This is Beauty Podcast - Episode 2 Transcript

Beauty and the Brain with Dr. Aenne Brielmann

Nina Kins 1:20

So Aenne, welcome to the This is Beauty Podcast. It’s so great to finally meet you. So tell us a little about your work and how you got started and interested in the study of beauty, which is a very interesting area of research, I think.

Aenne Brielmann 1:28

Sure. I think I’m going to give you a little chronicle almost because I think it really illustrates well how all of that came about.

Nina Kins 1:34

Great!

Aenne Brielmann 1:37

So when I was still a student, I was really struggling to find something that interested me as a field of study… And I have varied interests. So I went to art school and I also went to do an internship in a hospital to potentially look at (it) for medical school. And I looked into physics and math and all of these things and then at some point I figured out that psychology is the combination of all those things and so I did quite normal studies in psychology with a focus on visual perception and I thought I wanted to go on with that during my Ph.D., but when I write this motivation letter that you have to write for the U.S. universities, I started with the experience of painting because that was still really close to my heart and my then to become supervisor pick up on that and he wrote me an email and she wanted to interview me ant the first thing he wanted to do was for me to show him my paintings. So I did. And after that he immediately asked, “So what do you think about doing a P.h.D. on beauty aesthetics?” And I thought for five-seconds, then immediately I thought, “Wonderful! Let’s do it!” And that’s how I started doing research on this topic. And so I think it really because such and intense area of focus for me because it does reflect the mix of all these things that I find fascinating in creativity and the arts combined with science and with this curiosity on many different levels.

Nina Kins 3:19

In that we’re very similar. I come from a different perspective, but that’s why I’m doing this podcast. There are just so many different understandings of beauty and I’m fascinated by that so I’m just delighted to run across your work. Wo what is the exact field of study that you do called? What is is that you do?

Aenne Brielmann 3:35

So I think over the past two decades the specialty field that I’’m in has defined itself as Empirical Aesthetics. So it’s derived from this old idea in philosophy of aesthetics being a sub-field in philosophy that really focuses on sensory experiences and how we evaluate them, not only how we perceive in and objective kind of sense, “This is a tree. This is an apple…”, but also in a subjective sense of, “I like this tree. I like how it looks. I like how this apple tastes…” - And the empirical side of it, actually started with the beginning of psychology but somehow got lost — and then focuses in on brining in the science of that, so studying systematically how people respond to certain objects, mostly in the visual domain because that’s what a lot to psychology focuses on. And trying to find out under which conditions or in response to which objects people do have certain responses to these objects. The main focus of that all has been for a long time, and I believe still is which objects, and and under which circumstances do we like something, do we find it beautiful, beautiful always being this pinnacle of liking so-to-speak, so that the research that I’m most interested in”

Aenne Brielmann 5:10

Neuro-aesthetics, an even newer field, is the logical development as we see all of Psychology is adding in those tools of, not only, studying what people do, but also what goes on in the brain when they have these feelings of liking and beauty.

Nina Kins 5:32

The processing of it?

Aenne Brielmann 5:33

Yes

Nina Kins 5:36

But I feel that in reading your research that you’ve gone a little bit deeper and broader than that. From what I’m reading, it’s not just how we see things, it’s how we experience them in kind of a meta-sense, how we feel when we’re feeling beauty. Is that right?

Aenne Brielmann 6:00

That’s right. So that is what I’m a bit too much of a skeptical scientist to say it like that, but that’s what we want to at of course, right? So when I say “behavior” I also mean what people tell us about their preferences - just being a little bit nit-picky because while we want to go about explaining what people feel internally, we can only access what people are telling us about that. So when I say behavior, I mean that really broadly and that includes for me all these implications of behavior. So, yes, you’re completely right. What I really want to understand is what internal processes lead to this experience of beauty, what makes us feel this very strong…Uhm… Yeah, let’s call it emotion for now.

Nina Kins 7:32

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit more about that..about this relationship act you make between beauty and the experience of pleasure, or something that goes on in the brain.

