Anjan Chatterjee > Quotes

“Is beauty a property of things out there in the world? Or is beauty to be found in our heads? Is beauty a fiction constructed by culture? Perhaps beauty is created by people of influence, who use beauty to maintain their own power or to make money by selling things.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“Examining this thing called beauty that is both powerful and useless will prepare us for later discussions of pleasure and art. For many people, beauty is an essential ingredient of art. What is the relationship of beauty and pleasure? What is the relationship of beauty and art? Before we get to those questions, let’s see what we can discover by exploring beauty in people, places, and proofs.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“The golden (logarithmic) spiral. The golden rectangle is formed by two sides comprised of the golden ratio. Portioning off a square within the golden rectangle leaves a smaller golden rectangle, a pattern that can be repeated ad infinitum. Connecting the points of the successively smaller squares gives the golden spiral found in nautilus shells, rams’ horns, whirlpools, and galaxies.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“Nothing dramatic happened. Calle described this final encounter as a banal ending to a banal story. Her art was to play out empty romances with which we easily delude ourselves. She examined our indulgent fantasies that we easily project onto others.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“This ability is partly why artistically naive viewers prefer representational paintings over abstract ones: they can latch onto a piece of the meaning of the painting.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“The brain responds to art by using brain structures involved in perceiving everyday objects—structures that encode memories and meaning, and structures that respond to our enjoyment of food and sex.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“In some quarters, the parallel worlds of artists and neuroscientists have made it fashionable to claim that artists, whether Proust or Cezanne, are really neuroscientists.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“Thus, writing is not an obligatory product of our evolved brain. Writing is better considered a plug-in, a cultural tool grafted onto other built-in properties of the brain.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“The bliss of someone in the midst of an opium or marijuana high is the result of the flooding of their receptors that are bathed more gently when we experience everyday pleasures.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“We like what we want and we want what we like.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“The point is not that women necessarily fetishize these parts of men’s bodies, but that these parts can be measured easily and are good markers of overall symmetry. Men with symmetrical bodies also do well in their own sexual marketplace. They tend to have sex a few years earlier than other men. They also have sex earlier when courting a specific woman, and have two or three times as many partners than less symmetrical men. Their partners even experience them as better in bed! It turns out that a man’s physical symmetry can predict the likelihood of his female lover having an orgasm better than his earnings, investment in the relationship, or frequency of love-making [31]. Heterosexual men also prefer symmetrical women. This preference is evident in laboratory experiments as well as from behavioral observations. Physically symmetrical women have more sexual partners than less symmetrical women. It turns out that women with large and symmetrical breasts are more fertile than women with less symmetrical breasts. Women also become more symmetrical during ovulation. Symmetry in soft tissue as measured in women’s ears and third, fourth, and fifth fingers can increase up to 30 percent during ovulation [32]. We saw that sexual dimorphic features can drive attractiveness in male and female faces. Sexual dimorphic features also influence how animals and people”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

“However, Serrano sees the symbol as now sanitized of its horror. He challenges peoples’ reverence for religious iconography that often masquerades as reverence for religion itself. His struggle with religion is not obvious from just looking at the picture. Instead, the picture and its title seems to be pissing on good people.”
― Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art