1 00:00:09,135 --> 00:00:11,971 [man] A professional domino artist is someone 2 00:00:12,055 --> 00:00:14,640 who can set up thousands and thousands of dominoes 3 00:00:14,724 --> 00:00:18,561 to create structures, patterns, images. 4 00:00:19,353 --> 00:00:22,356 [narrator] In 2017, Steve Price led a team 5 00:00:22,440 --> 00:00:26,903 that built a domino display of more than 76,000 pieces. 6 00:00:27,028 --> 00:00:29,405 Smashing a Guinness World Record. 7 00:00:29,489 --> 00:00:32,450 [Price] You can build flat on the ground two-dimensional, 8 00:00:32,533 --> 00:00:36,162 or you can also do 3-D structures like pyramids and walls 9 00:00:36,245 --> 00:00:39,791 and make certain sort of curves and spirals. 10 00:00:39,874 --> 00:00:43,711 [narrator] And his YouTube videos get millions of views. 11 00:00:43,795 --> 00:00:46,339 [Price] The pleasure of watching the dominoes toppling 12 00:00:46,422 --> 00:00:50,301 just comes from knowing how much went into the project. 13 00:00:50,802 --> 00:00:55,223 As the viewer, you get to just watch it all fall into place. 14 00:00:55,973 --> 00:00:59,435 [narrator] Humans love looking at all kinds of things. 15 00:01:00,436 --> 00:01:05,066 Why are millions of people watching videos of cookies getting iced? 16 00:01:05,149 --> 00:01:10,655 Or enjoy looking at a collage made up of 21 cutout images of pimples? 17 00:01:10,738 --> 00:01:15,785 Others like Gothic churches, horses, synchronized swimming, 18 00:01:15,868 --> 00:01:18,121 and of course, other people. 19 00:01:19,580 --> 00:01:21,499 Where do these preferences come from? 20 00:01:22,583 --> 00:01:25,044 And why is beauty something we seek at all? 21 00:01:26,337 --> 00:01:29,674 [man] Art is an individual creative experience. 22 00:01:29,757 --> 00:01:33,970 The greater the knowledge one possesses, the greater will be the experience. 23 00:01:34,512 --> 00:01:37,974 Many photographers owe their success to specialization. 24 00:01:38,057 --> 00:01:39,475 It might be still life, 25 00:01:39,934 --> 00:01:42,728 babies, animals, or fashion. 26 00:01:42,812 --> 00:01:45,189 The Earth, I'm afraid, is in a class by itself. 27 00:01:45,273 --> 00:01:46,607 [laughs] 28 00:01:47,358 --> 00:01:50,069 [man] The placement is exact and symmetrical. 29 00:01:50,444 --> 00:01:55,575 Exactness in details helps in giving the final impression of perfection. 30 00:01:59,036 --> 00:02:03,082 [narrator] For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to explain beauty. 31 00:02:03,541 --> 00:02:08,671 Aristotle said, "Beauty depends on magnitude and order." 32 00:02:08,754 --> 00:02:13,843 Confucius said, "I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty." 33 00:02:13,926 --> 00:02:18,097 Kant said, "The beautiful is that which pleases universally, 34 00:02:18,181 --> 00:02:19,765 without a concept." 35 00:02:20,391 --> 00:02:23,686 In the Renaissance, the seeds of an answer were planted 36 00:02:23,769 --> 00:02:28,858 when an Italian mathematician named a number the Divine Proportion 37 00:02:29,358 --> 00:02:32,153 in a book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. 38 00:02:33,070 --> 00:02:37,658 Mathematicians have been fixated on this number since ancient times, 39 00:02:37,742 --> 00:02:40,661 because it kept coming up in geometry. 40 00:02:40,745 --> 00:02:45,208 In the 1800s, a German psychologist decided this number 41 00:02:45,291 --> 00:02:49,879 was the universal law of beauty, and today it's known in popular culture 42 00:02:49,962 --> 00:02:53,716 as the golden ratio, with people claiming to find it 43 00:02:53,799 --> 00:02:57,595 in all kinds of human masterpieces all over the world. 