Search
1000 results for “my_actual_brain”
-
Tues. Dec. 30, 2025: In That Liminal Space
image courtesy of Mike Dubyna via pixabay.comTuesday, December 30, 2025
Waxing Moon
Chiron, Uranus, Jupiter Retrograde
Cloudy and very cold
Welcome to a new week and, in a couple of days, a new year!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is up here. It’s our last week using the Yuletide Tarot. Next week, we switch decks.
If you haven’t had a chance to look over the 2026 questions on the Goals, Dreams, and Resolutions site, you can do so here.
Over the past few weeks, I decided on a title for Nina Bell #6, which will be a collection of novellas covering a specific span of time. None of what happens in that span is enough to sustain an entire book, but it’s all important for her character arc (and those of some other core characters). So I decided to do five shorter pieces, ending in one that will be longer and somewhat disturbing, but is an important catalyst for future arcs. The title is MURDEROUS INTERLUDES, at least at the moment, and the cover designer showed me some roughs.
Nina #3 is VICIOUS CRITIC, Nina #4 is BUT IS SHE A BETTING MAN? (set in Saratoga Springs, during racing season), and Nina #5 is STAGE FALL, set off-Broadway that following fall. MURDEROUS INTERLUDES takes us through that next holiday season into the spring.
That will keep me busy for the foreseeable future!
I mean, if the sales don’t sustain, that changes everything, but sales for the first two books continue to grow. I can’t retire on them or anything, but right now they are sustainable. I hope that VICIOUS CRITIC will build on that, so I can keep writing this series. The Topic Workbooks are holding steady, and I’ll know how the holiday shorts did by early February. The last couple of months, when I’ve been consistent in the marketing, I’ve noticed the difference.
Consistency, be it in the writing or the marketing, is key. I mean, I know that, but I dropped the ball on a few things the last years, for many different reasons (like illness and moving and life chaos and elder care). I need to get back on track in a way that is sustainable balanced with other freelance work and energy levels.
I find that consistency in the morning yoga, meditation, and early morning writing practices help a lot in the actual workday. There are definitely days I consider skipping one or more elements of that, but I’m always glad when I don’t.
I will also explore some other marketing possibilities this coming year, and additional distribution outlets. I’m developing my own marketing style, that has very little to do with what the “experts” claim works. It takes longer, because it’s gentler and more personal, but I think it works better for what I do in the long run.
Someone whose posts I often enjoyed on Instagram boasted about asking ChatGPT to “read her astrological chart” so I unfollowed. Nope. Don’t pretend that AI/ChatGPT has a spiritual connection or ethical spiritual usage. It’s theft and harm on multiple levels. Don’t pretend you care about consent, art, spirituality, or the environment if you use it. I will unfollow, block if necessary, disengage. I’ve distanced myself from several people I know in real life who use it, and will continue to do so.
Got out of the house and to the grocery store. Did a small shop, but still spent more than I hoped (just like everyone else dealing with grocery prices). My fishmonger refused to sell me trout on Friday, saying it wasn’t fresh enough anymore, and she was about to pull it from the case. I got flounder instead, and she promised to have a nice cut of salmon for me on New Year’s Eve, when I’ll pick up the salmon we need for that night’s meal.
As I said last week, always make friends with your fishmonger!
We don’t need much until the big meals around New Year’s – we’ll be eating leftovers in the liminal week. I got duck breast for the Day. There weren’t any whole ducks (and I doubt they’d have been in my budget if there had been – I lucked out last year to find one on deep discount). We won’t have a lot of leftovers with this (we might not have any), but it will still be “duck on the Day” which is a tradition I like, when I can pull it off. This duck breast was at the top of my budget for the meal, but still within it, and was the last thing I need for the Day’s meal, except maybe another orange for the sauce, so we’re all good.
I was kind of shocked that they were selling a bony goose carcass for $107, post-Christmas. Um?
I know goose is more expensive than other poultry, but that seems rather. . .absurd.
Besides, the Coq au Vin was delightful and we have leftovers. So many leftovers, some went into the freezer.
On a whim, on the way home, I stopped at a thrift store I regularly visit. There was a silver-looking teapot with a gorgeous, ornate fruit top, for less than $3. Handling it, I think it’s more likely to be pewter than silver, but it’s pretty. I also a good quality 10” pan with a lid in perfect shape (for less than $5) to replace a pan of ours that has lived its life and needs to retire. The tired pan was bought around 2000, I think, at Lechter’s or something. It’s done its job. We have an older 10” pan, copper-bottomed, from the 1960’s that’s still in great shape (when they made things to last) and we use all the time, but we often need two pans of that size going at once.
Would I love to live in a place big enough for a six-burner stove? Why, yes, I would, but I manage with four. A double oven would also make my life easier, but we make do.
I couldn’t stand the thought of boxed mac and cheese (even the organic ones I sometimes buy for lunch options), so I found an easy sauce recipe, cut it in half, and made myself simplified mac and cheese for lunch, by cooking some elbow pasta, making a small portion of the sauce, and tossing in some pancetta. I will make a big pan of Moosewood mac and cheese at some point in January, but that was too much for me to do for lunch. This recipe was okay, but not brilliant. If I make it again, I will tweak it with some herbs and spices. It was still better than boxed, though.
I have no memory of what I did after lunch. Puttered, maybe? Read a little? Played with cats? Caught up on Instagram with friends? Not a darned clue. I remember, at one point, Tessa was in one wingback chair sleeping, my mom was in her chair reading, I was on the sofa reading, with Charlotte on my lap and Bea on the back of the sofa. The only one missing was Willa, who was asleep on my mother’s bed.
I was glad to get things done early, since the storm warnings intensified to the point where shops and restaurants started closing in the afternoon, to make sure their people could get home. Which is a great choice.
I made the parsnip and pear puree from SILVER PALATE GOOD TIMES Cookbook. I was both intrigued and worried about it. I like parsnips, I like pears, but how could they possibly come together? It was either going to be good or awful.
There was peeling and chopping involved, of course. The parsnips cooked in one pot, while I simmered the pears in butter and brandy in another. Once I drained the cooked parsnips, they went back in the pan with the pear mush (it had cooked down to mush) and added salt, pepper, and allspice. It cooled a bit while I steamed the peas and breaded the flounder to cook.
While the flounder was doing its thing (in the new pan, which works very well), I put the parsnip and pear mixture into the food processor with sour cream, processed it, and then returned it to the pan to warm through.
Throughout the whole process, I could not figure out what it would taste like. Even tasting bits as it cooked, I couldn’t prepare my brain for what my mouth would experience.
Fortunately, it’s good. Strange, but good. The fish was a little delicate with it. I think it needs something more robust. The bison would have been a good pairing with it. We have a lot left over, and I wonder what it will taste like cold (it could be used as a spread). I could imagine it on a toasted roll with cold, sliced leftover bison. Only we ate all the bison. But the butcher carries it regularly, and the price isn’t bad, relatively, in relation to a lot of other stuff. It’s certainly at a better price than the goose! So we will see.
I bought a different brand of flavored bread crumb, and regretted it. The flavoring was off, and the consistency of the crumbs was like gravel. That’ll teach me. I’ll go back to my preferred brand when I use these up. Until then, I will have to toss them in the food processor with some fresh herbs whenever I want to use them. So that I can use them up, because I can’t justify just tossing them.
I started reading THE MOTHER TONGUE by Bill Bryson in the evening, about the evolution of the English language. It’s very interesting, and made me realize how much I didn’t know. It’s a little too dry for me right now, so I switched over to WORDHORD by Hanna Videen, which is very lively. And she has an Instagram account, which is fun. Speaking of IG, if you’re not following Medievalist Matt, I highly recommend that account. I learn a lot, and it’s also hilarious. It was snowing quite hard by the time I went to bed, and very pretty.
Slept okay. Woke up around 1 AM after a disturbing dream (sigh, February will be a challenge), because my bad hip hurt. Rolled it out on a tennis ball, the way my acupuncturist taught me way back when, until it stopped grumbling and I could sleep again.
Up at the usual time. Morning routine. Quite a bit of snow, everything muffled and quiet, which was a lovely way to spend morning yoga and meditation. By the time I wrote, the plows were out.
I put in a Chewy order for both wet and dry food. Those little monsters eat a lot, especially in winter. We are still okay for a couple of weeks, but I prefer to have the food here, ready to go, especially with storms coming through regularly. The delivery last week was for the special wet food Willa and Bea get on Sundays.
I did the backing, filling, and quilting on “Vast.” I’m still worried it looks like a giant potholder, and considered pulling it from the show. But I worked the text portion of the piece, and (for once) I’m happy with a poem I wrote. I worked it enough in my head over the weeks, forming it as I formed the textile piece, that the text is where I want it, even if I am unsure about the textile. And hey, with over forty artists in the show, my little piece won’t be noticed!
It’s more abstract that I originally envisioned, but the text supports the changes. I considered adding embellishments to hide the flaws, but I think the simpler I keep it, the better. It won’t be for sale. The whole reason I’m part of the gallery this year is to push myself to experiment, and put those experiments out there.
I found a pattern for inseam pockets that I downloaded and printed out. I usually don’t use PDF patterns, it’s too much of a pain to print them properly. But a pocket is small enough to print, even a decent-sized pocket. And anything I sew in the future with side seams will get an inseam pocket, if at all possible.
