Marcos Nadal, psychologist: "Pleasure is conditioned by your experience, expectations and context"

When you come across something that you consider truly beautiful, be it a song, a person, or a work of art, it is because a handful of neural systems tune in and work together to give off that pleasant sensation.

The science that studies it, called neuroesthetics, is a young discipline, admits Marcos Nadal (47 years old, Palma de Mallorca), psychologist and researcher at the Human Evolution and Cognition Group at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, but he has already noticed that it is not one, but several brain centers involved.

Like an orchestra, all at once.

Nadal has visited Barcelona to participate in the series of conferences

, organized by the CosmoCaixa Science Museum.

“Beauty is not a quality that resides in objects, but a quality of our experience of them,” he explained to a dedicated audience.

Believing that color, sound or beauty are attributes of objects is, according to him, “naive realism”.

"We are not reality collectors, but interpreters," he justified.

And he warned that beauty is not trivial, but rather influences behavior, emotions and decisions.

And he gave an example: there are studies that have shown that, when faced with attractive students, teachers have a certain bias and value their academic possibilities more, mark their work better and perceive them as more competent.

They are also more popular socially.

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Ask.

What does beauty mean?

Answer.

It is a philosophical concept that comes from classical Greece.

But not all philosophical concepts fit well into the conceptual schemes of psychology and neuroscience.

And beauty is one of them.

Because?

Because we do not find mental processes or neural mechanisms that are specific to the experience of beauty.

The first lesson that psychologists and neuroscientists draw is that this experience we call beauty is equivalent, in practically everything, to other experiences that we say are pleasant.

Q.

So, that beauty is pleasure.

A.

At least.

But not only.

A beauty experience is almost always going to be pleasant.

Beauty is something that emerges from complex neural systems that are dedicated to generating those pleasurable experiences in other areas of life, such as the pleasure of sex, company or drugs.

Q.

How does this system work?

Because what for one can be beautiful or pleasant, for others not.

One likes French fries and another likes broccoli.

A.

This is a system that works by anticipating objects, situations, environments that are going to be pleasant and measuring the difference between real pleasure and anticipated pleasure, generating the subjective experience that you like something.

It is a very contextual processing: you like French fries, but if you have eaten two buckets from McDonald's, eating one more will make you sick, because of satiety.

Satiety is a factor that affects the functioning of this neural system, saying that this is no longer pleasant.

It is a system that works by analyzing what can be good for your body at this time.

What makes one thing beautiful to one person and another not?

Well, that experience that you have had throughout your life, which has conditioned the things that have been feeding you this system of pleasure.

Q.

So, does beauty depend on our personal experience?

R.

A lot, like any pleasure.

It depends on your personal experience, the context you are in, what you anticipate.

The same movie seen in the cinema, at home, with people making a lot of noise or by yourself in the cinema, changes that experience of pleasure.

The experience of beauty is never isolated, it is always immersed in the life of a person, in its context.

Q.

You said that beauty is pleasure, but not only.

What else is it?

R.

That is the part that we have less clear.

In the case of beauty, there seems to be a scheme of what we mean when we say that something is beautiful.

We have learned that in our culture there are certain patterns of what represents beauty.

So, it seems that, in addition to this pleasure, there is, due to the internalization of learning in each culture, that canon that you compare with the object that gives you pleasure and, the moment they fit together, you say that this is beautiful.

Q.

Is that why we agree that Jon Kortajarena is very handsome and Felipe el Hermoso was very ugly, for example?

R.

Indeed, because in our culture we prefer that type of canon.

But that pattern changes historically.

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, and from the 1980s to today, what was considered that canon of beauty has changed a lot.

But it has changed within certain margins: no one is a person with a very exaggerated facial asymmetry, for example.

Q.

What happens inside the brain when we perceive something beautiful?

R.

There are many studies in music that analyze what happens in the brain when a person experiences a piece of music as beautiful.

And what happens is that the activity of the neurons of the auditory system, which is processing the musical aspects of that fragment, is synchronized with a series of brain centers that process different aspects of pleasure.

For example, there is a center called the nucleus accumbens, which is responsible for generating pleasant sensations, but also for anticipating them.

And that anticipation—and then, the resolution of what we anticipate—generates a series of responses of pleasure.

