These instinctive behaviors aren’t conscious acts. They’re spontaneous, irrepressible, and predictable. They’re performed without evident reason, but rather with stimulation. Your beauty detectors, like Doppler radar, are able to scan the environment in real time for signs of an attractive mate and forecast a conclusion about that environment. Your assessments are fast and accurate. For example, you can observe a human face for a fraction of a second and accurately rate its beauty—and what it’s trying to communicate to you, through expressions, nuances, and all kinds of nonverbal signals. Similarly, your appearance affects the first impressions that others have of you. And that first one can be a lasting one.
So how do we make those snap judgments? It all starts with a group of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. That sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Each new number is the sum of the two before it, and the ratio of each number to the one before it approximates the value of phi, or 1.618.* OK, so you may be asking what in the world a group of numbers has to do with the fact that you prefer just a little bit of nicely groomed chest hair. Well, phi is the basis for what’s called the divine proportion or the golden ratio: the ratio of lengths from one element to another is 1.618 to 1 (see Figure A.1). This golden ratio is found throughout nature, from leaves to seed arrangements to conch shells, and it also figures prominently in a list of man’s greatest accomplishments, like the Great Pyramids, the Parthenon, Michelangelo’s David, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The omnipresence of phi throughout our world creates a sense of balance, harmony, and beauty in the designs we see naturally and artificially.
Phi is also a driving force in human attraction—men and women around the globe prefer a mate whose face is symmetrical and follows this ratio. (More than 2,000 years ago, Pythagoras developed a formula for the perfect female face, which included such stats as this one: The ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose should be—tada!—1.618 to 1.) In this part, you’ll see more examples of this on the human body. Now, we’re not suggesting that you move your eyeballs closer together or farther apart if they don’t meet these statistical standards, but we are suggesting that there are many easier options that can make the ratio closer.
Figure A.1 Oh, Rats! The reproductive patterns of animals gave us the formula for beauty. Each generation of life—whether flower petals or lips—reproduce with a predictable ratio. As the proportion of offspring produced increases, the ratio of one block divided by the one before it serves as the foundation for things we perceive as beautiful. So, 5/3 is about 8/5 is about 13/8, or about 1.6—the golden ratio.
Our point: Humans do have universal (and subconscious) standards of beauty—underscoring its importance and the fact that your brain really does make reflexive decisions about people based on appearance that affect every aspect of your life.
There’s a reason why we have to use this reflex—it would take way too much time to assess others if we didn’t have it. Consider this:
Just about every situation we confront in life provides infinitely more inputs than we’re able to process productively. A classic example of this idea is chess. While the game is reasonably well defined and contained, after just ten moves there are literally billions of possibilities to consider for a next move. Assuming we could evaluate these options at a rate of about one per second, it would take about 9,000 years for us to consider all the possibilities. Not only would this make for a really long chess match, it underscores the brain’s need to keep it simple.
Safari Secrets:
Lessons from the animal kingdom
The reason we all look a little different may not be obvious today, but there’s an evolutionary basis for our genetic differences. At first glance, zebra stripes seem like a bull’s-eye for predators. In fact they’re the wild’s greatest camouflage system because predatory animals, which see only in black and white, can’t see zebras standing in the tall grass. Also, zebras blend in with the heat waves coming off the ground, which look alternating black and white against the sand, so they’re especially confusing to the pestering tsetse flies—an example of how an animal’s looks respond to external pressures.
Because of the immense computational complexity and impracticality of processing all the inputs a particular situation presents, the cognitive system has developed a number of mechanisms that limit the number of possibilities that are considered. How? For one, the eye takes in a limited amount of high-quality information (through a part of the eye called the fovea), which is supplemented with lower-quality info as needed. As your eye moves to process the info, it takes in only a fraction of what’s in your horizon. In a constant state of vibration, the eye repeatedly refreshes what it sees (like refreshing web pages). These movements help your brain decide what it is you’re looking at (and without the movements, we’d actually lose our vision because the rods and cones in our eyes respond only to certain changes). So you take some shortcuts and make leaps about what you see; you need cues like beauty and waist-to-hip ratio—things with scientific and universal standards—to make judgments about people. You can’t contemplate 9,000 different nuances in someone’s face in a timely fashion. You keep it simple.
For example, the most information-dense visible area in nature is the human face, so we process a small area of the face and extend our conclusions to the entire surface. The right changes (even if they’re small) can make a huge impact on how you’re perceived. Much of “seeing” someone you know is memory, since we don’t reanalyze an entire face each time.* The richest connection of nerve and muscle density in the body is actually around the larynx (voice box), and the face is second—underscoring how important it is that you read subtle messages through speech and body language. Some argue that growth of the frontal lobe of the brain happened because of these rich connections and our ability to sense and transmit so much information beyond what most animals can.
Your face communicates whether you’re happy, sad, mad, disgusted, surprised, or ready and willing to do the two o’clock tango. Similarly, you receive information about other people through their eyes, their mouth, even their skin. The whole notion of beauty revolves primarily around nature’s hockey masks—either you’ve got a well-designed one or you don’t. Now, the question is: How do we define well-designed?
The theory is that the more symmetrical a face is, the healthier it is. As you can see in Figure A.2, that symmetry is divided into several planes, including horizontally, vertically, around the eyes, around the nose, and so on. The formula for beauty is that precise golden ratio (go ahead and pull out a ruler and a calculator on your next date). The same ratio holds for the width of the cheekbones to the width of the mouth. Scientists also believe that symmetry is equated with a strong immune system—indicating that more robust genes make a person more attractive.
Figure A.2 Divine Ruler Using the golden ratio of 1.6, we judge the beauty of other people’s faces (and other body parts). We use that ratio—subconsciously and reflexively—to decode whether someone’s eyes, face, and body are, in fact, beautiful.
Of course, that’s the element of beauty that you typically can’t control. You have what you were born with. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes—changes to enhance your beauty and, along with it, the way you feel about yourself.
That begs a few very interesting questions about our own beauty. What do you see when you look in the mirror? How do you think others see you? How much of your self-image has been determined not by who you are but by who others think you are? How much has your sense of the outer you influenced the inner you? To some degree your appearance influences how well you do in love, at work, and in life, but most of us feel we don’t measure up. So the question is, should you just accept yourself as you are? Or should you try to improve your appearance? How far should you go? What should you try to improve? Will it make you happier