The sewing machine was giving me fits. I need to find a place to get it serviced. I’m planning far too much sewing in the coming months to have to deal with what’s going on with it. And yes, it’s not the right machine to use for heavy, quilting work. It’s meant for clothing, even though it’s called a “huskystar.” I’ll ask the Studios where they get their machines serviced, and maybe over at SavvyHive, since they are now doing mending and alterations. I don’t mind hiking over to Bennington or Pittsfield, but I don’t want to go all the way over to Troy or Albany.
The psychological distance to Albany is much greater than the actual, physical distance. Once I have my new tires, I’ll probably feel more comfortable with longer drives.
I got some reading done later in the day, and dealt with some extended family stuff around an unsolved murder from nearly 40 years ago. I found some articles and some information I’d suspected, but didn’t know, and that a family member has tried to get the case some attention in the last few years. The whole situation just makes me so sad.
I dug the back of the car out and set down some sand. I left the snow on the windows and roof to protect the car.
Heated up some Coq Au Vin leftovers, which were really good, and read more at night. Because, you know, this time of year is for reading. (In this house, every time of year is for reading).
Slept reasonably well, although I woke up at 2 AM after a disturbing dream that makes me want to skip March (the dream for that night is tied to March). I fell back asleep, and then didn’t want to get up when Tessa woke me a few hours later. I did, however, have a breakthrough in “Body Games” that fixes where I got stuck. It was as though I had to finish “Vast” before I could breakthrough in “Body Games” (the historical mystery).
I finally got up, did the morning routine, did the Community Tarot Reading for the Week. As I was sorting through files in preparation to get back to “Body Games” I came across a garbled early draft of STAGE FALL. It’s garbled not just because it’s a first draft, but because it was from a different type of file and didn’t properly convert.
STAGE FALL was originally going to be the second Nina Bell mystery. It’s now the fifth, which means a lot has to change as far as arcs that have been established and growing in the interim. The bones of it are there. The show against which it is set was, again, at a theatre inspired by the Orpheum, as was the theatre in VICIOUS. I have to decide if I want to keep it there, or move it to someplace inspired by the Variety Arts, or a different theatre than the one in VICIOUS. It would make sense to work a different show at the same theatre, but maybe I should move it to a different theatre. I do, however, have to plant something in BETTING that I can pull through in STAGE FALL and beyond, or it won’t make sense. I want Nina to start working as a swing dresser on Broadway after the summer theatre/Edinburgh books after MURDEROUS INTERLUDES, so it makes sense to have STAGE FALL be at a different theatre than VICIOUS, still off-Broadway, to give a richer sense of the different theatres.
Finished “Body Games” and several revision/editing passes. It’s finally where I want it. I was just about ready to give up on it.
Stitched and attached the hanging loop and ribbon for “Vast.” Fixed the last two lines of the text portion, printed it out (in Calibri), and put that aside, ready to go. The Chewy order arrived, which was unexpected, so quickly. Cats should have full bellies until the end of February.
Read a bit, heated up the pork leftovers, which were very good. Heated up some parsnip-and-pear puree, and I was right, it’s better with a denser protein for balance.
A friend gave us a box of rose and violet creams. There are a set of rose creams, and a set of violet creams. These are to eat, encased in chocolate, not cream like you put on your body. They’re beautifully wrapped in rose and violet foils, too. It’s such an interesting sensation to taste something one is used to smelling. Smell and taste are closely connected. Often, when I smell a rose, there’s also a hint of a taste. Eating a rose cream, the taste hits first, and much more of it, and then there’s a hint of scent. And the taste of the violet is much stronger than the scent, unless you have a big bunch of them. They’re really good, but very different from a typical edible treat.
Between the floral cream candies and the parsnip-and-pear, it’s been a very sensory holiday, which is lovely.
Slept well, although I woke up around 3:30 from a nice dream about cooking and cookware. So I guess April is all about cooking.
I finally got up, a little after 5, much to Tessa’s glee. I had the whole morning routine done by just past 7 AM, and was at my desk. I figured out some layering I want to do in a scene of “Body Games” before I sent it off.
It was bucketing down with rain, so I decided to wait until late morning to do my errands, which were only a library run and dropping “Vast” off at the gallery.
I did some tweaks, tightening, and layering on “Body Games” and a proofreading pass, and off it went. I doubt there’s much set in this time period (I don’t think I’ve ever read a mystery set during the era, although I’ve heard of CHOCOLATE HOUSE TREASON). I hope the balance of period detail without overexplaining, character arcs, and mystery is interesting enough for them to want it.
I also got out a play submission.
In this liminal time, I’ve intentionally tried to keep away from That Thing’s putrid existence as much as possible. I’m aware of the escalating issues, but I’m giving myself a necessary break.
By late morning, it was still bucketing down. I suited up, brushed the last of the wet snow off the car’s windshield, and headed out. I did a drop-off/pick up at the library, and also checked out some large print books for my mom, who’d run out. I have a few things in transit, so we’ll see when they come in.
Then, I headed down to the gallery. Much to my delight, my friend Jane was there at the same time for her drop-off, along with a new member we will get to know over the course of the year. We got in, filled out our forms, and lined up our pieces neatly. We are all worried about how this rain would freeze overnight, and it’s supposed to snow, on and off, until New Year’s Day. We may have to skate back for the opening on Friday. The weekend after my workshop, Jane is offering tarot readings, so I offered to be a back-up person and help wrangle querants, so she can focus on the readings. She doesn’t think there will be many people; I do. And if there’s a lull, we can chat and catch up!
Good thing I hadn’t gone out to the laundromat Monday morning – they’re digging up the street in front of it again, which means I couldn’t go this morning, either. I don’t like going into the New Year with dirty laundry, but this year, I will have to get over myself. We have enough clean everythings to start the new year fresh.
Soup for lunch on a dreary day, and a quiet afternoon of ghostwriting, reading, research, working on the GDR questions.
Heated up leftover pasta for dinner. Charlotte was delighted to get some freshly grated pasta.
The first box of books for the contest arrived. Usually, it’s a huge box. This batch is tiny, with only a few novellas. The bulk of the books are digital this year. I will get started on this batch, both print and digital, next week.
The rain had changed over to snow, and it was snowing steadily by the time I went to bed. It was harsh and cold when I woke up this morning. Morning routine was good, especially the writing session. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but I woke up feeling pretty decent and calm, so I hope that sets a good tone for May.
On today’s agenda: write the opening for BETTING MAN, pop it into the end of VICIOUS, and send it off to my editor. Then, I work on the outline for BETTING MAN before I switch over to the ghostwriting, which I will do until I leave for yoga.
At some point, I will also finish the next book for review. I’d like to get that written and out tomorrow.
Have a good one – we are almost at year’s end! Hang in there.
#3 #4 #5 #6 #art #cooking #freelance #liminalSpaceBetweenYears #NinaBellMysteries #planning #shortStories
-
Tues. Dec. 30, 2025: In That Liminal Space
image courtesy of Mike Dubyna via pixabay.comTuesday, December 30, 2025
Waxing Moon
Chiron, Uranus, Jupiter Retrograde
Cloudy and very cold
Welcome to a new week and, in a couple of days, a new year!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is up here. It’s our last week using the Yuletide Tarot. Next week, we switch decks.
If you haven’t had a chance to look over the 2026 questions on the Goals, Dreams, and Resolutions site, you can do so here.
Over the past few weeks, I decided on a title for Nina Bell #6, which will be a collection of novellas covering a specific span of time. None of what happens in that span is enough to sustain an entire book, but it’s all important for her character arc (and those of some other core characters). So I decided to do five shorter pieces, ending in one that will be longer and somewhat disturbing, but is an important catalyst for future arcs. The title is MURDEROUS INTERLUDES, at least at the moment, and the cover designer showed me some roughs.
Nina #3 is VICIOUS CRITIC, Nina #4 is BUT IS SHE A BETTING MAN? (set in Saratoga Springs, during racing season), and Nina #5 is STAGE FALL, set off-Broadway that following fall. MURDEROUS INTERLUDES takes us through that next holiday season into the spring.
That will keep me busy for the foreseeable future!
I mean, if the sales don’t sustain, that changes everything, but sales for the first two books continue to grow. I can’t retire on them or anything, but right now they are sustainable. I hope that VICIOUS CRITIC will build on that, so I can keep writing this series. The Topic Workbooks are holding steady, and I’ll know how the holiday shorts did by early February. The last couple of months, when I’ve been consistent in the marketing, I’ve noticed the difference.
Consistency, be it in the writing or the marketing, is key. I mean, I know that, but I dropped the ball on a few things the last years, for many different reasons (like illness and moving and life chaos and elder care). I need to get back on track in a way that is sustainable balanced with other freelance work and energy levels.
I find that consistency in the morning yoga, meditation, and early morning writing practices help a lot in the actual workday. There are definitely days I consider skipping one or more elements of that, but I’m always glad when I don’t.
I will also explore some other marketing possibilities this coming year, and additional distribution outlets. I’m developing my own marketing style, that has very little to do with what the “experts” claim works. It takes longer, because it’s gentler and more personal, but I think it works better for what I do in the long run.
