That’s Not How Beauty Works: Your Beauty Is Not Only in the Eyes of the Beholder
The difference between logic and passion embodies the same untouchable humanity as wisdom.
Do you know the feeling of being a sports icon in your hometown?
I had strange encounters with other students making up coincidental conversation topics, just so they could tell people at school we were friends. Basically, against my will, I was an athletic icon.
I hated to be a public figure in my community, so much so that I took refuge in books.
In the summer, I played beach volleyball in the national championship. The rivalry between the surfers and us to win over the most beautiful girls was highly competitive.
I never understood why I was so neglected by most of the summer muses I fell in love with until my best friend pointed at my right hand and told me:
How can girls date a guy that brings a philosophy book everywhere he goes?
I looked down at the copy of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in my hand. I thought I’d be ingenious- that it was somehow exotic for a girl to see a young man with the body of the statue of David and the brain of a philosopher from ancient Greece.
After a few summers, I realized my friend was right. Gorgeous girls didn’t even come close to me, probably afraid that I would recite complex notes they wouldn’t have any interest in.
My left hemisphere was functioning and therefore, performing its logical functions. However, my best friend’s advantage in dating was that he had the left side of his brain on vacation. He only had his right side working, transforming visual and auditory signals into feelings.
Only a few years later I realized my clumsiness with girls had to do with ignorance about the brain’s functionality.
For an intellectual sportsman, who studied Plato and Aristotle, it was an inexcusable mistake.
Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart.
‘Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’ is in reality almost always unwarranted and deeply troublesome.
Look at my awkward case: an 18-year-old sports icon from a small city in Portugal, carried by my left hemisphere in a logical line of thought that blocked my creativity.
Imagine my best friend looking at me reading Plato on the beach and him saying:
You may think that projecting the image of an intellectual athlete could only bring you advantages. The reality is that you’re thinking with your left hemisphere, which processes only logical functions. You should be using your right hemisphere, which interprets emotions and feelings perfectly. Then you could romance the cutest girl of the summer.
Unfortunately, we were too young to have that kind of deep thinking and experience so explicitly.
Creativity or lack of it may well have been the cause of my chronic awkwardness towards the opposite sex.
Perhaps ignorance about how emotions and feelings work was the real problem. Why the hell would a teenage kid be so interested in how the brain works?
If I became interested in classical philosophy and brain science, I would have had much more success, not only in sports but also in raising my consistently low virility.
For example, when looking at someone’s face, the left side of your brain calculates the geometric proportions of the person’s features. In contrast, the right side evaluates whether you find those physical attributes attractive or not. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it is in the right hemisphere of your brain.- John Pugliano in The Robots Are Coming
We should all advocate for this kind of information to be taught in school before adolescence. It would prevent intellectual nerds like me from making a fool of myself in front of sculptural monuments on the beach.
The difference between logic and passion embodies the same untouchable humanity as wisdom. In fact, a robot can create a sophisticated piece with a 3D printer. Now imagine what Leonardo DaVinci could do with the same printer.
Genius will never become superfluous.
What actually drove me at the age of 18 was thinking like a robot, which is strange for an aficionado of ancient Greek culture.
I lacked the human touch to win over the beautiful brunette I longed for.
The human quality, provided by the right hemisphere can create original content and initiate new styles of operating.
It was probably this lack of nuance that dictated my painful journey in the first steps of my adolescent romantic life.
Never close your lips to those to whom you have already opened your heart.
Seeking out things we perceive as beautiful is such a basic need of the human condition that we cannot live without it.
We do have the lowest common denominator when it comes to beauty, no matter if it is portraits, landscapes, or any other kind of photography or art. We have a hard time explaining what it is, but we do recognize it when we see it. Despite that, the concept of beauty has changed throughout history, some objective factors never seem to go out of fashion, factors like the golden ratio, symmetry, certain patterns, and contrast.- Mads Peter Iversen
The pursuit of beauty can take many forms. Like love, beauty is an emotional condition, and it’s tough to accurately quantify. Yet it’s an evidently human touch.
As much as you want to use logical thinking, and therefore, your left hemisphere, the human touch is always a product of your right hemisphere.
In fact, Albert Einstein was the best example of a perfectly balanced brain that used both creativity and logic. A robot can only reproduce what the human touch creates. And robots have the power to produce close to perfection- only after the human creator finishes their creation.
Most sources of creativity originate when the brain’s abstract right side is affected by the left hemisphere’s practical side.
Creativity is a compromise between the two hemispheres of the brain, one based on logic and one on emotion. The mixture of the two results in our human capacity to create an infinite combination of unique characteristics.- John Pugliano
It’s a bit ironic that we’re so emotionally conditioned by the physiology of our brains.
Inadvertently, my best friend was more successful than I was as a teenager. Not only because he had more courage than me to go and talk to the cute girls but also because his brain was more balanced to the side that favored him romantically for years.
I want to believe that my awkwardness could be blamed on my ignorance about brain functioning, not for lack of any other human attribute.
Final Thought
I must confess that the human brain is a box of surprises. With advancing age, we realize how much we have been victims of certain situations in our lives due to our brain’s chemistry.
Creation and the search for beauty can be said to be in the beholder’s eye, but it’s also in the creator’s brain.
The left hemisphere struggles with the right for the primacy of either logic or emotion. So the notion of beauty is a perfect mix between those who behold and those who produce creation.
If I would have approached the cute brunette with a more emotional brain, my success would have been granted. And of course, Plato’s book would have been stored away in my backpack.
Or maybe even if I had recited a beautiful poem, I would have continued to be an awkward geek to women. Perhaps even my right hemisphere would not have gone unpunished in the dating game.
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