44 00:02:58,763 --> 00:03:00,640 But, there's a problem with that. 45 00:03:00,723 --> 00:03:03,851 When people have tried to study it directly, 46 00:03:03,935 --> 00:03:08,940 it's not so clear that everybody responds specifically to the golden rectangle. 47 00:03:09,732 --> 00:03:12,193 [narrator] Study after study has found little evidence 48 00:03:12,276 --> 00:03:17,657 that people are especially drawn to rectangles with this exact proportion. 49 00:03:18,157 --> 00:03:19,825 We do like rectangles though. 50 00:03:20,868 --> 00:03:25,456 It's the best flowing configuration for images from plane to brain. 51 00:03:25,539 --> 00:03:28,417 As in, the fastest shape our brains can process. 52 00:03:29,502 --> 00:03:32,463 Pleasant to look at because it's easy on the eyes. 53 00:03:33,047 --> 00:03:36,133 And many scientists today believe the reason for this 54 00:03:36,217 --> 00:03:37,885 boils down to survival. 55 00:03:39,011 --> 00:03:43,849 More than 150 million years ago, dinosaurs dominated the Earth. 56 00:03:43,933 --> 00:03:46,394 But to understand how humans see the world, 57 00:03:46,477 --> 00:03:49,230 you have to look down at the dinosaur's feet. 58 00:03:49,313 --> 00:03:53,109 That's where our ancestors, small shrew-like mammals, 59 00:03:53,192 --> 00:03:56,696 spent their time and they had a pretty dim view of the world. 60 00:03:56,779 --> 00:04:00,116 They perceived just two colors: blue and red. 61 00:04:00,199 --> 00:04:04,245 They were also nocturnal to evade their better-seeing predators 62 00:04:04,328 --> 00:04:08,207 and constantly scanned their environment horizontally. 63 00:04:09,083 --> 00:04:14,255 And that may be the simple reason we make so many things in that shape today. 64 00:04:15,589 --> 00:04:18,634 Visual beauty is based in vision, of course, 65 00:04:18,718 --> 00:04:21,887 and our vision evolved because it helped us survive. 66 00:04:22,680 --> 00:04:27,893 When the dinosaurs went extinct, our ancestors came out into the light. 67 00:04:28,602 --> 00:04:30,813 And over time, their eyes developed, 68 00:04:30,896 --> 00:04:34,608 opening up all the colors of the rainbow we know today. 69 00:04:34,692 --> 00:04:37,903 And many things we're still visually drawn to 70 00:04:37,987 --> 00:04:40,740 are things that helped our ancestors survive. 71 00:04:41,657 --> 00:04:45,328 Flowers indicated that something might turn into fruit. 72 00:04:45,411 --> 00:04:49,415 Water sources signal the possible bounty of nourishment. 73 00:04:49,874 --> 00:04:52,877 And places of refuge helped us evade predators. 74 00:04:53,502 --> 00:04:57,715 We still like landscapes that resemble where early humans evolved. 75 00:04:59,216 --> 00:05:02,386 Two artists conducted a survey in the 1990s, 76 00:05:02,470 --> 00:05:07,058 to find the most desirable painting in 14 different countries. 77 00:05:07,141 --> 00:05:08,601 They asked questions, like... 78 00:05:09,018 --> 00:05:12,605 "Would you rather see paintings of outdoor or indoor scenes?" 79 00:05:12,688 --> 00:05:18,110 "Which one, if any, of the following types of outdoor scenes appeals to you most?" 80 00:05:18,194 --> 00:05:20,363 and "Would you say that you prefer paintings 81 00:05:20,446 --> 00:05:23,908 in which the people are nude or fully clothed?" 82 00:05:23,991 --> 00:05:28,371 The resulting painting looked like this in the United States. 83 00:05:28,454 --> 00:05:33,501 In France, like this. This was Turkey's. This China's. 84 00:05:33,584 --> 00:05:38,964 This is sometimes referred to as the African savanna hypothesis, 85 00:05:39,048 --> 00:05:41,050 because savanna's have those properties. 86 00:05:41,133 --> 00:05:44,428 [narrator] Blue skies, a sheltering rock of some kind, 87 00:05:44,512 --> 00:05:48,265 something edible growing in a big sweep of water. 88 00:05:48,349 --> 00:05:51,852 Turns out, we're terribly unoriginal creatures. 