Aenne Brielmann 7:32

So for a neuroscientist, I think would say, “What this difference?” But let’s just say that there potentially might be a difference. So to me, this internal experience of pleasure is pretty simple to my research, but I also do believe that we can understand a lot about this experience by looking into the processes in the brain that are correlated, or precede this feeling of pleasure

Nina Kins 7:41

Okay. So you said in “Frontiers in Psychology” that,“Intense beauty requires intense pleasure, but you sad you had found in an earlier study that feelings of intense pleasure always result in intense beauty. Can you king of take to us a little about what that means and the correlation between the two, because it’a subtle difference, really? To me…

Aenne Brielmann 8:12

Yes, it really is a subtle difference. So the earliest finding was this pure correlation. So we observed that one always occurs with the other. When people said they had really high pleasure, they also said that they experienced beauty. And from a psychologist’s point of view this is the weaker claim because we don’t know about the hen and the egg yet. So, they’re both there, but is it a coincidence, or is there really something causal? And them we followed up with a study where we followed people who have difficulty experiencing pleasure, in general, within a much broader population. So, we’re asking, if it were true, hypothetically, that pleasure is something we need in order to experience beauty (then) we should see that people who have difficulty experiencing pleasure also have difficulty experiencing beauty..

And that’s what we really found. So that gave us the clue that it’s not merely coincidence that beauty and pleasure tend to occur with one another, but there is really a causal link between the two. And within this study the causal link indicates the pleasure is something that is require for us to experience beauty.

Nina Kins 9:55

So you found that people with anhedonia, which is the clinical definition for the inability to experience pleasure.. So these people in your study were not able to have experience of beauty, or they weren’t correlated with experiencing beauty?

Aenne Brielmann: 10:00

Yeah. So those people were much, much less likely to have experiences of beauty so we have this large set of images and some of these images, you know, ninety-percent of these people across the board said, “Oh! This is beautiful!” And then we split participants and looked at them separately, and so (among) the people who do not have anhedonia there we found this overwhelming response, “Oh! This is beautiful!” And then we looked at the people with anhedonia and there we really, really few people who got that response. And if we looked into the highest end of beauty, we even found that those people had a zero-percent probability of making those highest beauty ratings. So it really seems that this inability to experience pleasure at least coincides with an inability to experience the highest level of beauty, and with much lower probability of experiencing beauty at all.

Nina Kins: 11:06

And so how does that affect, or how is that affected by, say, depression, or being in a bad mood? Does that mean that if we’re in a bad mood, or that we’re depressed that we’re not able to see things as beautiful?

Aenne Brielmann: 11:17

So, sadly, I must say that it really suggests that this is the case - not as deterministically because even though anhedonia is really, really frequent in depression - it’s one of the main symptoms - that does not need to be the case. So it’s about only a third to forty-percent of people who are depressed who have anhedonia So usually, those people can still find moments of pleasure or particular things that they find pleasurable.I would always want to argue that experiencing beauty, or having the pleasure of seeing, smelling, tasting something might be one of those niches where we can get those people to experience pleasure. And then as to the second part of your question about mood, it does seem to be the case that when we’re in a bad mood we are also less likely to experience beauty. So there seems to really be something of a vicious cycle really going on that the you’re already in a state of, “Yeah everything is really kind of unpleasant, you’re also less likely to find sources of pleasure, or to recognize the pleasure in things that are usually pleasurable to most people.

Nina Kins: 12:36

So it is a matter of degree, then… Or is it an absolute?

Aenne Brielmann: 12:42

It is, most of the time, a matter of degree. So even within those people with anhedonia on a scale of one to seven (for beauty), a five to six was possible. So it’s a matter of degree, just as mood is a matter of degree in my opinion. You know, you’re not either in a good mood or a bad mood. You’re just kind of on a continuous scale.

Nina Kins: 13:14

Okay. So what is the difference, then, between pleasure itself in determining beauty vis-a-vis intense pleasure, or the degree of pleasure?

Aenne Brielmann: 13:30

That’s a wonderful question and I do not believe I have found the answer to that. So sometimes when I want to challenge my colleagues I say, “Well maybe it’s just the same. You know?” Just like we call, say here’s something like a slight fear, or, “I’m afraid”, and I can be horrified. And this new word pops up and it describes another level of an experience that still lies on the same continuous scale. So (that’s) the kind of up front, very reductionist, hypothesis is, okay, we just have another word for that upper end of the pleasure scale and we call it “beauty”.

And then the somewhat more skeptical side of men says well, maybe there’s still a qualitative difference associated with that word? But we have not found it yet in our studies. We have not been able to empirically pin down what that qualitative difference might be.

Nina Kins: 14:37

Okay. So you made some reference to this previous study, or somebody’s comment about sucking on a piece of candy, and while that’s a pleasurable experience, not necessarily something we would define as ‘beautiful’. But are you saying also that we could find the experience of candy, if it’s intensely pleasurable ‘beautiful’? Because in my experience, we rarely describe anything having t do with taste as ‘beautiful’ - which I find fascinating because so many other things do fit under that umbrella.