At the same time, the amygdala is generating states of activation of the body, your physiological systems are activated with that pleasure.

The orbitofrontal cortex processes what's called the reinforcement value, which is how much you like it.

Q.

And can that be transformed?

That is to say, it happens with a song that you like at first, but you listen to it so much that it ends up boring you.

R.

There is an intermediate point of familiarity where that pleasure is maximum.

That is to say, at first it doesn't sound familiar to you, you don't quite understand the music, it's very new... but, you listen to it a couple of times, you make it yours and that pleasure is maximum.

Although later, satiety enters.

There's a middle ground where uncertainty meets predictability: there's enough uncertainty to make this interesting to you, but at the same time it's predictable.

When you have listened to the song many times, the degree of uncertainty is zero and the degree of predictability is absolute.

Your musical tastes and your previous experience in particular with that song greatly determine that degree of pleasure.

All your experience of pleasure is conditioned by three factors: your previous experience, the expectations you have and the context in which we are.

The psychologist Marcos Nadal, before one of the exhibitions at the CosmoCaixa Science Museum in BarcelonaCarles Ribas

Q.

Can the context modulate your entire perception of beauty?

Bell-bottoms were worn in the 2000s, then they fell out of favor and now they're back.

To what extent is it genuine that you like to dress like this or is it conditioned by others?

R.

It is that what is genuine is conditioned by others.

You see a person who is super attractive to you and then you meet them, and you find them unpleasant.

That knowledge that you make of that person changes the way you see them, you can even see them ugly.

And it also happens the other way around.

Beauty is not a response to some qualities of an object.

Beauty is an experience that we build taking into account the qualities of an object, but many more things.

Q.

It's not superficial.

A.

It is not just pertaining to the object.

It is an experience that is built with the object, but with everything that you also contribute to that object.

If your previous experience with that object, with that person, has been negative, color your perception of the beauty of that object.

The experience of beauty is never isolated, it is always immersed in the life of a person, in its context.

Q.

Is there a generational change in the perception of beauty?

R.

The way of perceiving beauty is the same, but we change what we are going to give the positive value of saying: this is beautiful for me.

Because?

Because we take models.

Each one of us has internalized a reference of what beautiful means.

And that model is changing.

Q.

In today's society, with social networks, the abuse of filters and techniques in search of perfection and supreme beauty, can all this have an impact?

R.

It has a very big impact.

Our beauty appreciation system feeds on specimens that we see throughout our lives and that we share with other people and generate that reference.

50 years ago, people moved in their town, in their circle, in their neighborhood, and the specimens of beauty that they had were much smaller.

Now we get examples from all over the world and the range of the most beautiful specimens opens up.

And it is further extended with the ability to apply filters to those images and, therefore, to exaggerate those features that we consider beautiful and enhance what our brain identifies as beautiful.

So, those referents that we have move towards the exaggerated beauty side, that beauty referent is exaggerated.

And what happens?

Well, there is a tension between your real world,

that of the people with whom you move daily, and the references that come to you through social networks, which is something exaggerated.

There is this growing tension or difference between what you can become, the beauty you see in the mirror, and the beauty you see in those images on social media.

It is impossible for there to be an experience of beauty if there is no pleasure-generating activity in the brain."

Q.

In what can this tension be specified?

R.

It can have two impacts: one of your own, that you do not see that you correspond to that model and that can affect self-esteem, the consideration that you have of your own image;

and then it has an effect on the people who see you: you, for them, will never be as beautiful as that other model.

This can generate dissatisfaction with one's self-image and, perhaps, also with the image that you expect your girlfriend or boyfriend to have, because it doesn't quite satisfy that ultra-filtered and ultra-exaggerated model, which continues to be a falsification of reality.

Q.

Could these generational changes cause neurological changes in the processing of beauty?

R.

We focus here a bit on the field of science fiction, almost on the

, but it is a very interesting question.

The biological evolution part of the human being is very slow and the rate of change of culture is overwhelming.

It is very difficult to think about how it will end or where it leads us to this gap.

I would wager that it is impossible for there to be an experience of beauty if there is no pleasure-generating activity in the brain.

If a moment of accelerated change, of the impact of new technologies, means that the beauty experience does not involve these very deep and ancient neural centers of the brain, I would say that this experience would not be beauty, it would be something else.

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