The Psychology of Pretty Patterns

What is art? For one thing, art is what I get when I tame the wildness of nature — when I impose order on the chaotic world around me. This story will show why order is beautiful.

Pretend that on the outskirts of our town sit two factories — one run by the Howards and the other run by the Smiths. Both family-owned outfits make dice by hand.

The Howard family makes these:

For as long as you can remember, you’ve used these irregular, wonky Howard-brand dice. You’ve used them to play Yahtzee, Parcheesi, Candyland, and Backgammon.

Other folks in town buy from the Smiths, who make these:

If you didn’t know anything about these two families except for the dice they made and distributed, which would you guess had an unmowed lawn? Which would you guess wore untucked shirts, kept a messy house, showered infrequently, and overslept? Which family would you guess was more industrious and competent?

Rudolf Arnheim noted that most people tend to prefer the symmetrical dice. He’d logged the long hours in the lab to support his claim. He was a perceptual psychologist, so unlike the architect or the graphic designer bent on “eradicating ugliness from the world,” he aimed only to learn why we like what we like. And his theories sprouted from his research on handwriting.

When you study handwriting long enough, you’re not likely to come away thinking that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That’s because the vast majority of people agree on what good and bad handwriting look like. Excellent penmanship means

• all your capital A’s have a consistent shape,
• the curves of your D’s, C’s, and G’s are nicely-rounded,
• your characters align along an invisible baseline and have a consistent median height,
• all your descenders fall the same distance below the baseline, and so on.

This standard of beauty for handwriting transcends cultures, and I doubt that we’ll ever find an uglytopia whose residents call sloppy cursive more beautiful than clean cursive while they compete to write as sloppily as possible.

You might object that each master calligrapher has a personal style, and no two masters write the same way. Therefore, you’d say, no standard of beauty exists.

To that I’d reply that all master calligraphers have the fundamentals down pat. So long as they reach a minimum threshold of beauty, they’re free to indulge in artistic flourishes that distinguish their personal calligraphic style. But again, nobody applauds your excellent penmanship if you can’t align your letters on an invisible baseline.

And isn’t the same true for singing, dancing, drumming, and web design? Beyonce embellishes her singing with inflections, phrasing, vibrato, and improvisations that set it apart from Adele’s singing. Amy Winehouse, Alanis Morissette, and Mariah Carey each have recognizable voices too, but they’ve all mastered the fundamentals. Their voices all reached the beauty threshold in the same way, and they diverged from there.

So we could bicker over whether Beyonce sings better than Adele, but we’ll join hands in agreement that Beyonce sings more beautifully than American Idol’s auditionees like William Hung. The most isolated villagers from Samoa and New Guinea would agree emphatically. Even the journalists who advocate for cultural relativism would have to admit that every nation’s top-ranked singers share vocal similarities. And why should this surprise us? Logically, if we’re wired from birth to favor fresh rather than spoiled vanilla yogurt, why wouldn’t we also be wired to favor certain vocalists, even after we control for cultural conditioning? (Of course it’s true that not all artists intend to please our eyes, nor all musicians our ears. One thing at a time. We’ll examine those oddball cases later.)

Remarkably, good calligraphy pleases us for much the same reasons that good design or good vocals please us. Top-tier music has clarity and precision, which means Adele’s notes come through on-pitch, her voice doesn’t waver, and she enunciates clearly. She has absolute control over her voice just as the master calligrapher has absolute control over the strokes of his pen. And Adele’s richly sung melodies stimulate our brain’s pleasure centers like a calligrapher’s swirls of script. Meanwhile a bad vocalist’s muddled, unsteady notes put us off, like the wobbly calligraphy a demented man puts on paper. To be certain, artistic precision isn’t the only attractive aspect of the arts, but it’s an important one because we seek out this quality in every art domain.

Sometime ago, our ancestors went from saying, “She has full control over her singing voice,” to saying, “she sings beautifully.” Why did we start conflating precision with beauty?

Pretend you’re visiting a foraging community in New Guinea, and the tribe welcomes you with a show. A beautiful vocalist accompanies an expert bongo player and an athletic rhythmic dancer. After the performance, you could make a few guesses about the mental and physical health of these artists.