Aenne Brielmann: 15:19

I love the fact that you brought up that question because it’s one that I often find leads to fascinating discussions because it invites us to think deeper about when we describe something as ‘beautiful’. So, we actually have data on this. So we have this one study where we have people eat Andy and we have them stroke a teddy-bear so it’s haptic and (has) this taste component in our study. And even in that study, when popped were at the top end of the pleasure scale they very often also called these experiences ‘beautiful’. And these are U.S. Americans, so it’s not like weird cultural differences. And we were really puzzled. We did not want this in our study. We wanted the candy to be something that is ‘pleasurable’ but not ‘beautiful’ as a controlled condition. And then I told this to, actually, one of my best friends and he’s a trained artist - a dancer - and he looked at me like, “What do you mean? Everything can be beautiful. Of course!” And that kept me thinking for a while. And the more I thought about it, the more it started making sense to em that it might be a coincidence that this really high pleasure comes about when we eat something, or when we touch something because this are our everyday sense that we very rarely concentrate on, right? So we’re very visually focused as human beings. And then I had this one espresso in Rome on vacation, and ever since this espresso, it makes complete and utter sense to me that high please corresponds to beauty because that espresso was beautiful. It was so intensely pleasurable that it was, no question, beautiful. And then more pieces started falling in place and ever since I invited all my colleagues who doubt me to eat The Great British Bake-Off and count the number of times that the word ‘beautiful’ was used in that context and not referred to the appearance of cakes.

I really think that it might be a cultural bias as well. So I think two things come into play here. One is that the bias that in those not so prominent senses we often don’t experience this high pleasure also because we don’t really concentrate and give them enough attention and then the second part is that there’s a cultural inhibition. This cultural inhibition to call these things beautiful, may be different in different cultures, countries or languages and the other one is the fact that we don’t concentrate as much on those senses so we don’t get those really peak pleasure experiences as often so beauty doe not really occur as often. Maybe those two even interact - reinforce each other.

Nina Kins: 18:19

Okay What about this idea that you can experience…we can experience multiple pleasures, or multiple experience of beauty? If we’re holding the teddy-bear and we’re eating the candy, are you saying that those experiences in your study were melded together, or that we were able to make a distinction between the two?

Aenne Brielmann: 18:44

So the data that I have… the experiments that we’ve done so far were only with images and I’ve got really, really new exciting data with my colleagues where we mixed images and music and there it seems to be the case (that) we can if we want to. So say you are watching a movie and the cinematics are really beautiful, but the music for some reaction doesn’t appeal to you… You can disassociate the two. You can say, “Oh this looks really beautiful, but the sound is just not what I like…” But you can also meld the two so people are also happy to average across the two, creating this overall impression and evaluation of what they are seeing and that’s really cool to me that we have these kind of two-channels at the minimum, maybe even three or four, where we can sort of take our environment apart and figure out which aspects are the one that say “please me” and which are the ones that, “don’t please me.” That really pretty smart…

Nina Kins: 19:49

You said that the one thing that the philosophers and psychologists and neuroscientists can fundamentally agree upon is that beauty involves pleasure, but is that the only thing? What are the other things you guys have found in your research that correlate with beauty…the feeling of it?

Aenne Brielmann: 20:07

So I think in terms of the agreement among philosophers… I think that’s really the only thing I’ve ever found. My colleagues in philosophy might correct me on this, but I have doubts because philosophers just love to argue among each other. The it comes to additional things that we have found coincide with beauty, we have this one study where we ask a lot of people form the U.K. and the U.S. and India what their memories of what were like beautiful experiences to them and what struck us there was that there was almost and either/or in the types of experiences that people reported. So, either, they were out in nature — they reported some form of experience where they were either outdoors, or looking at the outdoors, or they were with a significant other, either their family or friends and very often either a partner or a spouse. And, then, of course there are also reports of both of these things combined. So I think there’s another interesting aspect of having this connection to nature, or other human beings in this experience of beauty, which I find interesting because stereotypically this field, in this fancy term we call “aesthetics”, traditionally looks a lot at the arts. And the arts were something that the people we surveyed very, very rarely mentioned at all when we asked about one particular experience of beauty as the first thing that comes to mind.

Nina Kins: 21:55

So these experiences of beauty can be based around something that you see, or a visual or aesthetic experience, but they can also be related to something you hear, or taste, or even a memory… Is that what you found?

