How We See and Feel Through the Eyes of our Brain

     Studying the brain and its behavior, I read many different articles of how the brain creates, processes, and, most importantly, feels. Looking at two specific video assessments over the brain, I was overwhelmingly fascinated by about how the brain works, and I still cannot get a grip on it. In Anjan Chatterjee's "How your brain decides what is beautiful," and Rebecca Saxe's "How we read each other's minds," both of these speakers discuss the brain's ability to express itself  through desire, sympathy, and many other powerful emotions.
     In Chatterjee's speech, he discusses the connection our brain makes when each individual person sees beauty. Some observed factors over the years stretch from the likes of having a symmetrical face/body to a preference of the stereotypical looking man/woman, and just simple hormones. In our brain, there are actual parts which are specifically activated when we see beauty. Our vision center connects with hormones that signify pleasure, our minds then setting off this universal feeling of attraction. Anjan also states, after conducting multiple tests, people do not necessarily even have to be thinking or focusing on something "beautiful" for the brain to trigger a sense of pleasure. An observed group were shown different pictures of people and asked if they were the same. Even though their brains were focusing on the question, pleasure hormones were still activated by just seeing what their brains thought of as beautiful. Anjan then goes on to talk about the negative side of our mind's relation to beauty, how people who have deformities or are not translated as beautiful are often looked at as less important, dishonest, and even bad. A man by the name of Sir Francis Galton did an experiment to decipher this idea of beauty, compiling a bunch of photos of criminals and putting them together to make a new face. Thinking he would see the true face of a criminal, he ended up being astonished by the fact that these criminals had made such a beautiful man. 
    
Sir Francis Galton's compilation of Criminals

     Moving onto Rebecca Saxe, Saxe talks about how the brain can process the actions, feelings, and generally the lives of others. Using an example from the video, Saxe describes how, when we see certain pictures or settings of human lives, a certain part in our brain called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction (RTPJ) actually processes the beliefs, feelings, and states of other minds. As we grow, this part of our brain grows as well, helping people learn and improve what they understand about reasoning for other people's decisions/ actions. In the video, Saxe uses children of three different ages (3, 5, and 7) to test this. All children are told the same story and asked the same questions, but each child's answers is different, the oldest child being the most logical as the youngest just beginning to understand the reasoning behind the situation. A similar test was also done with adults, which are almost at max, if not, with the formation of their RTPJ. There were multiple different answers, indicating how humans are very complex when it comes to their beliefs. There was also a test done where a magnetic pulse was used to actually distort the RTPJ, changing people's previous answers.

     To conclude, this may only be one small part out of the hundreds of different abilities in the brain, but the nonetheless a humungous contributing factor to who we are and our everyday lives. It blows my mind how this one little part of us can have such an impact on everything that makes us human. How a tiny organ in our head gives us the ability to love, understand, create, and manifest in all that we do. The brain is a crazy and complex community that works together and strives to be more and more. I am happy to say that I have a brain, and I am going to use it.      

Sources:
 https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments#t-169625

https://www.ted.com/talks/anjan_chatterjee_how_your_brain_decides_what_is_beautiful#t-73325