Feel Good When Looking at Pretty Faces? It's Your Brain, Rewarding You
Who hasn't been there? We see a pretty -- or handsome -- face and we can't look away. The reason is pretty obvious. But there's a new one that may take your breath away. It's our brain rewarding us for looking. A quick glimpse of a face provides us with rich information about the person in front of us. Are we acquainted? Man or woman? Happy or angry? Attractive? Research has shown that our visual system is able to direct attention to the most important information in a face. A new study suggests that evolution has made us experts on faces, according to newswise.com. “We are very curious about others’ faces, we read stories in them and evaluate their aesthetic value,” says Olga Chelnokova, writing for her Ph.D thesis at the department of psychology, University of Oslo. Together with colleagues from another research group, she revealed that the brain reward system – a cluster of regions deep in our brain – is involved in our evaluation of other people’s...