Someone whose posts I often enjoyed on Instagram boasted about asking ChatGPT to “read her astrological chart” so I unfollowed. Nope. Don’t pretend that AI/ChatGPT has a spiritual connection or ethical spiritual usage. It’s theft and harm on multiple levels. Don’t pretend you care about consent, art, spirituality, or the environment if you use it. I will unfollow, block if necessary, disengage. I’ve distanced myself from several people I know in real life who use it, and will continue to do so.
Got out of the house and to the grocery store. Did a small shop, but still spent more than I hoped (just like everyone else dealing with grocery prices). My fishmonger refused to sell me trout on Friday, saying it wasn’t fresh enough anymore, and she was about to pull it from the case. I got flounder instead, and she promised to have a nice cut of salmon for me on New Year’s Eve, when I’ll pick up the salmon we need for that night’s meal.
As I said last week, always make friends with your fishmonger!
We don’t need much until the big meals around New Year’s – we’ll be eating leftovers in the liminal week. I got duck breast for the Day. There weren’t any whole ducks (and I doubt they’d have been in my budget if there had been – I lucked out last year to find one on deep discount). We won’t have a lot of leftovers with this (we might not have any), but it will still be “duck on the Day” which is a tradition I like, when I can pull it off. This duck breast was at the top of my budget for the meal, but still within it, and was the last thing I need for the Day’s meal, except maybe another orange for the sauce, so we’re all good.
I was kind of shocked that they were selling a bony goose carcass for $107, post-Christmas. Um?
I know goose is more expensive than other poultry, but that seems rather. . .absurd.
Besides, the Coq au Vin was delightful and we have leftovers. So many leftovers, some went into the freezer.
On a whim, on the way home, I stopped at a thrift store I regularly visit. There was a silver-looking teapot with a gorgeous, ornate fruit top, for less than $3. Handling it, I think it’s more likely to be pewter than silver, but it’s pretty. I also a good quality 10” pan with a lid in perfect shape (for less than $5) to replace a pan of ours that has lived its life and needs to retire. The tired pan was bought around 2000, I think, at Lechter’s or something. It’s done its job. We have an older 10” pan, copper-bottomed, from the 1960’s that’s still in great shape (when they made things to last) and we use all the time, but we often need two pans of that size going at once.
Would I love to live in a place big enough for a six-burner stove? Why, yes, I would, but I manage with four. A double oven would also make my life easier, but we make do.
I couldn’t stand the thought of boxed mac and cheese (even the organic ones I sometimes buy for lunch options), so I found an easy sauce recipe, cut it in half, and made myself simplified mac and cheese for lunch, by cooking some elbow pasta, making a small portion of the sauce, and tossing in some pancetta. I will make a big pan of Moosewood mac and cheese at some point in January, but that was too much for me to do for lunch. This recipe was okay, but not brilliant. If I make it again, I will tweak it with some herbs and spices. It was still better than boxed, though.
I have no memory of what I did after lunch. Puttered, maybe? Read a little? Played with cats? Caught up on Instagram with friends? Not a darned clue. I remember, at one point, Tessa was in one wingback chair sleeping, my mom was in her chair reading, I was on the sofa reading, with Charlotte on my lap and Bea on the back of the sofa. The only one missing was Willa, who was asleep on my mother’s bed.
I was glad to get things done early, since the storm warnings intensified to the point where shops and restaurants started closing in the afternoon, to make sure their people could get home. Which is a great choice.
I made the parsnip and pear puree from SILVER PALATE GOOD TIMES Cookbook. I was both intrigued and worried about it. I like parsnips, I like pears, but how could they possibly come together? It was either going to be good or awful.
There was peeling and chopping involved, of course. The parsnips cooked in one pot, while I simmered the pears in butter and brandy in another. Once I drained the cooked parsnips, they went back in the pan with the pear mush (it had cooked down to mush) and added salt, pepper, and allspice. It cooled a bit while I steamed the peas and breaded the flounder to cook.
While the flounder was doing its thing (in the new pan, which works very well), I put the parsnip and pear mixture into the food processor with sour cream, processed it, and then returned it to the pan to warm through.
Throughout the whole process, I could not figure out what it would taste like. Even tasting bits as it cooked, I couldn’t prepare my brain for what my mouth would experience.
Fortunately, it’s good. Strange, but good. The fish was a little delicate with it. I think it needs something more robust. The bison would have been a good pairing with it. We have a lot left over, and I wonder what it will taste like cold (it could be used as a spread). I could imagine it on a toasted roll with cold, sliced leftover bison. Only we ate all the bison. But the butcher carries it regularly, and the price isn’t bad, relatively, in relation to a lot of other stuff. It’s certainly at a better price than the goose! So we will see.
I bought a different brand of flavored bread crumb, and regretted it. The flavoring was off, and the consistency of the crumbs was like gravel. That’ll teach me. I’ll go back to my preferred brand when I use these up. Until then, I will have to toss them in the food processor with some fresh herbs whenever I want to use them. So that I can use them up, because I can’t justify just tossing them.
I started reading THE MOTHER TONGUE by Bill Bryson in the evening, about the evolution of the English language. It’s very interesting, and made me realize how much I didn’t know. It’s a little too dry for me right now, so I switched over to WORDHORD by Hanna Videen, which is very lively. And she has an Instagram account, which is fun. Speaking of IG, if you’re not following Medievalist Matt, I highly recommend that account. I learn a lot, and it’s also hilarious. It was snowing quite hard by the time I went to bed, and very pretty.
Slept okay. Woke up around 1 AM after a disturbing dream (sigh, February will be a challenge), because my bad hip hurt. Rolled it out on a tennis ball, the way my acupuncturist taught me way back when, until it stopped grumbling and I could sleep again.
Up at the usual time. Morning routine. Quite a bit of snow, everything muffled and quiet, which was a lovely way to spend morning yoga and meditation. By the time I wrote, the plows were out.
I put in a Chewy order for both wet and dry food. Those little monsters eat a lot, especially in winter. We are still okay for a couple of weeks, but I prefer to have the food here, ready to go, especially with storms coming through regularly. The delivery last week was for the special wet food Willa and Bea get on Sundays.
I did the backing, filling, and quilting on “Vast.” I’m still worried it looks like a giant potholder, and considered pulling it from the show. But I worked the text portion of the piece, and (for once) I’m happy with a poem I wrote. I worked it enough in my head over the weeks, forming it as I formed the textile piece, that the text is where I want it, even if I am unsure about the textile. And hey, with over forty artists in the show, my little piece won’t be noticed!
It’s more abstract that I originally envisioned, but the text supports the changes. I considered adding embellishments to hide the flaws, but I think the simpler I keep it, the better. It won’t be for sale. The whole reason I’m part of the gallery this year is to push myself to experiment, and put those experiments out there.
I found a pattern for inseam pockets that I downloaded and printed out. I usually don’t use PDF patterns, it’s too much of a pain to print them properly. But a pocket is small enough to print, even a decent-sized pocket. And anything I sew in the future with side seams will get an inseam pocket, if at all possible.
The sewing machine was giving me fits. I need to find a place to get it serviced. I’m planning far too much sewing in the coming months to have to deal with what’s going on with it. And yes, it’s not the right machine to use for heavy, quilting work. It’s meant for clothing, even though it’s called a “huskystar.” I’ll ask the Studios where they get their machines serviced, and maybe over at SavvyHive, since they are now doing mending and alterations. I don’t mind hiking over to Bennington or Pittsfield, but I don’t want to go all the way over to Troy or Albany.
The psychological distance to Albany is much greater than the actual, physical distance. Once I have my new tires, I’ll probably feel more comfortable with longer drives.
I got some reading done later in the day, and dealt with some extended family stuff around an unsolved murder from nearly 40 years ago. I found some articles and some information I’d suspected, but didn’t know, and that a family member has tried to get the case some attention in the last few years. The whole situation just makes me so sad.
I dug the back of the car out and set down some sand. I left the snow on the windows and roof to protect the car.
Heated up some Coq Au Vin leftovers, which were really good, and read more at night. Because, you know, this time of year is for reading. (In this house, every time of year is for reading).
Slept reasonably well, although I woke up at 2 AM after a disturbing dream that makes me want to skip March (the dream for that night is tied to March). I fell back asleep, and then didn’t want to get up when Tessa woke me a few hours later. I did, however, have a breakthrough in “Body Games” that fixes where I got stuck. It was as though I had to finish “Vast” before I could breakthrough in “Body Games” (the historical mystery).
I finally got up, did the morning routine, did the Community Tarot Reading for the Week. As I was sorting through files in preparation to get back to “Body Games” I came across a garbled early draft of STAGE FALL. It’s garbled not just because it’s a first draft, but because it was from a different type of file and didn’t properly convert.
STAGE FALL was originally going to be the second Nina Bell mystery. It’s now the fifth, which means a lot has to change as far as arcs that have been established and growing in the interim. The bones of it are there. The show against which it is set was, again, at a theatre inspired by the Orpheum, as was the theatre in VICIOUS. I have to decide if I want to keep it there, or move it to someplace inspired by the Variety Arts, or a different theatre than the one in VICIOUS. It would make sense to work a different show at the same theatre, but maybe I should move it to a different theatre. I do, however, have to plant something in BETTING that I can pull through in STAGE FALL and beyond, or it won’t make sense. I want Nina to start working as a swing dresser on Broadway after the summer theatre/Edinburgh books after MURDEROUS INTERLUDES, so it makes sense to have STAGE FALL be at a different theatre than VICIOUS, still off-Broadway, to give a richer sense of the different theatres.