Aenne Brielmann: 22:07

Correct. That as well. Even though most people know when we ask them to recall something that was beautiful then they do report something that they saw rather than something they heard or smelled. I think there’s just a bias in how often we experience beauty from these different senses.

Nina Kins: 22:31

Okay, but you did say something about more experiences being based more around social interactions?

Aenne Brielmann: 22:39

Correct.

Nina Kins 22.41

Can you tell us a little more about what that was?

Aenne Brielmann: 22:43

Yes. So that was something that we found very surprising. So people really reported that they experienced beauty, or not really, but they more often than we thought reported experiencing beauty when they were together with others and not together in an anonymous crowd, but together with either their family, or friends, or their partners. Uhm… so in our continued studies we tried to go a little bit deeper also in the discussion also about why is it important that there are other people? Or why might it be important that there are other people around that are important to you? And what we came up with the - in more of a descriptive session though, I must say - is that people thing that sharing an experience of beauty with others is (a) more important component to them, so it’s not that it is not an experience we have in isolation. It’s an experience that we communicate to others and that we experience together with others.

Nina Kins: 23:47

So does that mean that being Abel to share beauty compounds, or intensifies the experience? Could you say that?

Aenne Brielmann: 23:56

I would think so… There is a student of my old lane at NYU who is looking into that. It’s not easy in the middle of the pandemic right now so she’s looking at the difference between going to a museum exhibition alone verses going there with a friend. And so very preliminarily she also find that people are more likely to enjoy the exhibition, to experience high pleasure, to experience beauty, when they are together with somebody else. My hunch is that it’s an amplifier - certainly not a necessity. I think that’s fair to say. So that there’s almost like a resonance. That is what I’ve anecdotally had when I went together with a really good friend to a show, or to an exhibition. That this interaction and even this sharing of pointing out “Oh, look at this,” or, “Look at this,” enables and enhances these experiences.

Nina Kins: 25:05

I have had these experiences when I travel along. I spent some time in Vancouver and it’s a very beautiful place.

Aenne Brielmann 25:13 )

Oh, yeah…

Nina Kins: 25:14

You’ve been there?

Aenne Brielmann: 25:15

Yes. I lived there for a bit. It’s amazing.

Nina Kins: 25:20

It is. And I was so excited to go. It was, gain, a real bucket-lit items for me. And when I got there, after about the first week.., At first I was like, “Oh, this is so beautiful,” and everything. And the second week, because I was alone - and I was there for three months by myself, I found that my ability to enjoy it, or to really absorb all of the beautiful things dropped like a rock. And I ended up in this very depressive state. And I realized that without the ability

To share that beauty with someone, it really diminished the experience that I was having. I’m speaking a little bit more your language right now, but that’s how it felt to me. I never could understand what that was all about… Just not as much pleasure, or maybe it was a matter of degree or intensity of past associations with pleasure, which brings up another question… Do you think some people may be more… better wired to experience beauty, that their ability to have intensely pleasurable experiences is amplified relative to some other people?

Aenne Brielmann: 26:34

Yes. I do think so. I do know that we have that sort of evidence for music very specifically because there is also a very specific condition called ‘music anhedonia’ where people are only unable to experience pleasure form music. And so people people started looking into that and they found out that there’s not only the negative side of it, there’s also this ‘hyper-anhedonia’ at least in music. Fascinatingly, even, we can map that onto differences in how people’s brains are wired. And I believe that it’s plausible that that also exists in other modalities - not only for sound and music, but others. So what seems to be the case it this: We have regions in the brain that are strongly active when we experience pleasure and there’s all sorts of chemicals involved in eliciting this activity and centers are connected to the entire rest of the brain and also, separately, to the centers in the brain that process certain sensory information. So, for example, there’s a region along our temples that is mostly involved in processing sound and so when the connections of that region to those reward centers is stronger, those people are more likely to experience pleasure from music. There’s kind of this link from the sensory to the pleasure centers. And I think that is most likely the case for vision and maybe for other sense as well. The problem only being that we don’t really understand where in the brain and what the hell is going on with the other senses yet. So vision and audition it is for now. So to make a long story short, I think that it’s the case there are differences in how sensitive people are and how much pleasure they can get out of their experiences.

Nina Kins: 28:40

Do you think that, say, when people describe something like a poem or literature that they read as beautiful… Do you think that is also coming from a pleasure-center focus? Do you thin that’s ‘pleasure’, or do you think there’s some intellectual component to that?

