▶ Narrator : For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to explain beauty. Aristotle said, "Beauty depends on magnitude and order." Confucius said, "I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty." Kant said, "The beautiful is that which pleases universally, without a concept." In the Renaissance, the seeds of an answer were planted when an Italian mathematician named a number the Divine Proportion in a book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. Mathematicians have been fixatedon this number since ancient times, because it kept coming up in geometry. In the 1800s, a German psychologist decided this number was the universal law of beauty, and today it's known in popular culture as the golden ratio, with people claiming to find it in all kinds of human masterpieces all over the world. But, there's a problem with that. ▷ Neuroscientist: When people have tried to study it directly, it's not so clear that everybody responds specifically to the golden rectangle. ================================ philosopher - 철학자 universally - 보편적으로, 일반적으로 the Divine Proportion 신의 비율 1.618 the golden ratio - 황금비율 4:3 fixate - 고정시키다, 고착시키다, fixate on - (병적으로)집착하게 하다, 주의를 집중하다
▶ Narrator: Study after study has found little evidence that people are especially drawn to rectangles with this exact proportion. We do like rectangles though. It's the best flowing configuration for images from plane to brain. As in, the fastest shape our brains can process. Pleasant to look at because it's easy on the eyes. And many scientists today believe the reason for this boils down to survival. More than 150 million years ago, dinosaurs dominated the Earth. But to understand how humans see the world, you have to look down at the dinosaur's feet. That's where our ancestors, small shrew-like mammals, spent their time and they had a pretty dimview of the world. They perceived just two colors : blue and red. They were also nocturnal to evade their better-seeing predators and constantly scanned their environment horizontally. And that may be the simple reason we make so many things in that shape today. Visual beauty is based in vision, of course, and our vision evolved because it helped us survive. When the dinosaurs went extinct, our ancestors came out into the light. And over time, their eyes developed, opening up all the colors of the rainbow we know today. And many things we're still visually drawn to are things that helped our ancestors survive. Flowers indicated that something might turn into fruit. Water sources signal the possible bounty of nourishment. And places of refuge helped us evade predators. We still like landscapes that resemble where early humans evolved. ============================================