Finished “Body Games” and several revision/editing passes. It’s finally where I want it. I was just about ready to give up on it.
Stitched and attached the hanging loop and ribbon for “Vast.” Fixed the last two lines of the text portion, printed it out (in Calibri), and put that aside, ready to go. The Chewy order arrived, which was unexpected, so quickly. Cats should have full bellies until the end of February.
Read a bit, heated up the pork leftovers, which were very good. Heated up some parsnip-and-pear puree, and I was right, it’s better with a denser protein for balance.
A friend gave us a box of rose and violet creams. There are a set of rose creams, and a set of violet creams. These are to eat, encased in chocolate, not cream like you put on your body. They’re beautifully wrapped in rose and violet foils, too. It’s such an interesting sensation to taste something one is used to smelling. Smell and taste are closely connected. Often, when I smell a rose, there’s also a hint of a taste. Eating a rose cream, the taste hits first, and much more of it, and then there’s a hint of scent. And the taste of the violet is much stronger than the scent, unless you have a big bunch of them. They’re really good, but very different from a typical edible treat.
Between the floral cream candies and the parsnip-and-pear, it’s been a very sensory holiday, which is lovely.
Slept well, although I woke up around 3:30 from a nice dream about cooking and cookware. So I guess April is all about cooking.
I finally got up, a little after 5, much to Tessa’s glee. I had the whole morning routine done by just past 7 AM, and was at my desk. I figured out some layering I want to do in a scene of “Body Games” before I sent it off.
It was bucketing down with rain, so I decided to wait until late morning to do my errands, which were only a library run and dropping “Vast” off at the gallery.
I did some tweaks, tightening, and layering on “Body Games” and a proofreading pass, and off it went. I doubt there’s much set in this time period (I don’t think I’ve ever read a mystery set during the era, although I’ve heard of CHOCOLATE HOUSE TREASON). I hope the balance of period detail without overexplaining, character arcs, and mystery is interesting enough for them to want it.
I also got out a play submission.
In this liminal time, I’ve intentionally tried to keep away from That Thing’s putrid existence as much as possible. I’m aware of the escalating issues, but I’m giving myself a necessary break.
By late morning, it was still bucketing down. I suited up, brushed the last of the wet snow off the car’s windshield, and headed out. I did a drop-off/pick up at the library, and also checked out some large print books for my mom, who’d run out. I have a few things in transit, so we’ll see when they come in.
Then, I headed down to the gallery. Much to my delight, my friend Jane was there at the same time for her drop-off, along with a new member we will get to know over the course of the year. We got in, filled out our forms, and lined up our pieces neatly. We are all worried about how this rain would freeze overnight, and it’s supposed to snow, on and off, until New Year’s Day. We may have to skate back for the opening on Friday. The weekend after my workshop, Jane is offering tarot readings, so I offered to be a back-up person and help wrangle querants, so she can focus on the readings. She doesn’t think there will be many people; I do. And if there’s a lull, we can chat and catch up!
Good thing I hadn’t gone out to the laundromat Monday morning – they’re digging up the street in front of it again, which means I couldn’t go this morning, either. I don’t like going into the New Year with dirty laundry, but this year, I will have to get over myself. We have enough clean everythings to start the new year fresh.
Soup for lunch on a dreary day, and a quiet afternoon of ghostwriting, reading, research, working on the GDR questions.
Heated up leftover pasta for dinner. Charlotte was delighted to get some freshly grated pasta.
The first box of books for the contest arrived. Usually, it’s a huge box. This batch is tiny, with only a few novellas. The bulk of the books are digital this year. I will get started on this batch, both print and digital, next week.
The rain had changed over to snow, and it was snowing steadily by the time I went to bed. It was harsh and cold when I woke up this morning. Morning routine was good, especially the writing session. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but I woke up feeling pretty decent and calm, so I hope that sets a good tone for May.
On today’s agenda: write the opening for BETTING MAN, pop it into the end of VICIOUS, and send it off to my editor. Then, I work on the outline for BETTING MAN before I switch over to the ghostwriting, which I will do until I leave for yoga.
At some point, I will also finish the next book for review. I’d like to get that written and out tomorrow.
Have a good one – we are almost at year’s end! Hang in there.
#3 #4 #5 #6 #art #cooking #freelance #liminalSpaceBetweenYears #NinaBellMysteries #planning #shortStories
-
Tues. Dec. 30, 2025: In That Liminal Space
image courtesy of Mike Dubyna via pixabay.comTuesday, December 30, 2025
Waxing Moon
Chiron, Uranus, Jupiter Retrograde
Cloudy and very cold
Welcome to a new week and, in a couple of days, a new year!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is up here. It’s our last week using the Yuletide Tarot. Next week, we switch decks.
If you haven’t had a chance to look over the 2026 questions on the Goals, Dreams, and Resolutions site, you can do so here.
Over the past few weeks, I decided on a title for Nina Bell #6, which will be a collection of novellas covering a specific span of time. None of what happens in that span is enough to sustain an entire book, but it’s all important for her character arc (and those of some other core characters). So I decided to do five shorter pieces, ending in one that will be longer and somewhat disturbing, but is an important catalyst for future arcs. The title is MURDEROUS INTERLUDES, at least at the moment, and the cover designer showed me some roughs.
Nina #3 is VICIOUS CRITIC, Nina #4 is BUT IS SHE A BETTING MAN? (set in Saratoga Springs, during racing season), and Nina #5 is STAGE FALL, set off-Broadway that following fall. MURDEROUS INTERLUDES takes us through that next holiday season into the spring.
That will keep me busy for the foreseeable future!
I mean, if the sales don’t sustain, that changes everything, but sales for the first two books continue to grow. I can’t retire on them or anything, but right now they are sustainable. I hope that VICIOUS CRITIC will build on that, so I can keep writing this series. The Topic Workbooks are holding steady, and I’ll know how the holiday shorts did by early February. The last couple of months, when I’ve been consistent in the marketing, I’ve noticed the difference.
Consistency, be it in the writing or the marketing, is key. I mean, I know that, but I dropped the ball on a few things the last years, for many different reasons (like illness and moving and life chaos and elder care). I need to get back on track in a way that is sustainable balanced with other freelance work and energy levels.
I find that consistency in the morning yoga, meditation, and early morning writing practices help a lot in the actual workday. There are definitely days I consider skipping one or more elements of that, but I’m always glad when I don’t.
I will also explore some other marketing possibilities this coming year, and additional distribution outlets. I’m developing my own marketing style, that has very little to do with what the “experts” claim works. It takes longer, because it’s gentler and more personal, but I think it works better for what I do in the long run.
Someone whose posts I often enjoyed on Instagram boasted about asking ChatGPT to “read her astrological chart” so I unfollowed. Nope. Don’t pretend that AI/ChatGPT has a spiritual connection or ethical spiritual usage. It’s theft and harm on multiple levels. Don’t pretend you care about consent, art, spirituality, or the environment if you use it. I will unfollow, block if necessary, disengage. I’ve distanced myself from several people I know in real life who use it, and will continue to do so.
Got out of the house and to the grocery store. Did a small shop, but still spent more than I hoped (just like everyone else dealing with grocery prices). My fishmonger refused to sell me trout on Friday, saying it wasn’t fresh enough anymore, and she was about to pull it from the case. I got flounder instead, and she promised to have a nice cut of salmon for me on New Year’s Eve, when I’ll pick up the salmon we need for that night’s meal.
As I said last week, always make friends with your fishmonger!
We don’t need much until the big meals around New Year’s – we’ll be eating leftovers in the liminal week. I got duck breast for the Day. There weren’t any whole ducks (and I doubt they’d have been in my budget if there had been – I lucked out last year to find one on deep discount). We won’t have a lot of leftovers with this (we might not have any), but it will still be “duck on the Day” which is a tradition I like, when I can pull it off. This duck breast was at the top of my budget for the meal, but still within it, and was the last thing I need for the Day’s meal, except maybe another orange for the sauce, so we’re all good.
I was kind of shocked that they were selling a bony goose carcass for $107, post-Christmas. Um?
I know goose is more expensive than other poultry, but that seems rather. . .absurd.
Besides, the Coq au Vin was delightful and we have leftovers. So many leftovers, some went into the freezer.
On a whim, on the way home, I stopped at a thrift store I regularly visit. There was a silver-looking teapot with a gorgeous, ornate fruit top, for less than $3. Handling it, I think it’s more likely to be pewter than silver, but it’s pretty. I also a good quality 10” pan with a lid in perfect shape (for less than $5) to replace a pan of ours that has lived its life and needs to retire. The tired pan was bought around 2000, I think, at Lechter’s or something. It’s done its job. We have an older 10” pan, copper-bottomed, from the 1960’s that’s still in great shape (when they made things to last) and we use all the time, but we often need two pans of that size going at once.
Would I love to live in a place big enough for a six-burner stove? Why, yes, I would, but I manage with four. A double oven would also make my life easier, but we make do.