89 00:05:51,936 --> 00:05:54,688 Part of beauty is just a desire to live. 90 00:05:54,772 --> 00:05:55,815 [chirping] 91 00:05:56,565 --> 00:06:00,236 But not everyone's sold on some kind of explanation for beauty. 92 00:06:01,028 --> 00:06:04,073 I think scientists have been misled, 93 00:06:04,156 --> 00:06:07,451 by the fantastic experience of explaining something, 94 00:06:07,576 --> 00:06:11,580 to think that those kinds of explanations have broad power. 95 00:06:12,164 --> 00:06:13,749 [narrator] In 2017, 96 00:06:13,833 --> 00:06:15,501 Richard Prum published a book 97 00:06:15,584 --> 00:06:16,627 that caused a stir 98 00:06:16,710 --> 00:06:19,004 in the world of evolutionary biology. 99 00:06:19,088 --> 00:06:24,385 In it, he argues that not all beauty is about survival or fitness. 100 00:06:24,468 --> 00:06:27,972 Some of it is arbitrary and even useless. 101 00:06:28,472 --> 00:06:30,099 Take the tail of the peacock... 102 00:06:31,058 --> 00:06:35,479 [Prum] The tail is covered with hundreds of beautiful eye spots, 103 00:06:35,563 --> 00:06:38,858 each one of which includes four or five different colors 104 00:06:38,941 --> 00:06:41,527 created by optical nanostructures in the feathers 105 00:06:41,610 --> 00:06:43,821 that are made up of melanin granules 106 00:06:43,904 --> 00:06:46,073 organized in a crystalline fashion. 107 00:06:46,157 --> 00:06:49,577 [narrator] Female peacocks, they're actually called peahens, 108 00:06:49,660 --> 00:06:51,287 are drawn to these tails. 109 00:06:51,370 --> 00:06:56,292 During courtship display, a male peacock erects his tail 110 00:06:56,375 --> 00:06:59,628 and creates a huge sort of hemisphere 111 00:06:59,712 --> 00:07:03,632 that suspends over the female as he displays. 112 00:07:03,716 --> 00:07:05,926 [narrator] But the tails are heavy and make it harder 113 00:07:06,010 --> 00:07:08,429 for the male peacocks to run and fly. 114 00:07:08,512 --> 00:07:11,849 Their beauty, essentially, is bad for their survival. 115 00:07:11,932 --> 00:07:12,933 [caws] 116 00:07:13,017 --> 00:07:16,854 This even stumped Charles Darwin as he wrote in a letter to a colleague. 117 00:07:17,646 --> 00:07:20,733 [Prum] "Whenever I gaze at a feather from the tail of a peacock, 118 00:07:20,816 --> 00:07:22,026 it makes me sick!" 119 00:07:22,109 --> 00:07:25,529 He was troubled by the fact that adaptation by natural selection 120 00:07:25,613 --> 00:07:30,034 could not describe the evolution of ornaments that would not help 121 00:07:30,117 --> 00:07:32,077 in the struggle for survival. 122 00:07:32,161 --> 00:07:37,249 He proposed the theory of sexual selection and what he was hypothesizing, 123 00:07:37,333 --> 00:07:42,004 was that mate choice is really about the subjective experiences of animals. 124 00:07:42,087 --> 00:07:46,509 [narrator] And it's not just the peacock that has seemingly unhelpful ornaments. 125 00:07:47,051 --> 00:07:50,763 There's the flame bowerbird and his waving cape. 126 00:07:50,846 --> 00:07:54,517 The sage grouse and his inflatable yellow chest. 127 00:07:54,600 --> 00:07:58,521 The great frigatebird and his ballooning red throat pouch. 128 00:07:58,604 --> 00:08:01,565 The shoebill and his bill that looks like a shoe. 129 00:08:01,649 --> 00:08:03,692 [Prum] So, there aren't any birds in the world today 130 00:08:03,776 --> 00:08:06,529 that don't exhibit the radiation, 131 00:08:06,612 --> 00:08:09,782 the elaboration, the diversification of preference. 132 00:08:09,865 --> 00:08:11,283 It's about pleasure. 133 00:08:11,367 --> 00:08:14,954 Pleasure is the motivation that drives the choices that animals make. 134 00:08:16,872 --> 00:08:20,834 [narrator] In the human brain, that's what beauty is: pleasure. 