Turns out, your brain is playing matchmaker.
Who is the most beautiful woman in the world? A few years ago, perception researchers from the University of Toronto and St. Andrew’s University announced that they had the definitive answer. Surprisingly, the winner of the scientific beauty pageant wasn’t a supermodel or a movie star, but rather Canadian-born country singer Shania Twain.
As it turned out, Twain was the celebrity who conformed most precisely to a set of ideal facial measurements. The scientists developed those standards by taking a generic female face and using Photoshop to tinker with its proportions, and then showing the various results to volunteers. Through the survey, the researchers discovered that the distance between the ideal woman’s eyes and mouth is 36 percent of the overall length of her face from hairline to chin. Similarly, her pupils should be precisely 46 percent of the width of her face from ear to ear.
Even more intriguing is the researchers’ explanation for why the volunteers preferred those proportions. Those facial ratios also happen to be the average of all female faces. Thus, the most beautiful woman in the world essentially is just the typical woman, to an extreme of precision.
But that raises other questions. Why do we find symmetrical features attractive? And what is it that happens in our brains to make us feel enamored of a certain person, as opposed to every other member of his or her gender? In this article, we’ll delve into the neuroscience of attraction, and look at how our brain processes sensory information and evaluates our perceptions to decide who we think is a babe or a hunk. We’ll also look at the extent to which attraction is hard-wired into our brains by evolution, and what influence is played by environment or personal variations on preference.
The Anatomy and Physiology of Attraction
When we look at someone, our brain almost instantly decides whether that person is a hottie or a nottie. Princeton University psychologist Alex Todarov, who has studied humans’ processing of faces, has found that we respond to them within a tenth of a second—so rapidly that the reasoning portion of our minds may not have time to influence the reaction. “It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way,” Todarov said in an article on Princeton University’s website. Indeed, it’s almost impossible for us not to stare at an attractive person. A 2007 study by Florida State psychologist Jon Maner found that subjects fixed their eyes upon an attractive person within a second of first seeing them.
But although the process of attraction occurs in a flash, it’s also surprisingly complex. When we look at someone’s face, the visual information is processed in a specialized section of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, with the help of the superiortemporal sulcus, an area which focuses on details such as our potential love object’s facial expression, and whether or not he or she is viewing us with a sultry gaze.
In a flash, that information is relayed to other parts of the brain that help us figure out how to feel. In a study published in 2012 in Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from Ireland’s Trinity College did brainscans of students who looked at photos of prospective romantic flames and then later got to meet them in person at a speed-dating event. Essentially, they found that when you have an immediate attraction to a person, two parts of a certain area of the brain—the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—generally light up with neural activity. One is the paracingulate cortex, a region that makes calculations about the attractiveness of the person you’re gazing upon. The other part is therostromedial prefrontal cortex, which compares your perception of attractiveness to other people’s reactions to the person. That’s the part of the brain that actually decides whether your potential love bunny is right for you, regardless of whether he or she appeals to your guy buddies or girl pals. When that happens, you’re most likely to trot out your best pickup lines or offer your phone number.
Interestingly, though, if you meet someone who by group consensus is exceptionally drop-dead gorgeous—say, a clone of Ryan Reynolds, or Rihanna—a third part of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, will also kick into action. But even when it activates, you won’t necessarily pursue the object of your admiration. Apparently, that’s because the rostomedial prefrontal cortex cools your jets, warning you that the person is either unattainable, or that your own personal tastes are a little different.Meanwhile, other parts of the brain also are reacting to that visual information about our possible love interest. A study by University College of London neuroscientists, published in the journalNeuropsychologica in 2007, found that the amygdala—a primitive area deep in the brain that helps trigger powerful emotions—also lights up when we see an exceptionally attractive person. The hypothalamussends out a surge of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that not only creates a pleasurable sensation, but also increases our heart rate. So when we say that our true love makes our pulse flutter, we’re not that far from the truth.
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