The Surma, a pastoral people, originate from the remote plateaus of southwestern Ethiopia, near the border of Sudan. Both males and females of the Surma tribes shave their heads as a mark of beauty. The women wear lip plates; their lower lips are pierced and stretched as ever-larger plates are inserted over time. The larger the plate, the more appealing the woman, and indicates the number of cattle required for her dowry. This plate is worth 75 head of cattle.

Does a Rembrandt portrait or a van Gogh still life press some special buttons in every human being's brain? Will a red painting speak to us in ways a blue one never could? Are we wired in ways that make every one of us enjoy a smiling bust and shiver at a frowning one?

And if our brains determine how art works on us, what does that tell us about art, or us -- could studying the way we're wired determine crisply that the "Mona Lisa" is truly great, or do we need some history to tell us how a complex painting speaks, or not, to all its different viewers?

The Third International Conference on Neuroesthetics, subtitled "Emotions in Art and the Brain," was held earlier this month at the Berkeley Art Museum and tried to get a start at least on answering such questions. It was a showcase for the progress that's been made in figuring out what goes on in the brain when art is seen or made. The fundamental premise of the field, stated by several of the invited speakers, is that every time something out there in the world makes us feel a certain way, it's because some particular bits of our brains are being tickled by it. A close look at a brain (the "neuro" part of the discipline) as it gets lit up by art (the "aesthetics" part) should give us insight into the links that exist between the two.

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union"
-Frank Lloyd Wright

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other." - Frank Lloyd Wright

Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
- Bertrand Russell

In the words of Alan Watts:

"...to watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds... When the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered..."

The most beautiful experiment in physics, according to a poll of Physics World readers, is the interference of single electrons in a Young's double slit.
Others in the top 10 included Galileo's experiments with falling bodies, Millikan's oil-drop experiment and Newton's separation of sunlight with a prism. Young's original double-slit interference experiment with light also appeared in the list

It is the cracks in the bark of trees that lets us know it is a mature and healthy tree, harboring an ecosystem while protecting itself from many of the denizens of the ecosystem.

It is the lines in a persons face that lets us know how much they have laughed, considered carefully, grimaced in their lifetime.

Krishnamurti speaks of our souls each being of the same paper but that which makes us unique is the creases left in the paper from all the folding and unfolding of experience.

Asymmetry could account for a fifth of the variation in romantic jealousy from person to person, says a Canadian researcher.

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.
- M. C. Escher

If you try to make something beautiful, it is often ugly. If you try to make something useful, it is often beautiful.
- Oscar Wilde

The Geometry of Art and Life
Copyright 1977
By Matila Ghyka

The Divine Proportion - A Study in Mathematical Beauty
Copyright 1970
By H. E. Huntley