135 00:08:20,918 --> 00:08:25,506 [Chatterjee] So our view, is that the combined activation of visual cortex 136 00:08:25,589 --> 00:08:28,342 and these reward systems together 137 00:08:28,425 --> 00:08:32,054 is the biologic signature of our response to beauty. 138 00:08:32,137 --> 00:08:35,599 [narrator] Three main neurotransmitter systems are involved. 139 00:08:35,683 --> 00:08:37,476 First, the dopamine system. 140 00:08:37,560 --> 00:08:43,691 The dopamine system seems to be about our desires and our wanting things. 141 00:08:43,774 --> 00:08:47,027 [narrator] A surge of dopamine can literally move us. 142 00:08:47,528 --> 00:08:52,116 It is what motivates us to approach things that we find attractive. 143 00:08:52,199 --> 00:08:57,621 [narrator] Beauty can also activate our endocannabinoid and opioid systems. 144 00:08:57,705 --> 00:09:02,084 The same systems that are activated by consuming cannabis or opioids. 145 00:09:02,209 --> 00:09:06,380 They seem to be the core experience of pleasure. 146 00:09:06,797 --> 00:09:08,173 [narrator] But peahens evolved 147 00:09:08,257 --> 00:09:11,343 to find pleasure in the same kind of peacock tail. 148 00:09:11,427 --> 00:09:15,681 Explaining all the pleasure humans get from beauty is harder, 149 00:09:15,764 --> 00:09:17,725 because we don't all agree. 150 00:09:19,893 --> 00:09:23,814 It was once a sign of beauty in Japan to dye your teeth black. 151 00:09:23,897 --> 00:09:27,651 It was once a sign of beauty in Europe to pluck out all your eyelashes. 152 00:09:27,735 --> 00:09:33,157 In America today, some consider it a sign of beauty to stain, spray, 153 00:09:33,240 --> 00:09:36,744 mist, burn, or mousse your skin bronze. 154 00:09:36,827 --> 00:09:39,872 We humans are deeply cultural creatures. 155 00:09:39,955 --> 00:09:42,249 We're influenced by our social environment, 156 00:09:42,333 --> 00:09:46,170 and we take variation in that environment and we incorporate it into ourselves. 157 00:09:47,254 --> 00:09:52,259 Aesthetic preferences are established psychologically through development, 158 00:09:52,343 --> 00:09:55,346 through exposure, and through individual innovation. 159 00:09:55,846 --> 00:09:57,973 [Stoller] Of course, we're all kind of culturally conditioned 160 00:09:58,057 --> 00:09:59,308 depending on our context. 161 00:09:59,391 --> 00:10:01,185 But, I think I'm always trying to ask myself, 162 00:10:01,685 --> 00:10:04,355 "Why do I think that? Where does that come from?" 163 00:10:05,189 --> 00:10:08,901 [Price] The culture of domino art is definitely based around the internet. 164 00:10:08,984 --> 00:10:15,282 There is a very big niche community for people who enjoy this sort of thing. 165 00:10:15,991 --> 00:10:18,452 One hundred fifty years ago, impressionist paintings, 166 00:10:18,535 --> 00:10:21,288 they had a hard time breaking into the scene. 167 00:10:21,372 --> 00:10:24,083 Now, if you survey most Americans, 168 00:10:24,166 --> 00:10:27,461 people tend to say they like impressionist artwork the most. 169 00:10:27,544 --> 00:10:29,588 Our brains haven't changed in 150 years, 170 00:10:29,672 --> 00:10:34,635 and yet these kinds of population-based preferences have changed dramatically. 171 00:10:34,718 --> 00:10:37,971 Right? So, that has to be from what we're exposed. 172 00:10:39,390 --> 00:10:40,474 [narrator] Take color. 173 00:10:41,100 --> 00:10:45,229 In the USA today, pink is often associated with young girls. 174 00:10:45,771 --> 00:10:51,485 But it 1927, when Time magazine surveyed ten major American department stores, 175 00:10:51,568 --> 00:10:54,196 half said pink was the color for boys. 176 00:10:54,279 --> 00:10:57,282 That shift happened over the following decades. 