Thesis and Predictions

The structure of aesthetic phenomena can be explained by preferences that arise from the soft, liquid crystalline physical state of the animal brain

Thesis

Aesthetic phenomena are usually made up of complex, contradictory mixtures of differentially exciting qualities or concepts, particularly those from the opposite ends of evolutionarily primitive perceptual dimensions or dualities. Arranging such opposites in pairs with respect to the level of arousal they convey produces a set of contrary or “mixed” structures that correspond to essential features of music, song, dance, art, poetry, mythology, language, humor, games, hallucinations, dreams and a surprising proportion of the overall content in animal communication, behavior, coloration and shape, creating a pattern that can only be understood in terms of similar, universal complexity in the animal brain, evidently that related to its soft, liquid crystalline physical condition.

Predictions

Support for the following predictions, which are testable, for the most part, through experiments or observational studies, represents support for the given thesis, from which they were derived. Arguments based on parsimony, probability and a preponderance of anecdotal evidence can be made in their favor. Some appear to be true from the results of studies that have already been carried out (e.g., crossmodal correspondences). Others predict patterns we already know to exist, without necessarily knowing why (e.g., song, dance, Thayer’s law, Gloger’s rule). Links in the predictions lead to sections with a discussion and examples or to collections of relevant photos on Pinterest, mostly those of sexually selected animal coloration patterns. Parenthetical references cite related research for further information, not necessarily that which backs up the given prediction or the overall thesis.

