Beauty and the Brain

Last night I was outside when it became apparent that it was going to rain. I started noticing how the cloud cover caused the color of everything outside to look as if someone had taken a huge Prismacolor marker to it. It was beautiful.


I started thinking, "man, I wish I had a camera so I could share this with others." Then, for some strange reason, I began to wonder about beauty, or the things I that I think are beautiful. It occured to me that I could have taken a thousand pictures of the sky that day, or of the trees or anything else I saw, and maybe no one else would have found them to be beautiful or significant or even interesting. I started to question whether or not the amazingly bright colors that appealed to me so much, would have the same effect on anyone else. What would they see?


Would they feel like they were standing in the midst of a surreal environment provided by the technicolor magic of the movies where things typically look way more beautiful than they truly are? Or would they notice anything at all? This led me to wonder about the brain functions and chemicals that are responsible for perception. Do they function differently in everyone to determine what we individually find beautiful? Or do we all see essentially the same things? This may seem trivial, but it's just a small example of the random things I think about. I don't even know if any of this makes sense and I'm finding stream of consciousness thoughts difficult to put into writing...