177 00:10:57,366 --> 00:11:01,370 Thanks in part, to toy marketing campaigns in the 1980s. 178 00:11:01,453 --> 00:11:03,455 I love you, My Little Pony. 179 00:11:03,539 --> 00:11:04,915 [narrator] And dark yellow. 180 00:11:04,998 --> 00:11:09,503 One study found that babies' eyes linger the longest on this color. 181 00:11:09,586 --> 00:11:11,088 But adults around the world 182 00:11:11,171 --> 00:11:12,548 consistently rank 183 00:11:12,631 --> 00:11:14,758 this as their least popular color. 184 00:11:15,175 --> 00:11:18,137 A leading theory is that as we grow up, 185 00:11:18,220 --> 00:11:22,558 we learn to associate this shade with unpleasant things. 186 00:11:23,058 --> 00:11:26,770 There are complicated ways in which our experiences, our education, 187 00:11:26,854 --> 00:11:29,481 and also the structure of a society 188 00:11:29,565 --> 00:11:33,736 can have an influence on what one regards is attractive. 189 00:11:33,819 --> 00:11:35,529 You can look at a painting of a monarch 190 00:11:35,612 --> 00:11:40,200 and just be amazed at the opulence or the beauty. 191 00:11:40,284 --> 00:11:45,038 On the other hand, if the whole notion of monarchy is disturbing to you, 192 00:11:45,122 --> 00:11:47,291 then you're not going to find it beautiful. 193 00:11:49,001 --> 00:11:54,256 How to get a sense of what certain people find satisfying is really hard, 194 00:11:54,339 --> 00:11:55,591 which is why scientists 195 00:11:55,674 --> 00:11:59,636 generally tend to focus on the things that most people get pleasure out of. 196 00:12:00,262 --> 00:12:02,389 [narrator] There isn't robust research yet 197 00:12:02,473 --> 00:12:05,768 to explain why some people see beauty in this... 198 00:12:06,185 --> 00:12:07,102 or this... 199 00:12:08,437 --> 00:12:09,521 or this... 200 00:12:10,522 --> 00:12:13,025 But researchers studying the brain 201 00:12:13,108 --> 00:12:15,819 during moments of peak aesthetic experience 202 00:12:15,903 --> 00:12:20,991 believe they may have found a clue in an area of the brain called the DMN. 203 00:12:21,492 --> 00:12:26,079 The DMN is the Default Mode Network. 204 00:12:26,163 --> 00:12:29,708 So you can almost think of it as the idling state of the brain. 205 00:12:30,125 --> 00:12:31,126 [narrator] In brain scans 206 00:12:31,210 --> 00:12:35,005 when people are asked to do a task or think about something specific, 207 00:12:35,088 --> 00:12:37,466 this area of the brain quiets down. 208 00:12:38,008 --> 00:12:42,513 The DMN actually lights up when we aren't doing a specific task 209 00:12:42,596 --> 00:12:44,598 and our minds turn inward. 210 00:12:45,265 --> 00:12:49,311 They probably reflect a kind of internal state, 211 00:12:49,394 --> 00:12:52,356 when you're kind of spacing out, when you're mind's wandering, 212 00:12:52,439 --> 00:12:53,732 when you're self-reflective. 213 00:12:54,483 --> 00:12:56,235 [narrator] In a few recent experiments, 214 00:12:56,318 --> 00:13:01,114 people were presented with images of art from a variety of cultural traditions. 215 00:13:01,615 --> 00:13:03,659 And something surprising happened. 216 00:13:03,742 --> 00:13:07,079 The DMN region in their brains lit up. 217 00:13:07,162 --> 00:13:08,914 But, only when they were looking 218 00:13:08,997 --> 00:13:11,625 at the paintings they said moved them the most. 219 00:13:11,708 --> 00:13:16,213 It is triggering a whole set of associations 220 00:13:16,296 --> 00:13:17,923 and thoughts in our own brain, 221 00:13:18,006 --> 00:13:20,759 which is a kind of free play of our own imagination. 222 00:13:21,176 --> 00:13:23,428 [narrator] The researchers believe this is evidence 223 00:13:23,512 --> 00:13:25,138 that our experience of beauty 224 00:13:25,222 --> 00:13:29,852 involves connecting our senses and emotions with something personal. 