Aenne Brielmann: 29:09

So…One part of me wants now to reason with the brain agains and say, “Well, we can imagine the very intellectual processing might just as well be connected to the reward centers”. It’s sort of like and immaterial sense in a way… a sense of cognition, or something like that. But then also I think it’s also fascinating to think about poems and literature in a way of something like an imaginary sensory experience. Right? So there was little bit of work by some colleagues of mine that found that people who really enjoy poems… I think they took Japanese poems, Haiku, the very short ones. The ones who enjoy these also have a very vivid imagination of the word, of their content. And so maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe there’s this sort of intellectual ‘Je ne sais quoi’ that is non-sensory. I think there’s also a component of the imaginary, of the like ‘almost sensory’ that is in there and that it can all be connected to these pleasure centers in the brain and then come back to this universal mechanism underlying beauty that stimulates pleasure and when it reaches its peak you say, “Ah! This beautiful!”

Nina Kins: 30:38

I think there’s some curiosity as the maybe the distinction between literature, or a story that’s perceived as beautiful vis-a-vis poems because poems are ally unique. They affect all parts of our brains many times, you know? We have some insight intuitively… People who are responsive to poems, I think they have some intuitive insight into the feeling or another level you can’t get access to just by reading and thought, or the cognitive aspect.

Aenne Brielmann: 31:07

Yes. Yes. It think you’re right. I think there’s still so much to be understood, or maybe not even to be understood, or maybe so much that we cannot grasp in those unique experiences. Poetry’s an amazing example, I believe. For me, even more fascinating, because I have a little bit of a hard time with poetry myself. I mean I have to go to poetry slams, or poetry readings. And then they unlock poetry for me.

Nina Kins: 31:38

So maybe that will lead me into this next question about some research data you did about beauty and thought. So can we talk a little bit about that relationship?

Aenne Brielmann: 31:47

Sure.

Nina Kins: 31:49

There was some research that you did on beauty experiences requiring thought, or thinking on thinking as a component of beauty?

Aenne Brielmann: 31:56

Yes. Yes. That was actually the very first study I did during my P.h.D.. I won’t mention how long ago that was. So we were really interested in this hypothesis some philosophers had, most prominently, perhaps, Immanuel Kant. When he was still younger, he wrote a little clearer hypotheses… And so the idea is that we experience beauty, the differentiation of pleasures is that it’s not only sensory. It’s not enough to just perceive. You also need this cognitive aspect to it and what we did in our experiments to test that was we gave people a bunch of different objects. So candy and a teddy bear were part of that study… primarily a bunch of images. And the default people just experienced those and we made sure that there were some things in there that people found really beautiful. Then we also had people experience these things. So look at these images, taste the candy when they had to do a really hard task on the side. So psychologists have developed really nasty tasks to make sure that your brain is well-occupied throughout and then looked at the difference between those two. So what does it do to you when your brain is occupied with something else while you’re experiencing something that you usually find beautiful. And what we found was that the beauty goes away. So if you distract people enough then these beauty experiences are suppressed.

Nina Kins: 33:39

Fascinating… So distraction can diminish beauty experiences?

Aenne Brielmann: 33:48

That’s exactly what we found. Uhm… In our times… it’s a bit of a harsh reality really, because we have so many distractions all around us, at all of our fingertips all of the time. So, you know, that was kind of tangible evidence that distraction really has detrimental side-effects.

Nina Kins: 34:10

That’s just fascinating to me because I’m finding from the people I’m talking to about beauty that this is the problem we have right now. We’ve kind of defaulted to the conventional definitions of beauty because they’re easier so we have to really work harder to experience beauty in out lives. So, you know, I think maybe when you’re in, like, a museum or something like that, you know, maybe that’s why museums are so quiet… I don’t know… what the practical implications of this are. You could speak to that better than I can…

Aenne Brielmann: 34:19

I even want to mention, I don’t think it’s harder. I think the hard part is to resist the temptation of distraction, but I do think that beauty comes easily. I think we just shouldn’t take it away from ourselves. I think that’s more of the message. That’s more of the message that I also took away form myself from this because the actions that we need to take to enable us experience beauty are really small. So just, you know, leave phone at home, or do not…or leave work be in the evening is a hard one for most of us, I’m sure. But create opportunities and space where there are no distractions that leave room for beauty. I don’t think we have to work for beauty. I think that comes quite ways because we want to… like beauty also draws our attention. We want to engage with that. So that’s the easy part. I think getting engaged in something different is the hard part.

Nina Kins 5:55

Not getting pulled away… and to your point, that’s very difficult right now. But is there an evolutionary reason that we experience beauty? Why do we have beauty experience in the first place?

