TED | 大脑如何判断什么是美？

演讲精彩片段（节选）欣赏

So what happens in the brain when we see beautiful people? Attractive faces activate parts of our visual cortex in the back of the brain, an area called the fusiform gyrus, that is especially tuned to processing faces, and an adjacent area called the lateral occipital complex, that is especially attuned to processing objects.

所以，当我们看见美丽的人时，头脑中会发生什么变化？ 有吸引力的脸孔会触发 我们的部份视觉皮层，它位在大脑的后方，这个区域叫做梭状回，专门用来处理脸孔信息，还有一个相邻的区域，叫侧枕叶复合体，它是特别用来处理对象信息的。

In addition, attractive faces activate parts of our reward and pleasure centers in the front and deep in the brain, and these include areas that have complicated names, like the ventralstriatum, the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Our visual brain that is tuned to processing faces interacts with our pleasure centers to underpin the experience of beauty.

此外，具吸引力的脸孔会触发位在我们大脑前方深处的 奖赏与快感中枢，包括一些名称复杂的区域，比如腹侧纹状体、眼眶额叶皮质、及腹内侧额叶。我们用来处理脸孔的视觉大脑 会和我们的快感中枢互动，强化对美感的体验。

Amazingly, while we all engage with beauty, without our knowledge, beauty also engages us. Our brains respond to attractive faces even when we’re not thinking about beauty. We conducted an experiment in which people saw a series of faces, and in one condition, they had to decide if a pair of faces were the same or a different person.

但惊人的是，当我们「遇见」美丽时，却不知道，美丽同时也「遇见」了我们。即使我们没有想着美，我们的大脑却会对 有吸引力的脸孔做出反应。我们做了一个实验，让人们看一系列的脸孔，在一个条件下，他们得要判定一对脸孔是否属于同一个人。

Even in this condition, attractive faces drove neural activity robustly in their visual cortex, despite the fact that they were thinking about a person’s identity and not their beauty. Another group similarly found automatic responses to beauty within our pleasure centers. Taken together, these studies suggest that our brain automatically responds to beauty by linking vision and pleasure. These beauty detectors, it seems, ping every time we see beauty, regardless of whatever else we might be thinking.

即使在这个情况中，有吸引力的脸孔会明显地驱动 受测者视觉皮层的神经活动，尽管当时他们在想的是人的身份，而不是他们美不美。另一群人也有类似发现，在我们的快感中枢里，我们对美会有自动的反应。整体来看，这些研究指出，我们的大脑会藉由视觉和快感的链接对美会自动的反应，似乎，每回当我们看到美时，这些对美有反应的侦测器就会响起，不论我们当时在想什么其它的事。

We also have a “beauty is good” stereotype embedded in the brain. Within the orbitofrontal cortex, there’s overlapping neural activity in response to beauty and to goodness, and this happens even when people aren’t explicitly thinking about beauty or goodness. Our brains seem to reflexively associate beauty and good. And this reflexive association may be the biologic trigger for the many social effects of beauty. Attractive people receive all kinds of advantages in life. They’re regarded as more intelligent, more trustworthy, they’re given higher pay and less punishments, even when such judgments are not warranted.

我们脑中也内建了一个「美等于好」的刻板印象。在眼眶额叶皮质中，对于「美」及「好」所造成的神经活动反应是有重迭性的，即使人们没有特别去想着美或好，也会发生。我们的大脑似乎会反射性地把美与好连结在一起。社会上因「美」而产生的回馈，其背后的关联性可能就是 这些生物触发器在驱动。有吸引力的人，在人生中有各种优势。他们会被视为比较聪明，比较值得信赖，他们会比较高薪、比较少受惩罚，即使这类的判断是没根据的。

These kinds of observations reveal beauty’s ugly side. In my lab, we recently found that people with minor facial anomalies and disfigurements are regarded as less good, less kind, less intelligent, less competent and less hardworking. Unfortunately, we also have a “disfigured is bad” stereotype. This stereotype is probably exploited and magnified by images in popular media, in which facial disfigurement is often used as a shorthand to depict someone of villainous character. We need to understand these kinds of implicit biases if we are to overcome them and aim for a society in which we treat people fairly, based on their behavior and not on the happenstance of their looks.

观察到这种现象 也揭露出美的丑陋面。在我的实验室中，我们最近发现 有轻微面部异常及缺损的人，会被认为比较不好、比较不仁慈、比较不聪明、比较没能力、且比较不努力。不幸的是，我们也有「缺损等于不好」的刻板印象。大众媒体的影像可能会利用和放大 这种刻板印象，他们常用「面部缺损」 这种简单的描绘方式来形容反派人物。我们需要了解这类的暗示性偏见，才有可能克服它们，并朝向一个能平等待人的社会迈进，不要只是看一个人的外表就断定人的好坏。

Let me leave you with one final thought. Beauty is a work in progress. The so-called universal attributes of beauty were selected for during the almost two million years of the Pleistocene. Life was nasty, brutish and a very long time ago. The selection criteria for reproductive success from that time doesn’t really apply today.

让我留给各位一个最后的思考。美的定义还在改变。所谓放诸四海皆准的美的特征 是从几乎两百万年的「更新世」所挑选出来的。那时生命很糟糕、很粗野、很古早。当时能繁衍成功的选择标准在现今并不适用。

For example, death by parasite is not one of the top ways that people die, at least not in the technologically developed world. From antibiotics to surgery, birth control to in vitro fertilization, the filters for reproductive success are being relaxed. And under these relaxed conditions, preference and trait combinations are free to drift and become more variable. Even as we are profoundly affecting our environment, modern medicine and technological innovation is profoundly affecting the very essence of what it means to look beautiful. The universal nature of beauty is changing even as we’re changing the universe.

比如，因寄生虫而造成死亡 并不是人类前几名的死因，至少在技术发达的世界中不是。从抗生素到手术，从生育控制到试管授精，繁殖成功的过滤器已经被放宽了。在这些放宽的条件下，偏好与特性的组合可以自由搭配，也变得更多样性。即使我们会深深影响我们的环境，现代医学及技术创新会深深影响着 我们对美的定义。即使我们正在改变全世界，普世价值对美的定义也在改变。