1. More exciting things: Perceptual heat, fluidity, dynamism, speed, disorder, brightness, warm colors (red, orange, yellow), sound, loudness, high pitch, upwardness, outwardness, length, spikiness, large size, large numbers of things and novelty are more exciting to observers psychologically, neurologically and physically than their opposites. The experience of these qualities increases brain temperature more than that of less exciting things. Anger, sexual arousal and other high excitement extremes of emotion also correlate with higher brain temperature.
2. Less exciting things: Perceptual coldness, solidness, stasis, slowness, order, darkness, cool colors (green, blue, purple), silence, quietness, low pitch, downwardness, inwardness, roundness, small size, small numbers of things and familiarity are less exciting to observers than their opposites (those given in prediction 1). The experience of these qualities increases brain temperature less than that of more exciting things, if at all. Emotions near the lower excitement extreme of animal arousal are correlated with lower brain temperature.
3. Mental categories: Humans and other animals automatically associate more exciting things (list 1) with each other in an unconscious category of the mind (mental category 1), and less exciting things (list 2) with each other in an opposite mental category (2). Phenomena in the same category feel like each other unconsciously, which itself is because they involve similar changes in the neurological excitement, temperature and therefore thermal characteristics of the brain. Support for the reality of mental categories can be found in psychological literature on conceptual metaphor, cross-modal correspondences and synesthesia.
4. Aesthetic mixtures: Pairing any quality listed in prediction 1 with any quality listed in prediction 2 generates the structure of a contradictory juxtaposition of differentially exciting qualities, referred to here as a “mixture,” which happens to also be the structure of a common theme or pattern found throughout aesthetic material, so that mixtures make up a large portion of what animals find amusing. The experience of a mixture increases brain temperature moderately, less than that of a combination of more exciting things (e.g., red fluidity) and more than that of a combination of less exciting things (e.g., blue solidness).
5. Aesthetic indifference: The mixtures in prediction 4 effectively predict aesthetic structure regardless of whether they’re made up of direct opposites (e.g., bright~dark, up~down, fluid~solid) or indirect opposites (e.g., up~dark, bright~down, fluid~dark, fluid~down, bright~solid, up~solid). This can be demonstrated by lists of mixtures such as those in Monoaesthetic Mixtures in Language, Culture and Biology.
6. Thermoaesthetic isomorphism: Fluid~solid, dynamic~static, disorder~order, fluid~static, fluid~order, dynamic~solid, dynamic~order, disorder~solid and disorder~static are physical mixtures in the animal brain due to the liquid crystallinity in neuronal membranes, each of which causes a bias in the mind with the same structure as the mixture, and ultimately an isomorphism between physical conditions in the brain and aesthetic phenomena.
7. Sensory aesthetics: Breaking aesthetic material down into its most basic perceptual components, those given in predictions 1 and 2, for example, reveals the high frequency with which it tends to be made up, sequentially or simultaneously, of mixtures of qualities in mental category 1 with those in category 2. Such mixtures occur less frequently in non-aesthetic perceptual material.
8. Aesthetics: Beauty, preferences and aesthetic phenomena are usually explained as side effects of common experiences (in humans), as the direct result of differential survival in populations of ancestors, or as indirect bias/effect pairs that coevolve by chance and/or because they provide indications of genetic survival ability in the context of mate choice. These explanations are usually incorrect. Sensory bias theory, which argues that preexisting sensory system structure serving unrelated purposes gives rise incidentally to preferences that then happen to select for aesthetic phenomena, is the closest hypothesis to that proposed here.
9. Other mixtures: Common aesthetic mixtures also result from the pairing of more recently derived and/or specific opposites such as happy versus sad, life versus death, divine versus mortal, male versus female and others. Aesthetic indifference applies to these mixtures just as it does to those made up of relatively primitive, more general opposites, such that for example there’s some amount of aesthetic value in the juxtaposition of death not just with life (the undead, the afterlife) but with humor (tragicomedy), divinity (deicide) and masculinity (androcide, patricide), more so at least than there is in the combination of death with sadness, mortality and femininity.
10. Universal biases: Mixtures of perceptual opposites are selected for due to universal preferences with structures that match those of the mixtures, both through mate choice in animals generally and in culture by way of universal human inclinations.
11. Preexistence: Sentient animals have always been born with a preexisting ability to understand the difference between the pairs of opposites given in predictions 1 and 2, and with a set of related predilections for mixtures of the these and other opposites.
12. Monoaesthetics: All the specific aesthetic instances of a particular mixture are caused by a single, universal bias in the animal brain favoring that mixture, with the bias having originated prior to the species expressing it.
13. Aesthetic reflex and physical mental representation: Stimuli we recognize as exciting increase physical excitement in the brain, along with its temperature, fluidity, molecular motion and disorder, inducing an elastic-like response and a corresponding psychological desire for opposite, less exciting stimuli, and vice versa. This elasticity is the basis of animal preferences that don't make sense in an adaptive context, and it relies on the densely liquid crystallinity physical state of the brain.
14. Preference evolution and brain softness: Brains evolve to be soft, or liquid crystalline, because being in this condition allows for and facilitates consciousness, sensation and cognition, increasing biological fitness but also, incidentally, introducing biases that select for perceptual moderation and juxtaposition between qualities at opposite ends of the perceptual dimensions defined by sensory abilities. These biases are proximally nonadaptive, but not detrimental enough to be selected against to the point of being eliminated.
15. Temperature and emotion: Otherwise nonsensical popular expressions show that angriness, sexual arousal and other simple types of excitement are related to higher temperature, fluidity, motion and disorder in the mind and brain. Oppositely, low excitement emotions such as indifference and sadness can be shown through linguistic evidence to relate to relative coldness, solidness, stasis and order.
