A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that men’s and women’s brains work differently when processing beauty.
Men and women were shown examples of beautiful art and other visuals while the electrical actvity in the brain was monitored. The results of the study suggest that there were significant gender differences in how the brain’s of the pariticpants reacted to the images. When the participants viewed the image as beautiful, the women used both the right and left hemispheres of the brain while the men only used the right hemisphere.
The authors of the study believe that this gender-related difference may have ultimately resulted from the importance of evaluating aesthetics related to differences in the division of labour between our male and female hunter-gatherer ancestors.
You can read the abstract here and the news report here.
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