Aenne Brielmann: 36:12

That is the grand-prize questions - the million dollar question, I believe. I’ve spend the past one-and-a-half, two years thinking about that, really, and to some people, in surprising contexts. So right now I’m working with people who are really interested in how people, but also machines, artificial intelligences, make decisions. And this field, Computational Neuroscience, really always gets exactly this question of, “Why, what is the goal?” We call it the computational question because if you want to write a program that does something, the key aspect to it is, “What is the program supposed to do?” And what our ration right now is that, beauty is a signal that comes from sensory experience so ti must have something to do with our sensory system. Now, what is the goal of the sensory system? Well… we somehow have to figure out where we are int he world and what that world is going to be in the future so we can get food, get water, whatever we need to survive - to avoid danger. So what we think is, beauty is a signal that the sensory environment that we’re in right now is one where, I almost want to say, “we’re safe,” but that isn’t quite the right word. (It’s) one where we know what’s going on. This is an environment that our sensory system can dal with, or even better, a sensory environment where we can learn how to deal with the world even better in the future. So we think that beauty is the mix between comfort and challenge. So we can understand the world, all of these sensory things that come in. We can understand then, okay, but on top of that it also helps us to understand the world in the future. That’s what we think is the big, big ‘why’ behind all of that.

38:27

Nina Kins So beauty is important for us from an evolutionary perspective. It’s important to us for survival. It is fundamental to being human?

Aenne Brielmann: 38:36

Yes. We really think we have this strong signal as well for a particular important reason. Of course, you could also say in evolutionary psychology there are the voices that say it’s an important by-product of mate choice. But in my opinion, and that of some of my colleagues, it really does not go far enough and does not explain a lot of the beauty experiences that we have because it’s really, really detached, especially for humans from any sort of … you know. It’s not only that somebody that I want to go out with that I find attractive is beautiful. The world can beautiful in so many ways, and that makes so much more sense if the underlying goal of the feeling of beauty is much broader than just, you know, “Let’s find somebody that I can have kids with.”

Nina Kins: 38:26

Is there a relationship between perceptions of beauty and love? Is there a link there? And also, on the heels of that, did your studies reveal any difference between the way men and women discriminate between judgements of beauty, or their understandings?

Aenne Brielmann: 39:46

So…I’m going to answer those questions, I think, in reverse order because the first question is the quick answer. As far as I can see there are no major differences between men and women at all. Also because there is a continuim in the spectrum, I believe, in gender identities. So don’t even like to make a binary distinction. If anything at all, we found a very minor bias once when we looked at these large sets of images and how people rate their beauty that people who said, “I identify as a woman,” judged images where there was more than one person depicted as slightly more beautiful — the difference was really small. And I’m always asking myself with these small differences that are based on reported gender identity, “Is it real, or will it go away once society does not teach girls and boys to respond differently to different things anymore?” So the short answer is that I don’t believe there is any meaningful difference at all.

Nina Kins: 41:00

Okay…

Aenne Brielmann: 41:02

The second question is a bigger and more fascinating one. I’ve never looked at love specifically, but I think the comparison is a very inviting one and I think there’s great parallels between beauty and love in their intensity of that and also in the potential implications. I think, just anecdotally, and maybe a small study that we, sadly, never published love begets beauty in a way. I think we have all experienced falling in love in that person being, or becoming, beautiful in-and-by themselves. I hope that we’ve all experienced that… And in that sense, I think they’re intricately linked. Or, though I’ve not experience it myself, I’ve previously also worked with parents and kids as well. Someone’s kids, and even by association, everything that that kid does or produces becomes beautiful to the parent. That’s very, very deep love. So I think if there is a link we have not documented it. Beauty is already something that my colleagues laugh at me for, it being this elusive feeling like, “How could you ever do research on (beauty)?” If I came on with love now… I don’t what the response would be.

Nina Kins: 42:38

That’s another lifetime…

Aenne Brielmann: 42:40

That’s another lifetime. Uhm… But, yeah, I do think that the two are linked. I don’t know how, but it’s very plausible and inviting to think that there is a connection between the two.