16. Physical realities from psychology: Facts regarding the nature of matter can be discerned from universal psychological associations, regardless of the fact that a person wouldn't necessarily know or care to do so. One could have predicted, for instance, that heat, dynamism and disorder are somehow related in nature based on the fact that we associate them universally with each other, with intense emotions, and with psychological excitement in general. If we were not aware of the way colors are arranged in rainbows, in sunlight split by a prism, the order of the colors could be determined indirectly using the hue-heat effect because red looks slightly warmer than yellow, yellow looks warmer than green, green warmer than blue and so on.
17. Linguistic mixtures: Communication is largely made up of mixtures, or references to perceptual and conceptual phenomena from opposite ends of a spectrum of excitement. This applies to idioms, many of which have an aesthetic origin, to the music-like linguistic alternation between sound and silence and higher and lower pitch in language, and to other alternating or simultaneous references to the mental opposites given in predictions 1 and 2. Repeated random samples of popular expressions or lines of famous poems will contain examples of the predicted mixtures at high rates, and more frequently so in poetry than prose.
18. Mixtures in music: Animal vocalizations evolve to fit biases favoring auditory mixtures of sound with silence, high pitch with low pitch and regularity with randomness, especially under selection by mate choice. This is evident throughout the musical vocalizations of insects, birds, whales, mice, humans and numerous other animals, meaning the biases are independent of brain and body size and form, taxonomic history, and all the other differences between animals with the capacity to hear and sing a song.
19. Mixtures in dance: In dances, by contrast to normal, non-aesthetic activities, animals tend to increase the motion and disorder of the darker, lower, central and inward parts of their bodies more than the brighter, upper, outward and distal parts. These effects, which have the structure of mixtures as defined above, can be seen cross culturally in human dances and interspecifically in animal courtship rituals. As with musicality, differences between animals are irrelevant to the existence of the biases and their effects.
20. Mythical mixtures: The structure of mythical material is largely a reflection of human biases that favor differentially exciting juxtapositions of perceptual and conceptual opposites, such as gods versus death.
21. Learning and knowledge: Popular expressions show that, in the brain, learning is a fluid process and knowledge is like a solid. Learning, novelty, lies and fantasy are automatically thought of as being similar to heat, disorder, motion, upwardness, outwardness and length, while knowledge, truth and reality are thought of as being colder, orderly, still, down, inward and round.
22. Form is boring: Concepts having to do with form are mixed in aesthetic material with those related to excitement, indicating that form belongs to a mental category of less exciting things.
23. Time is boring: Concepts having to do with time are mixed in aesthetic material with those related to excitement, indicating that time belongs to a mental category of less exciting things.
24. Coloration patterns: Sexual selection causes the evolution of widespread patterns in the shape and coloration of animals, regardless of other differences between species. The more dorsal, anterior, distal, protrusive, elongated and dynamic parts of animals tend to evolve through mate choice to be darker, cooler colors, and relatively ventral, posterior, central, inward, round and static parts evolve to be brighter, warmer colors. Resulting from the same process, darker and bluer sections of color on bodies tend to take on more fluid-like, disordered, spiky and fragmented appearances than brighter and redder patches, which become relatively orderly, round, smooth and singular.
25. Thayer’s law: Despite its current interpretation as a cryptic survival adaptation, Thayer’s law is actually a sexually selected effect resulting from universal biases for upward (dorsal) darkness and downward (ventral) brightness. See Thayer (1896) and The Thayer Effect on Pinterest.
26. Gloger’s rule: Animals tend to prefer brighter and warmer colors in colder environments and darker and cooler colors in hotter environments, choosing mates accordingly, and these biases are largely responsible for the ecogeographic effect known as Gloger’s rule. See Gloger (1833).
27. Bouba Kiki: The bouba/kiki effect (Köhler 1970) can be interpreted as a universal association of high pitch (kiki) with spikiness and low pitch (bouba) with roundness. This makes phenomena in which high pitch is coupled with roundness or low pitch with spikiness relatively complicated, contradictory and amusing.
28. Roundness disruption effect: Animals are universally biased to appreciate disruptions of roundness, or the application of more exciting qualities to round things. This bias is responsible for the decoration of round body parts with long, flowing features, such as long hair in humans, and for the way round objects are used in games and sports.
29. Oblong effect: The oblong, slightly spiky shape of eggs, decorative ocelli, flower petals and other aesthetically selected things is a reflection of a corresponding, universal bias in the animal brain for the mixtures long~round and spiky~round. This is a special case of the more general roundness disruption effect.
30. Out~in effect in bodies: Animals find the outward parts of each other's bodies to be more exciting than the inward parts. A preference for mixtures of out and in causes sexual selection favoring bodies that exhibit complex juxtapositions of these qualities. This is why the inward parts of bodies such as mouths, noses and ears tend to be coupled with features expressing outwardness. Inward parts are also coupled with other exciting qualities such as brightness, redness, length and spikiness.
31. Proximity disruption effect: References to relatively exciting perceptual qualities increase between individuals as we approach each other more closely. This also applies to other animals. Proximity disruption is a special case of the inwardness disruption effect.
32. Physical lateralization: Due to differences in plasma membranes, probably in part to differences resulting from lipid (e.g. sphingomyelin) concentration, the left side of the brain is slightly more solid than the right, which is slightly more fluid, resulting in a preference for more exciting qualities to be situated on the right side of the visual field and less exciting qualities on the left. See Pediconi and Barrantes (1990) on phospholipid differences between brain hemispheres.
33. REM and brain heat: Rapid, random eye movements during sleep result from increased heat (molecular disorder and dynamism) in the brain during this sleep phase, and represent an outward, large-scale behavior caused by thermal conditions in neurons.
34. Softness effect: Animals are amused by soft bodily features and objects because they reflect the soft physical consistency as the brain.
35. Personality types: Extroverts, by comparison to introverts, are more tolerant of or amused by more exciting perceptual phenomena, while introverts are more tolerant of or amused by less exciting phenomena. This is due to physical differences in the extrovert versus introvert brain, the former being less excited physically by default than the latter. See Perceptual Excitement and Eysenck’s Mechanism of Personality.