
continue to have the same taste in art
as they had all their lives.
In an experiment from 2008,
20 people with Alzheimer's disease were shown a range of paintings.
Some were representational, like "People in the Sun" by Edward Hopper.
Some, less so, like Picasso's "Weeping Woman."
And others were totally abstract, like "Composition" by Mondrian.
The patients were asked to rank the paintings in order of preference.
Two weeks later, they were given the same task.
When asked to rank the original paintings,
they put them in largely the same order as before.
Our sense of beauty is deep.
[woman] I thought that Randy's was beautiful.
-[applause] -And she has a great sense of color.
[narrator] And for people with dementia, making art can be powerful therapy.
[woman] I find the color is the thing that sticks out the most for me.
Then, the feeling of movement.
I love movement in painting.
What else do we see in here?
[woman 2] I see the sun.
I have Lewy body dementia.
And for me, it was a big shock. I'm sure it is for everybody.
We all suffer from memory loss.
Different degrees depending on the person and how long they've suffered with this.
I think that, to the extent we retain our preferences for certain kinds of art,
or certain pieces of art,
it means that those pieces speak to us in a deep way.
To me, it's so wonderful to watch people painting.
-[applause] -[woman] Whoo!
[Mittelman] Look at their faces. They come alive.
People with dementia, as well as the rest of us.
Imagine a scenario where we were all wearing exactly the same clothes.
Every meal had no taste.
That our houses were all uniform.
Is that a world anybody would want to live in?
The absence of beauty, the absence of surrounding ourselves
with aesthetic experiences,
I think, just makes for a very impoverished life.
Perfect.
[theme music playing]