Nina Kins: 42:55

On a different plane, we perceive that our subjective definitions of beauty are universal to other people? I hope I’ve got that right…

Aenne Brielmann: 43:12

Yeah… You got that right. It’s a very old idea and annoyingly true, I believe. It is again Immanuel Kant, I believe. So the idea is that beauty isn in the eye of the beholder. The entire field of beauty and aesthetics is biased toward this old guy. It’s this idiom that is by and large really true. We’ve all seen that having fights with people not understanding like, “How could anyone ever put pineapple on pizza?”, to make a fun example. But I think when it comes to musical tastes, it’s really prominent. Or when it comes to movies, people’s tastes are different. And we know that. Nonetheless, we have this feeling that others aught to agree with our opinion. So even though intellectually we might struggle against this, it’s really hard for most people, I believe, to acknowledge that fact act something they find beautiful is not truly beautiful. You know, we objectify it. We project the beauty into the object and it becomes a part of the object even thought the beauty is in us. It’s a subjective feeling we’ve sort of projected onto the object and it becomes a property of the object and then the dilemma is, “Why can’t other people see it?” So it’s not even mean. It’s very benevolent. In the positive sense of it, you want people to acknowledge this pleasure, this positive beauty that you see in the object, even thought somehow you do know that, “Yeah, our tastes do differ and, yeah, I don’t like the same things that you like but why don’t you see it?”

Nina Kins: 45:12

I wonder if what’s going on is maybe we know that having other people agree with our beauty experience will enhance or amplify our won beauty experience?

Aenne Brielmann: 45:25

Yes. We’re back to this togetherness and shared experience, right? We want to share the experience of beauty. We know that it’s going to amplify it. And that becomes really difficult when fastest differ so much that it’s not really possible.

Nina Kins: 45:48

I know. I feel like people are kinder when they are talking about beauty. In general, they’re more accepting of other people’s definitions of beauty. I hope so…but…

Aenne Brielmann: 45:56

I hop so too and I feel so because the differences between people here… I don’t want to say they’re inconsequential, but I would hope that most people have and appreciation of the value of that diversity as somebody who love and heavy metal…I value the fact that there’s more musical diversity than just that because I know that’s what other like, but I can value that. It’s different, I feel like, from mortal or other kinds of preferences or opinions where a lot of people imagine, “If it were only me and my preferences and opinions the words would be a better place.” I feel like when it comes to beauty that that’s not so. We still appreciate diversity.

Nina Kins: 46:47

Yeah. I’m glad that you’re doing this research because you know with all of the discussion about cultural bias and sexual bias that a lot of people in academics and sciences are sometimes, reluctant right now to talk about beauty because there’s a bit of fear attached to it. The practical implications of what you’re saying is that we can be expansive in that regard rather than narrow-minded…

Aenne Brielmann: 47:26

Yes. Yes.

Nina Kins: 47:27

So, I don’t know if I’ve already asked you this, but when we first emailed back-and-forth, you said that you thought this research is important. Why do think it’s important and what are the practical implications from what you’ve found and what you hope to find moving forward?

Aenne Brielmann: 47:44

So I need a bit of a break for this because I’m so much in the mind of a researcher that almost wants to shout, “Well, for Science!” But I believe that especially the kind of research that we have been doing with respect to this feeling of pleasure and when it can, when it cannot occur, in response to sensor experience could be really important in our thinking about how do we deal with being in a state where we have very little pleasure in our lives… just teasing further apart. As I said, in there are a majority of people who have depression, but not anhedonia so there is a window of pleasure available to these people at a very low, low threshold and there is, luckily, som research from some of my colleagues for how, like, can we use, for instance, music or use the visual arts to get people with depression to have pleasurable experiences and sort of thought that sort of re-discover feelings of pleasure along those lines. The second line of where I think it’s important goes a little deeper into the research that I’m doing right where we are linking this basic understanding of “What is the experience?”, to “What are the consequences of this experience?”.

Nina Kins: 49:00

Aenne Brielmann: 49:24

So, when we make decisions in our everyday live, we’re all fully aware that the way things look and the way things smell and the ways thing taste when it comes to nutrition have this huge, huge, huge impact on our decisions - at least in industrialized countries where scarcity is not the issue, where there are always a lot of options and hat is still lacking really from our current understanding of how people make decisions because very often we still have these rational models of people acting base on, say, when it comes to food, “I need ‘x’ amount of protein and ‘x’ amount of water and ‘x’ about of carbohydrates and that’s what it costs… And then you do the somehow in your head implicitly… and that’s how people should behave. And the big puzzle is that they don’t. And I believe this question of beauty, or how much pleasure we get form sensory experience is really key to understanding how people make all of these different everyday choices for real, not in a model based only on these rational criteria. That, we already do understand fairly well. I think that’s probably the biggest implication. And then following form that with moral implications yet to be addressed, also how can we use this knowledge to guide people to make mostly beneficial decisions? It’s an obviously really big issue here in industrialized nations would be how could we make healthy food more attractive? But then you could go on and on about this, right? How might we make cars that are more environmentally friendly more attractive to people? How do we build our cities as well? That’s very recent research of mine. How do we have to design the urban landscape to make it more pleasant and reduce stress? These are the major implications. How do we design the sensory environment to make people experience more pleasure to enhance well-being, and to maybe guide their decision-making so that it’s more beneficial in the long-run?