I couldn’t stand the thought of boxed mac and cheese (even the organic ones I sometimes buy for lunch options), so I found an easy sauce recipe, cut it in half, and made myself simplified mac and cheese for lunch, by cooking some elbow pasta, making a small portion of the sauce, and tossing in some pancetta. I will make a big pan of Moosewood mac and cheese at some point in January, but that was too much for me to do for lunch. This recipe was okay, but not brilliant. If I make it again, I will tweak it with some herbs and spices. It was still better than boxed, though.
I have no memory of what I did after lunch. Puttered, maybe? Read a little? Played with cats? Caught up on Instagram with friends? Not a darned clue. I remember, at one point, Tessa was in one wingback chair sleeping, my mom was in her chair reading, I was on the sofa reading, with Charlotte on my lap and Bea on the back of the sofa. The only one missing was Willa, who was asleep on my mother’s bed.
I was glad to get things done early, since the storm warnings intensified to the point where shops and restaurants started closing in the afternoon, to make sure their people could get home. Which is a great choice.
I made the parsnip and pear puree from SILVER PALATE GOOD TIMES Cookbook. I was both intrigued and worried about it. I like parsnips, I like pears, but how could they possibly come together? It was either going to be good or awful.
There was peeling and chopping involved, of course. The parsnips cooked in one pot, while I simmered the pears in butter and brandy in another. Once I drained the cooked parsnips, they went back in the pan with the pear mush (it had cooked down to mush) and added salt, pepper, and allspice. It cooled a bit while I steamed the peas and breaded the flounder to cook.
While the flounder was doing its thing (in the new pan, which works very well), I put the parsnip and pear mixture into the food processor with sour cream, processed it, and then returned it to the pan to warm through.
Throughout the whole process, I could not figure out what it would taste like. Even tasting bits as it cooked, I couldn’t prepare my brain for what my mouth would experience.
Fortunately, it’s good. Strange, but good. The fish was a little delicate with it. I think it needs something more robust. The bison would have been a good pairing with it. We have a lot left over, and I wonder what it will taste like cold (it could be used as a spread). I could imagine it on a toasted roll with cold, sliced leftover bison. Only we ate all the bison. But the butcher carries it regularly, and the price isn’t bad, relatively, in relation to a lot of other stuff. It’s certainly at a better price than the goose! So we will see.
I bought a different brand of flavored bread crumb, and regretted it. The flavoring was off, and the consistency of the crumbs was like gravel. That’ll teach me. I’ll go back to my preferred brand when I use these up. Until then, I will have to toss them in the food processor with some fresh herbs whenever I want to use them. So that I can use them up, because I can’t justify just tossing them.
I started reading THE MOTHER TONGUE by Bill Bryson in the evening, about the evolution of the English language. It’s very interesting, and made me realize how much I didn’t know. It’s a little too dry for me right now, so I switched over to WORDHORD by Hanna Videen, which is very lively. And she has an Instagram account, which is fun. Speaking of IG, if you’re not following Medievalist Matt, I highly recommend that account. I learn a lot, and it’s also hilarious. It was snowing quite hard by the time I went to bed, and very pretty.
Slept okay. Woke up around 1 AM after a disturbing dream (sigh, February will be a challenge), because my bad hip hurt. Rolled it out on a tennis ball, the way my acupuncturist taught me way back when, until it stopped grumbling and I could sleep again.
Up at the usual time. Morning routine. Quite a bit of snow, everything muffled and quiet, which was a lovely way to spend morning yoga and meditation. By the time I wrote, the plows were out.
I put in a Chewy order for both wet and dry food. Those little monsters eat a lot, especially in winter. We are still okay for a couple of weeks, but I prefer to have the food here, ready to go, especially with storms coming through regularly. The delivery last week was for the special wet food Willa and Bea get on Sundays.
I did the backing, filling, and quilting on “Vast.” I’m still worried it looks like a giant potholder, and considered pulling it from the show. But I worked the text portion of the piece, and (for once) I’m happy with a poem I wrote. I worked it enough in my head over the weeks, forming it as I formed the textile piece, that the text is where I want it, even if I am unsure about the textile. And hey, with over forty artists in the show, my little piece won’t be noticed!
It’s more abstract that I originally envisioned, but the text supports the changes. I considered adding embellishments to hide the flaws, but I think the simpler I keep it, the better. It won’t be for sale. The whole reason I’m part of the gallery this year is to push myself to experiment, and put those experiments out there.
I found a pattern for inseam pockets that I downloaded and printed out. I usually don’t use PDF patterns, it’s too much of a pain to print them properly. But a pocket is small enough to print, even a decent-sized pocket. And anything I sew in the future with side seams will get an inseam pocket, if at all possible.
The sewing machine was giving me fits. I need to find a place to get it serviced. I’m planning far too much sewing in the coming months to have to deal with what’s going on with it. And yes, it’s not the right machine to use for heavy, quilting work. It’s meant for clothing, even though it’s called a “huskystar.” I’ll ask the Studios where they get their machines serviced, and maybe over at SavvyHive, since they are now doing mending and alterations. I don’t mind hiking over to Bennington or Pittsfield, but I don’t want to go all the way over to Troy or Albany.
The psychological distance to Albany is much greater than the actual, physical distance. Once I have my new tires, I’ll probably feel more comfortable with longer drives.
I got some reading done later in the day, and dealt with some extended family stuff around an unsolved murder from nearly 40 years ago. I found some articles and some information I’d suspected, but didn’t know, and that a family member has tried to get the case some attention in the last few years. The whole situation just makes me so sad.
I dug the back of the car out and set down some sand. I left the snow on the windows and roof to protect the car.
Heated up some Coq Au Vin leftovers, which were really good, and read more at night. Because, you know, this time of year is for reading. (In this house, every time of year is for reading).
Slept reasonably well, although I woke up at 2 AM after a disturbing dream that makes me want to skip March (the dream for that night is tied to March). I fell back asleep, and then didn’t want to get up when Tessa woke me a few hours later. I did, however, have a breakthrough in “Body Games” that fixes where I got stuck. It was as though I had to finish “Vast” before I could breakthrough in “Body Games” (the historical mystery).
I finally got up, did the morning routine, did the Community Tarot Reading for the Week. As I was sorting through files in preparation to get back to “Body Games” I came across a garbled early draft of STAGE FALL. It’s garbled not just because it’s a first draft, but because it was from a different type of file and didn’t properly convert.
STAGE FALL was originally going to be the second Nina Bell mystery. It’s now the fifth, which means a lot has to change as far as arcs that have been established and growing in the interim. The bones of it are there. The show against which it is set was, again, at a theatre inspired by the Orpheum, as was the theatre in VICIOUS. I have to decide if I want to keep it there, or move it to someplace inspired by the Variety Arts, or a different theatre than the one in VICIOUS. It would make sense to work a different show at the same theatre, but maybe I should move it to a different theatre. I do, however, have to plant something in BETTING that I can pull through in STAGE FALL and beyond, or it won’t make sense. I want Nina to start working as a swing dresser on Broadway after the summer theatre/Edinburgh books after MURDEROUS INTERLUDES, so it makes sense to have STAGE FALL be at a different theatre than VICIOUS, still off-Broadway, to give a richer sense of the different theatres.
Finished “Body Games” and several revision/editing passes. It’s finally where I want it. I was just about ready to give up on it.
Stitched and attached the hanging loop and ribbon for “Vast.” Fixed the last two lines of the text portion, printed it out (in Calibri), and put that aside, ready to go. The Chewy order arrived, which was unexpected, so quickly. Cats should have full bellies until the end of February.
Read a bit, heated up the pork leftovers, which were very good. Heated up some parsnip-and-pear puree, and I was right, it’s better with a denser protein for balance.
A friend gave us a box of rose and violet creams. There are a set of rose creams, and a set of violet creams. These are to eat, encased in chocolate, not cream like you put on your body. They’re beautifully wrapped in rose and violet foils, too. It’s such an interesting sensation to taste something one is used to smelling. Smell and taste are closely connected. Often, when I smell a rose, there’s also a hint of a taste. Eating a rose cream, the taste hits first, and much more of it, and then there’s a hint of scent. And the taste of the violet is much stronger than the scent, unless you have a big bunch of them. They’re really good, but very different from a typical edible treat.
Between the floral cream candies and the parsnip-and-pear, it’s been a very sensory holiday, which is lovely.
Slept well, although I woke up around 3:30 from a nice dream about cooking and cookware. So I guess April is all about cooking.
I finally got up, a little after 5, much to Tessa’s glee. I had the whole morning routine done by just past 7 AM, and was at my desk. I figured out some layering I want to do in a scene of “Body Games” before I sent it off.
It was bucketing down with rain, so I decided to wait until late morning to do my errands, which were only a library run and dropping “Vast” off at the gallery.
I did some tweaks, tightening, and layering on “Body Games” and a proofreading pass, and off it went. I doubt there’s much set in this time period (I don’t think I’ve ever read a mystery set during the era, although I’ve heard of CHOCOLATE HOUSE TREASON). I hope the balance of period detail without overexplaining, character arcs, and mystery is interesting enough for them to want it.
I also got out a play submission.
In this liminal time, I’ve intentionally tried to keep away from That Thing’s putrid existence as much as possible. I’m aware of the escalating issues, but I’m giving myself a necessary break.