If you believe that great artists are born, not made:

1. You’d say the performers must have at least a certain degree of intelligence and mental health. Anyone can sing badly or dance clumsily. But singing, drumming, or dancing with precision require the genes for competence, brains, and impeccable mental health.
2. You’d say the performers show off physical health. Sickly, feeble people lack the energy to belt out tunes with Adele’s vocal control. And even Adele must face the reality that her vocal talents will leave if ever she becomes sick or weak.

If you believe that great artists are made, not born:

1. You’d say the performers must have practiced for long hours, so they must have grit, tenacity, and toughness.
2. You’d say the performers must have practiced for long hours, so they must have a plenty of free time for practice. And singing, drumming, and dancing are non-essential pursuits. They don’t need a cushy life to take up these hobbies, but chances are good that they’re meeting their food, water, safety, and health needs each day. They’re probably wealthier (or better supported by friends and relatives) than the average tribesperson.
3. You’d say the performers have surprising energy, so they must be well nourished. In fact, singers in many nations must maintain specific diets (carbs, sugar, vinegar, and dairy are probably out). These diets are luxuries of the well-to-do, so anyone who sings beautifully advertises her wealth.

This tribe’s performers tend to be slightly more competent, energetic, hardworking, wealthy, and well-nourished than the average tribesperson. The singer may or may not be the fittest woman in the tribe, but we’re sure she’s not sickly or starving. A skilled performer probably has higher-than-average physical and mental fitness, just like a skilled dice-manufacturer.

When Ellen Dissanayake travelled the world looking at art from non-Western cultures, she found that “most, if not all, societies value agility, endurance, and grace in dance . . . and resonance and power in percussion.” (cite) Her observations fit with what we’d expect if artists perform for the sake of displaying their physical and mental fitness. Even the expert calligrapher advertises these qualities: (1) She’s not demented, (2) she’s hardworking enough to learn the craft, (3) she’s reasonably well-to-do, so that she can squander hundreds of hours practicing a non-essential skill.

Let me be clear, though, that performers never consciously say to themselves, I will dance beautifully to show that I’m sane, healthy, and well-fed. They dance, sing, and drum because it’s fun and feels good, though they can’t tell you why. Likewise, spectators never say to themselves, I see dancers perform with extraordinary skill, which must mean they’re sane, healthy, and well-fed. Instead, we watch an expert dancer’s coordinated movements because the sight delights us. Our response is emotional, not logical.

Now we’ve seen why we like artistic precision, but how did our brains get this way?

500,000 years ago, a handful of people were born with a mutation — a genetic fluke — that caused them to feel pleasure when they witnessed artistic precision. They delighted in seeing perfect geometric shapes made by human hands, and they loved to hear perfect rhythms on the bongos. They were the first to be captivated by human performances. I imagine the other tribespeople rolling their eyes at this eccentric quirk. But, the quirk turned out to be a gift because it lured the art appreciators into the company of top artist-performers. And artist-performers happened to be smarter than average, healthier than average, and more well-to-do than the average tribesperson. Friendships resulted in some cases, and the art appreciators gained the benefits of above-average allies. A few romances even developed, and the precision-appreciation genes were passed down, paired with genes for intelligence, health, and grit. A woman who finds Adele’s voice beautiful has a survival advantage over someone who doesn’t. But it’s a minuscule advantage — just a couple raindrops to raise the level of the pool. It’s hard to imagine that so slight a benefit can make waves that change an entire population.

In fact, biologists have documented real instances of minuscule advantages having such an impact. And when these sweeping changes happen, they happen fast. In one case, a single European’s genetic mutation enabled him to tolerate milk and cheese past infancy. (Before him, all humans had become lactose intolerant at the end of their weaning periods.) This trait gave him and his descendants a 2–3% fitness advantage over their peers. And as slight as 2–3% sounds, this gene spread through the whole of Northern Europe in less than 5,000 years. [link] Another trait, the sickle cell heterozygote, made its carriers malaria-resistant so that they were 9–10% fitter than those without it. This trait spread through the local population in 2,000 to 3,000 years, a breakneck pace when you consider the millions of years of human evolution. Both cases show ever-so-slight advantages provoking mass evolutionary change. And we get a picture of evolution happening not gradually, but in pauses and spurts.

In one spurt, our ancestors came to admire flowers, which lured them toward high-quality landscapes. In another, they came to admire artistic precision, which lured them toward high-quality friends and lovers. But this is only half the reason why our brains respond to pretty patterns.

Excerpt from an upcoming book, read more at superpinball.blogspot.com on December 2, 2017.