Nina Kins: 51:48

Fewer distractions, too, like you said before with less distractions in the design perhaps. I don’t know…

Aenne Brielmann: 51:55

Yeah, and perhaps with less opportunity for distractions, right? Because you also mentioned that a lot of research has been hesitant to talk bout the positive, or maybe less tangible aspects. I think we’re about to change that.

Nina Kins: 52:17

Good.

Aenne Brielmann: 52:20

I think that this field of empirical aesthetics is really fast-growing at the moment. I also think that research on well-being has been growing really fast in the past decade and that there’s a newfound awareness in my generation, the Y and Z generations - the importance of these things and understanding them.

Nina Kins: 52:51

Well, one other question I wanted to ask you before we get wrapped up here…This wasn’t in my plan, you brought it up earlier. You sad that you were doing some work with A.I., or that you have an interests in A.I., right?

Aenne Brielmann: 53:00

Yeah.

Nina Kins: 53:20

So this occurred to me while I was doing my research for this interview because I’m fascinated by A.I. and I’m also skeptical of it. But when we get to the point, because I think it’s inevitable - are we going to be able, or would we even want to integrate this aspect of understanding, or expressing pleasure or beauty into it? Is it something we’re going to want to share with our technology? And are there upsides to it? Or downsides? I don’t know. It’s out there…Kind of thinking in my head about that….

Aenne Brielmann: 53:49

Yeah. I have been thinking about exactly that of the past month as well because the newest findings that we have with this idea that beauty is actually something that helps us to process the environment better and helps our sensory system to adapt to its environment…That, of course, invites, “Well, if you build into A.I., could the A.I. learn to better perceive?” And that would be amazing for the kinds of Artificial Intelligence that we want to have, you know that can navigate the world and learn to navigate the world as it changes. And for some reason, I have the same hesitancy that you have in that if feels so uniquely human to have these experience. And to quote, end-quote, give them to an artificial intelligence, or in all steps of the artificial algorithms that we have had that initial hesitation of, “Okay, yes, we do want something that’s smart and can help us, but do we want something as smart as we are?”

Do we want to give it all that we have? And I think that that’s in that, too. So, I think there’s a real possibility of being extremely useful, but at the same time scary because it gets yet one step closer to being indistinguishably human.

Nina Kins: 55:35

Exactly. And for those of us who also fear the potential downsides of Artificial Intelligence where it can basically surpass its programming and develop on its own, maybe constructing Artificial Intelligence in a way where it could experience pleasure and human emotion, and even love, might help us with this intelligence, and maybe make it safer for us…So that’s a potential upside.

56:05

Aenne Brielmann Yeah. And it’s one of the big questions for the future. I think we’re still quite far away from try generalizable intelligence, but we’ve also made huge progress. It is a questions for the future and it’s going to be an important one to answer

Nina Kins: 56:22

Well, before we wrap up, do you feel there’s anything we haven’t covered in terms of your research?

Aenne Brielmann: 56:28

Yeah. Well, I really think we covered so many of the important things and even some things that you brought that I hadn’t been thinking in a while that are actually really fascinating and important to say. Yeah, I think if you let me think five minutes for sure because the topic is so deep and broad.

Nina Kins: 56:51

Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time. I know that you’re really busy and I really appreciate you taking the time out to discuss this with us. I feel very fortunate that the This is Beauty Podcast has had access to you and your work so early on in the show because it’s really instrumental to our own work and what we’re trying to do. And I hope as your research evolves that we’ll have some opportunity to have you back. I really would like to talk more about this idea, or work around music and beauty experiences, especially since it seems to be distinct from some of the other areas.

Aenne Brielmann: 57:23

That’s wonderful to hear. It was all my pleasure and I’d be happy to be back if you’ll have me.

Nina Kins: 57:28

Absolutely! We certainly will. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the This is Beauty Podcast and have a terrific day.

Aenne Brielmann: 57:36

You, too.

Nina Kins: 57:37

Okay. Bye, bye.

Aenne Brielmann: 57:38

Bye, bye.