By late morning, it was still bucketing down. I suited up, brushed the last of the wet snow off the car’s windshield, and headed out. I did a drop-off/pick up at the library, and also checked out some large print books for my mom, who’d run out. I have a few things in transit, so we’ll see when they come in.
Then, I headed down to the gallery. Much to my delight, my friend Jane was there at the same time for her drop-off, along with a new member we will get to know over the course of the year. We got in, filled out our forms, and lined up our pieces neatly. We are all worried about how this rain would freeze overnight, and it’s supposed to snow, on and off, until New Year’s Day. We may have to skate back for the opening on Friday. The weekend after my workshop, Jane is offering tarot readings, so I offered to be a back-up person and help wrangle querants, so she can focus on the readings. She doesn’t think there will be many people; I do. And if there’s a lull, we can chat and catch up!
Good thing I hadn’t gone out to the laundromat Monday morning – they’re digging up the street in front of it again, which means I couldn’t go this morning, either. I don’t like going into the New Year with dirty laundry, but this year, I will have to get over myself. We have enough clean everythings to start the new year fresh.
Soup for lunch on a dreary day, and a quiet afternoon of ghostwriting, reading, research, working on the GDR questions.
Heated up leftover pasta for dinner. Charlotte was delighted to get some freshly grated pasta.
The first box of books for the contest arrived. Usually, it’s a huge box. This batch is tiny, with only a few novellas. The bulk of the books are digital this year. I will get started on this batch, both print and digital, next week.
The rain had changed over to snow, and it was snowing steadily by the time I went to bed. It was harsh and cold when I woke up this morning. Morning routine was good, especially the writing session. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but I woke up feeling pretty decent and calm, so I hope that sets a good tone for May.
On today’s agenda: write the opening for BETTING MAN, pop it into the end of VICIOUS, and send it off to my editor. Then, I work on the outline for BETTING MAN before I switch over to the ghostwriting, which I will do until I leave for yoga.
At some point, I will also finish the next book for review. I’d like to get that written and out tomorrow.
Have a good one – we are almost at year’s end! Hang in there.
#3 #4 #5 #6 #art #cooking #freelance #liminalSpaceBetweenYears #NinaBellMysteries #planning #shortStories
-
CW: Disability/Health
So much happened today. I had my #neuromedicine
appointment. This doctor was fantastic. Listened to my full history, made a lot of notes, asked a lot of questions, then actually physically got into the examination. I have cerebral palsy but was never real long term care for it.She tested my reflexes, strength, range of motion, checked for pain, levels of sensation, all things you'd think would come up dealing with someone like me.
She thinks that there's a brain and/or spine issue affecting the left side of my body but that might just be the tip of the iceberg. But it's a direction for the first time in (probably) something like some of your lifetimes. And actual treatment. I could cry.
Someone finally listened and took the time to examine the problem instead of dismissing me as fat or lazy or trying to skate by on welfare. In 41 years, I can count on one hand the times I've had that.
And for someone like me, fighting with courts just to be acknowledged as disabled, it's huge.
-
New blog post: https://www.thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2023/01/04/reflections-on-transducers/
This one comes with actual software and a bone to pick! (jk?)
Anyways, this is basically a follow-up to my previous brain-vomit regarding #transducers and how they work in #Clojure vs. #Scheme. See https://coales.co/@thatgeoguy/109593495240951129
At the end of the day the only sane solution I found was to just parameterize the missing assumption, the fold procedure, inside of the transduce call. I think overall it fits together nicely and I've tried damn hard to make sure the docs all have tons of examples:
-
"Ridge Home for Mental Defectives"
[⚠️ CW: Historically, the treatment of people with invisible disabilities by institutions, policies and society, has often been inhumane. Examples cited in this piece, though not gory, may be unsettling to some.]
"Ridge Home for Mental Defectives – Are You a Mental Defective?":
Do I belong in a cage because I have invisible disabilities (IDs)? Should I be abused under the guise of “caretaking" that I do not require? Should I be jailed, even if I did not commit a crime, soley because I live with #TBI, am #ActuallyAutistic and have other #InvisibleDisabilities. Do I belong locked away from sunshine and society? Am I mentally incompetent or a “Mental Defective”? That’s exactly what so many others with invisible disabilities were categorized as, and subjected to, in a part of Colorado's dark history.
“The Ridge State Home and Training Center for Mental Defectives ”, and some state laws that still existed in just the last decade, are only two examples of some of the barbaric practices. Some of the articles linked below even demonstrate #stigmatude with use of words like “inmates" and the mental “R" slur. People with downs syndrome are not the “R" word and those with invisible disabilities and mental health chalenges, are not defectictives.
Did you know, if you were having a mental health crisis, that you could be jailed in Colorado if there was no room in medical facilities? That law was recently changed and funding from cannabis tax revenues was redirected for that purpose but, in some places, it still occurs. Colorado law gives officials 28 days to get people with such experience proper treatment and placement but, in some cases people with invisible disabilities spent six months incarcerated without even an evaluation. Is it any wonder that many do not want to ask for help?
So, what about the home for “Mental Defectives ”? My blood boils and I cringe everytime I hear that name… “Mental Defective", as if we are a broken toy or a factory second. We are people with health issues just like someone with cancer or diabetes. What if your loved one was locked away because they had #covid?
In 1909, Colorado chose 310 acres just west of Arvada to establish the “Ridge State Home and Training Center for Mental Defectives”. The wording in the “Golden History” link below refers to residents as “inmates" and cites the first such “inmate” arrived in July, 1912. By 1936, the Ridge Home’s capacity of 300 was already at 260 people with IDs, many of which, were “exiled” and abandoned by their own families.
I will surely expend my generous character limit if I give all of my thoughts, so I will give just a few of the low-lights.
The 1937 newspaper headline in the image below claimed that “Everyone”s Happy at Ridge Home for Mental Defectives". This propaganda is easily refuted by many accounts of actual occurrences at Colorado’s “prison” for people with ID and Mental Illnesses.
Aside from residents being forced to work on the “Ridge farm”, other abuses and atrocities were common. One employee was charged with crimes of abuse against multiple residents after he bragged about his deplorable actions to friends. The only means of release was by transfer to relative’s homes, to the so called “asylum” in Pueblo or death.
In the 1940s, the facility practiced “forced sterilization” of people with invisible disabilities, which some feel was a attempt at a form of genocide.
In the 50s, stories of underfunding, overcrowding and abuse began to surface. One administrator was quoted in a news article saying that many held captive in “Ridge” were “much too competent” to be in the home but, laws and family abandonment kept them there.
In the 1970s, fire safety issues, cracked walls and foundation caused part of the facility to be closed by order of the state. There were no proper fire exit routes, and not even a single fire escape. In the 80s reports of neglect allegedly due to funding and staffing problems came to light.
As recently as the 1980s, “time outs” for those with behavioral issues resulted in some being put in cages. One report cites a child was caged for nine month with only a bucket and a mattress. Others were said to be packed in wet sheets and ice for acting up. Does that sound like treatment that will improve mental health, or torture that would make matters worse?
From Denver ABC 7:
“They were so mistreated. It just wasn’t right,” said Rhonda Sherill, who said she worked at Ridge in the 1980s. “Some of them would be put in what they call time out, which was basically a cage they would put him in until they weren’t combative.”Eventually, this “section of hell" disguised as a medical facility was closed and sat abandon for years. Now, mostly demolished, “Ridge Home and Training Center for Mental Defectives” is the site of apartments and shops.
I personally would rather be homeless and not shop than to step one foot on those grounds. One can only imagine the horrors that these individuals must have lived but, one thing is apparent: Everyone was not happy at "Ridge Home for Mental Defectives."
Sadly, despite these changes, there is still much work to be done in bringing people living with invisible disabilities and mental illness “out of exile".
OutOfExile_IDR © 2022
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/spooky-history-arvadas-ridge-home
https://disabilitylawco.org/mental-illness-protection-and-advocacy-program
https://www.mentalhealthcolorado.org/colorado-jails-wont-used-hold-mentally-ill/
https://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=State_Home_and_Training_School_for_Mental_Defectives
Golden History - 303-278-3557:
https://www.goldenhistory.org/places/ridge-home/Pictures:
http://www.coloradoaerialphoto.com/pow.cgi?POW_ID=63#stigmatude #MentalHealth #MedicalIndustry #abuse #advocacy #disabilities #InvisibleDisability #colorado #InvisibleDisabilityRights #evil #DarkHistory #DownSyndrome #MentalDefectives #BrainInjury #HashtagsNobodyWillEverSearch
-
"Ridge Home for Mental Defectives"
[⚠️ CW: Historically, the treatment of people with invisible disabilities by institutions, policies and society, has often been inhumane. Examples cited in this piece, though not gory, may be unsettling to some.]
"Ridge Home for Mental Defectives – Are You a Mental Defective?":
Do I belong in a cage because I have invisible disabilities (IDs)? Should I be abused under the guise of “caretaking" that I do not require? Should I be jailed, even if I did not commit a crime, soley because I live with #TBI, am #ActuallyAutistic and have other #InvisibleDisabilities. Do I belong locked away from sunshine and society? Am I mentally incompetent or a “Mental Defective”? That’s exactly what so many others with invisible disabilities were categorized as, and subjected to, in a part of Colorado's dark history.