225 00:13:29,935 --> 00:13:31,436 Our sense of self. 226 00:13:31,520 --> 00:13:35,524 There's something about being moved by paintings 227 00:13:35,607 --> 00:13:38,485 that forces us to be self-reflective. 228 00:13:38,569 --> 00:13:40,571 That may be the biologic signature 229 00:13:40,654 --> 00:13:44,116 of what it means to feel moved by a painting. 230 00:13:44,199 --> 00:13:48,245 [narrator] Which could help explain why we're draw to and moved by 231 00:13:48,328 --> 00:13:52,624 the same kind of images, even as our memories slip away. 232 00:13:52,708 --> 00:13:55,878 There's been research that suggests that people with dementia 233 00:13:55,961 --> 00:13:58,297 continue to have the same taste in art 234 00:13:58,380 --> 00:14:00,966 as they had all their lives. 235 00:14:01,466 --> 00:14:03,635 In an experiment from 2008, 236 00:14:03,719 --> 00:14:08,015 20 people with Alzheimer's disease were shown a range of paintings. 237 00:14:08,098 --> 00:14:12,477 Some were representational, like "People in the Sun" by Edward Hopper. 238 00:14:12,561 --> 00:14:15,856 Some, less so, like Picasso's "Weeping Woman." 239 00:14:16,398 --> 00:14:20,527 And others were totally abstract, like "Composition" by Mondrian. 240 00:14:21,403 --> 00:14:25,157 The patients were asked to rank the paintings in order of preference. 241 00:14:25,657 --> 00:14:28,076 Two weeks later, they were given the same task. 242 00:14:28,577 --> 00:14:30,746 When asked to rank the original paintings, 243 00:14:30,829 --> 00:14:33,749 they put them in largely the same order as before. 244 00:14:37,377 --> 00:14:39,504 Our sense of beauty is deep. 245 00:14:39,588 --> 00:14:41,924 [woman] I thought that Randy's was beautiful. 246 00:14:42,007 --> 00:14:45,010 -[applause] -And she has a great sense of color. 247 00:14:45,510 --> 00:14:50,140 [narrator] And for people with dementia, making art can be powerful therapy. 248 00:14:50,223 --> 00:14:54,686 [woman] I find the color is the thing that sticks out the most for me. 249 00:14:54,770 --> 00:14:56,396 Then, the feeling of movement. 250 00:14:56,980 --> 00:14:58,982 I love movement in painting. 251 00:14:59,066 --> 00:15:00,734 What else do we see in here? 252 00:15:00,817 --> 00:15:02,569 [woman 2] I see the sun. 253 00:15:02,653 --> 00:15:04,529 I have Lewy body dementia. 254 00:15:05,072 --> 00:15:08,825 And for me, it was a big shock. I'm sure it is for everybody. 255 00:15:09,993 --> 00:15:12,162 We all suffer from memory loss. 256 00:15:12,829 --> 00:15:17,584 Different degrees depending on the person and how long they've suffered with this. 257 00:15:18,418 --> 00:15:23,632 I think that, to the extent we retain our preferences for certain kinds of art, 258 00:15:23,715 --> 00:15:25,133 or certain pieces of art, 259 00:15:25,634 --> 00:15:28,595 it means that those pieces speak to us in a deep way. 260 00:15:29,096 --> 00:15:32,432 To me, it's so wonderful to watch people painting. 261 00:15:32,516 --> 00:15:33,517 -[applause] -[woman] Whoo! 262 00:15:34,017 --> 00:15:36,395 [Mittelman] Look at their faces. They come alive. 263 00:15:37,437 --> 00:15:40,524 People with dementia, as well as the rest of us. 264 00:15:40,607 --> 00:15:45,779 Imagine a scenario where we were all wearing exactly the same clothes. 265 00:15:46,613 --> 00:15:48,240 Every meal had no taste. 266 00:15:49,032 --> 00:15:51,952 That our houses were all uniform. 267 00:15:52,035 --> 00:15:54,329 Is that a world anybody would want to live in? 268 00:15:54,413 --> 00:15:58,792 The absence of beauty, the absence of surrounding ourselves 269 00:15:58,875 --> 00:16:00,127 with aesthetic experiences, 270 00:16:00,210 --> 00:16:03,505 I think, just makes for a very impoverished life. 271 00:16:10,262 --> 00:16:11,096 Perfect. 272 00:16:11,179 --> 00:16:13,181 [theme music playing]