“The Ridge State Home and Training Center for Mental Defectives ”, and some state laws that still existed in just the last decade, are only two examples of some of the barbaric practices. Some of the articles linked below even demonstrate #stigmatude with use of words like “inmates" and the mental “R" slur. People with downs syndrome are not the “R" word and those with invisible disabilities and mental health chalenges, are not defectictives.
Did you know, if you were having a mental health crisis, that you could be jailed in Colorado if there was no room in medical facilities? That law was recently changed and funding from cannabis tax revenues was redirected for that purpose but, in some places, it still occurs. Colorado law gives officials 28 days to get people with such experience proper treatment and placement but, in some cases people with invisible disabilities spent six months incarcerated without even an evaluation. Is it any wonder that many do not want to ask for help?
So, what about the home for “Mental Defectives ”? My blood boils and I cringe everytime I hear that name… “Mental Defective", as if we are a broken toy or a factory second. We are people with health issues just like someone with cancer or diabetes. What if your loved one was locked away because they had #covid?
In 1909, Colorado chose 310 acres just west of Arvada to establish the “Ridge State Home and Training Center for Mental Defectives”. The wording in the “Golden History” link below refers to residents as “inmates" and cites the first such “inmate” arrived in July, 1912. By 1936, the Ridge Home’s capacity of 300 was already at 260 people with IDs, many of which, were “exiled” and abandoned by their own families.
I will surely expend my generous character limit if I give all of my thoughts, so I will give just a few of the low-lights.
The 1937 newspaper headline in the image below claimed that “Everyone”s Happy at Ridge Home for Mental Defectives". This propaganda is easily refuted by many accounts of actual occurrences at Colorado’s “prison” for people with ID and Mental Illnesses.
Aside from residents being forced to work on the “Ridge farm”, other abuses and atrocities were common. One employee was charged with crimes of abuse against multiple residents after he bragged about his deplorable actions to friends. The only means of release was by transfer to relative’s homes, to the so called “asylum” in Pueblo or death.
In the 1940s, the facility practiced “forced sterilization” of people with invisible disabilities, which some feel was a attempt at a form of genocide.
In the 50s, stories of underfunding, overcrowding and abuse began to surface. One administrator was quoted in a news article saying that many held captive in “Ridge” were “much too competent” to be in the home but, laws and family abandonment kept them there.
In the 1970s, fire safety issues, cracked walls and foundation caused part of the facility to be closed by order of the state. There were no proper fire exit routes, and not even a single fire escape. In the 80s reports of neglect allegedly due to funding and staffing problems came to light.
As recently as the 1980s, “time outs” for those with behavioral issues resulted in some being put in cages. One report cites a child was caged for nine month with only a bucket and a mattress. Others were said to be packed in wet sheets and ice for acting up. Does that sound like treatment that will improve mental health, or torture that would make matters worse?
From Denver ABC 7:
“They were so mistreated. It just wasn’t right,” said Rhonda Sherill, who said she worked at Ridge in the 1980s. “Some of them would be put in what they call time out, which was basically a cage they would put him in until they weren’t combative.”Eventually, this “section of hell" disguised as a medical facility was closed and sat abandon for years. Now, mostly demolished, “Ridge Home and Training Center for Mental Defectives” is the site of apartments and shops.
I personally would rather be homeless and not shop than to step one foot on those grounds. One can only imagine the horrors that these individuals must have lived but, one thing is apparent: Everyone was not happy at "Ridge Home for Mental Defectives."
Sadly, despite these changes, there is still much work to be done in bringing people living with invisible disabilities and mental illness “out of exile".
OutOfExile_IDR © 2022
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/spooky-history-arvadas-ridge-home
https://disabilitylawco.org/mental-illness-protection-and-advocacy-program
https://www.mentalhealthcolorado.org/colorado-jails-wont-used-hold-mentally-ill/
https://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=State_Home_and_Training_School_for_Mental_Defectives
Golden History - 303-278-3557:
https://www.goldenhistory.org/places/ridge-home/Pictures:
http://www.coloradoaerialphoto.com/pow.cgi?POW_ID=63#stigmatude #MentalHealth #MedicalIndustry #abuse #advocacy #disabilities #InvisibleDisability #colorado #InvisibleDisabilityRights #evil #DarkHistory #DownSyndrome #MentalDefectives #BrainInjury #HashtagsNobodyWillEverSearch
-
Eep, existing persists. We went out for my spouse's belated birthday lunch, then there was a period of trying to figure out why our internet crapped out and yeah... here we are, hours later. *chuckles* S'fine.
I also had to rub brain cells together and get my shop spreadsheets up to date, as I *le gasp* had an actual order. I also realised Etsy hadn't poked me when my card on record expired back in uh, *September*, so had been holding my money all this time. Granted, my shop is hobby level, not food-getting level, but. That still feels a bit shady. But then, that's just Etsy, innit.
Anyways.
-
Eep, existing persists. We went out for my spouse's belated birthday lunch, then there was a period of trying to figure out why our internet crapped out and yeah... here we are, hours later. *chuckles* S'fine.
I also had to rub brain cells together and get my shop spreadsheets up to date, as I *le gasp* had an actual order. I also realised Etsy hadn't poked me when my card on record expired back in uh, *September*, so had been holding my money all this time. Granted, my shop is hobby level, not food-getting level, but. That still feels a bit shady. But then, that's just Etsy, innit.
Anyways.
-
Eep, existing persists. We went out for my spouse's belated birthday lunch, then there was a period of trying to figure out why our internet crapped out and yeah... here we are, hours later. *chuckles* S'fine.
I also had to rub brain cells together and get my shop spreadsheets up to date, as I *le gasp* had an actual order. I also realised Etsy hadn't poked me when my card on record expired back in uh, *September*, so had been holding my money all this time. Granted, my shop is hobby level, not food-getting level, but. That still feels a bit shady. But then, that's just Etsy, innit.
Anyways.
-
The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage
The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.
A six-year-old can pour milk without spilling, recognize her grandmother by the sound of her walk on the stairs, and read her father’s mood from a quarter-second facial flicker before he speaks. No current AI does these reliably, which is why the warehouse, the construction site, and the elder-care ward continue to employ humans at rising wages while law firms cut their summer associate classes. What machines do well, with present technology, is symbol manipulation at scale: text, code, formal reasoning, pattern completion across enormous corpora of written human output. The honest version of the claim is narrower than the slogan and still consequential. No child born this year will outperform machines at symbol manipulation, retrieval, or formal reasoning across most of the tasks that currently pay a salary in an office. The slogan compresses that into a panic, which is bad rhetoric and bad policy, and the underlying observation remains true. What follows from the observation is the actual subject of the analysis below.
The Credentialed Class Loses Its Logic
The first casualty is the credentialed professional class, roughly the top 20 percent of American earners by household income. This stratum organized itself across the twentieth century around cognitive screening. The SAT in 1926, refined through the GI Bill expansion. The LSAT in 1948. The MCAT in its modern multiple-choice form in 1962. The USMLE consolidated in 1992. Each gate selected for a particular form of paid cognition: rapid pattern recognition under time pressure, short-term retention of densely structured information, formal reasoning across domain-specific symbol systems. The gates were effective because the cognitive work they screened for was scarce, expensive to develop, and economically valuable.
Three conditions held the system together. Scarcity was the first: only humans could perform the cognitive work, and only some humans, after long training. Expense was the second: the training cost time and money and required institutional infrastructure no individual could replicate. Value was the third: the market rewarded the work because nothing cheaper could produce equivalent output. All three conditions are now eroding simultaneously. A subscription that costs less than a Manhattan dinner produces legal memos, differential diagnoses, and tax planning at a level competent enough to embarrass the junior tier of every paid profession.
Embarrassment falls short of replacement. The senior partner still signs the brief. The attending physician still admits the patient. The accounting principal still files the return. What has collapsed is the economic logic of the apprentice tier, the rung at which young people once learned the trade by performing the work that AI now performs faster and at a thousandth of the cost. Without the apprentice tier, the senior tier has no successors, and the senior tier itself ages out within twenty years. The professions are not being replaced. They are being denied a generation, which is the same outcome on a longer clock.
The lawyer keeps courtroom presence, client relationship, and signature liability. For the doctor, what survives is touch, witness, legal accountability, and judgment under stakes. The architect’s irreducible work happens in the kitchen, in conversation with the homeowner about how the family actually lives. Three of those four functions are not why medical school costs $300,000. The training, the credentialing, the expensive cognitive certification, was effective because it produced the rare commodity. When the commodity is no longer rare, the price of training cannot hold. Either tuition collapses, which would gut the universities that have leveraged themselves on that revenue, or graduates default on debt for credentials that no longer command premium wages. Both outcomes are visible in early data. Neither has yet been admitted by the institutions whose survival depends on denying it.
The same compression is hitting working-class employment, particularly in transportation, customer service, and routine clerical work, and the human stakes there are larger in absolute terms. The reason this analysis concentrates on the credentialed class is that this class produced and sustained the public sphere through which the broader transition will be argued, named, and contested. When that class loses its grip on its own coherence, the conversation about every other displacement becomes harder to organize.
The Parental Project Loses Its Currency
The second consequence is psychological and reaches beyond economics into the structure of family life. American parenting in the educated class has run for at least three generations on a transmission model. Cultivate the child’s mind, secure the child’s place. The cultivation produced status, the status produced security, and the bargain held because each generation could roughly verify the prior one’s judgment. A father who tutored his daughter in algebra in 1995 watched her, twelve years later, take a meeting with someone who had been tutored similarly by similarly anxious parents. The investment paid out in a recognizable currency.
The currency has been redenominated without warning. A father in 2026 watches his daughter receive better tutoring, free, from a machine that has read every algebra textbook ever written and never tires. The democratization is real and worth celebrating. The disappearance of his comparative advantage is also real, and both arrive on the same Tuesday. He had counted on that advantage. Greed had nothing to do with it. The entire architecture of middle-class American parenting had encoded the cognitive premium as the path, and he was a competent parent walking the path his own parents had walked. The consolation that “my child will think for a living” has lost its meaning. What replaces it has not arrived. The vacuum is producing the parental anxiety that fills bookstores, podcast feeds, and pediatric psychiatry waiting rooms, and producing it faster than the helping professions can absorb the demand.
The School System Confronts Its Cover Story
The third consequence runs through the school itself. American schooling has carried at least four functions through the twentieth century: childcare for working parents, social formation, cognitive training, and credentialing for the labor market. The cognitive training and credentialing functions are the two AI most directly displaces, and they happen to be the two schools advertise in their mission statements as the reason for existing. Childcare and social formation remain, untouched and irreplaceable, and no school district raises a tax levy on those grounds.
The honest reckoning is one administrators are not yet willing to give. We run schools mostly to keep parents working and to teach children how to negotiate the social geometry of a room full of other children. The cognitive content has always been somewhat ornamental, a respectable cover story for an institution whose deeper functions were custodial and socializing. AI is forcing the cover story to retire. At least a decade of denial will follow. Curriculum committees will add “AI literacy” units that are structurally indistinguishable from the typing classes of 1985, the computer lab visits of 1995, and the laptop initiatives of 2010, each of which functioned as institutional reassurance rather than pedagogical substance. After the denial, a slow and reluctant rewriting of mission statements will move toward something more honest about what schools actually do, which is gather children safely while their parents earn a living and teach them to sit in rooms with people they did not choose. Both functions are valuable. Neither justifies the per-pupil expenditure of the current system, and the public will eventually discover that the math no longer works.
The Political Bargain Loses Its Foundation
The fourth consequence is political and may be the most important one in the medium term. Technocratic liberal democracy, the regime under which most readers of this essay have lived their entire lives, rested on a quiet bargain. Experts would govern the complicated parts. Voters would govern the simple parts. The experts held position because they knew more than the voters, and the voters tolerated the experts because the system, on average, delivered rising material conditions. The bargain frayed before AI arrived, evident in the populist movements of the past fifteen years, but AI removes the bargain’s foundation outright. If a machine knows more than the expert and the voter alike, the expert has no remaining claim that distinguishes her from any other citizen. She becomes one more citizen with opinions. The voice of trained competence has gone elsewhere, into the model and the dataset, where no human can claim it as her own.
Two political responses follow, and both are visible in the present. The populist response decides that if no human is more qualified than any other, then will, identity, and tribal allegiance settle the question. This is the shape of politics in much of Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia at the moment of writing, and the authoritarian movements within that response are gaining institutional ground rather than losing it. The technocratic response in a new key hands the decisions to the machine itself, which is the direction parts of finance, military targeting, and judicial sentencing are already moving. The first response sustains the form of democracy while emptying its substance. The second response abandons even the form. Neither response preserves democratic self-rule as the founding generations understood it, and there is no third response visibly forming. The honest political forecast is that what we have called liberal democracy will continue to use its old vocabulary while operating on different machinery, and the gap between the vocabulary and the machinery will widen until the vocabulary collapses, probably within a generation. Whether the collapse opens onto a new democratic form or onto its successor is the open question of the next twenty years.
The Cultural Layer Has Absorbed Shocks Like This Before
The fifth consequence is cultural and harder to predict, because culture has absorbed previous shocks of this kind. Photography arrived in 1839 and was widely expected to end painting. Painting survived by abandoning the territory photography claimed and inventing impressionism, then cubism, then abstraction. Recorded music arrived around 1900 and was expected to end live performance. Live performance survived by becoming an experience economy where presence, not fidelity, was the product. Chess engines surpassed human grandmasters in the late 1990s and were expected to kill the game. Online chess is now larger than at any point in its history, with more humans playing more games against more opponents than the pre-engine era could imagine.
The pattern across these examples is consistent. Mechanical reproduction shifts the value of the human version from product to presence. A handmade chair is no longer a better chair than a factory chair, and it costs ten times more, because the value lives in the maker’s hand and the buyer’s relationship to it. Live theatre does not compete with film on visual spectacle and does not need to, because the live audience pays for the breath in the room. Human writing, if AI writing becomes competent and ubiquitous, will likely become a luxury good signaling effort, time, and personal stake. The author’s life will count for more, and the work without an author behind it will lose value as it becomes plentiful. Whether that economy supports as many writers as the previous one is a separate question, and the answer is no. The professional middle of the writing trade, the working journalist, the staff editor, the workmanlike novelist, will thin out. The top will hold and the amateur base will expand. The middle was always the most vulnerable layer in any cultural economy, and AI accelerates a contraction that began with the collapse of newspaper revenue around 2007.
The Counter-Case Worth Holding
A counter-case deserves to be kept in view, because the foregoing analysis can slide into a fatalism the evidence does not support. Intelligence, as humans have meant the word for most of recorded history, has always carried more than symbol manipulation. The fuller meaning includes desire, mortality, embodiment, the capacity to lose, the capacity to refuse. A chess engine plays better chess than any human and cares about nothing. A writing engine produces fluent prose and risks no humiliation when the prose fails. The child born this year will live in a body that ages, will love people who die, will choose between options under genuine uncertainty about her own future, will know what it is to be afraid without being shut down for it. All of that registers as full-weight human activity, equal in importance to whatever the machine produces. The category is different from symbol manipulation, and the question of which category we will continue to honor with the word intelligence is a political question more than a technical one. The answer will be settled by what the courts protect, what the schools teach, what the markets pay for, and what the surviving institutions of self-government decide to defend.
The Hardest Truth
The hardest truth, the one this site has been documenting across a decade of work on institutional collapse, is that societies do not adjust gracefully to shifts of this size. Institutions built on one logic do not refactor themselves when the logic changes. They hollow out, keep their letterhead, draw their salaries, and lose their function while everyone with standing to name the loss benefits from its concealment. The American university, the credentialing professions, the editorial gatekeepers of the legacy press, the expert commentariat on broadcast television, each is running on borrowed legitimacy at this moment. None of these institutions will announce its own obsolescence. Each will continue to charge tuition, bill hours, issue credentials, and accept underwriting for some years past practical relevance, then collapse when a critical mass of clients notices they have been paying for what is now free.
The collapse will look like the late stages of American public broadcasting documented in the third volume of the Institutional Autopsy trilogy: a long, dignified fade that no one with authority is willing to name in real time, followed by a sudden insolvency event that surprises no one in retrospect. The next fifteen years will involve a generation-long restructuring of who has standing to speak, who deserves to be paid, and what humans are for once the symbol work has been outsourced. Some of that restructuring will be fair. Much of it will be brutal. Almost none of it will be planned, because the institutions in best position to plan are also the institutions with most to lose by acknowledging the situation.
What Is Left for the Child
The children in question will inherit the result without having known the previous arrangement. They will not mourn what they never had. That is the only mercy on offer, and it is offered only to them. The rest of us, who knew the cognitive bargain when it functioned and built our lives on its assumptions, will spend the remainder of our working lives attending its funeral while pretending it is still in business. The pretense will be socially mandatory, professionally protective, and personally corrosive.
The honest response is to name what is happening, refuse the pretense, and locate value where it is actually moving, which is into presence, judgment, embodiment, and the kind of human authorship that machines cannot fake because they have no stake in the result. The child born this year, if she is lucky, will grow up in a world that has finished the funeral and started building the next thing. The question is whether her parents and grandparents can endure the funeral with enough dignity to leave her something to build on.
#ai #brain #child #cognitive #credentials #culture #knowing #logic #mind #parenting #politics #schooling #tech #truth #writing -
The Psychology of Visual Aesthetics: Why Your Brain Decides What’s Beautiful Before You Do
Beauty isn’t a mystery. It’s a calculation — one your brain runs in milliseconds, without asking for your input. You glance at a logo, or scroll past an image, and something registers immediately. You either feel drawn in or you don’t. That instant pull is the psychology of visual aesthetics at work. And it’s far more precise, more predictable, and more powerful than most people realize.
This matters right now because we live in the most visually saturated environment in human history. Every surface competes for attention. Every brand fights for emotional resonance. Every interface is engineered to trigger a response. Understanding why we find certain colors and shapes instinctively beautiful — and how that shapes our daily decisions — is no longer just an academic question. It’s a design problem, a business problem, and ultimately, a human problem.
So let’s get into it. Not with tired color theory charts or recycled branding advice, but with the actual neuroscience, the evolutionary logic, and a few original frameworks, I think, give this topic the precision it deserves.
What Happens in Your Brain When You See Something Beautiful?
The moment your eyes land on something visually compelling, three neural systems activate almost simultaneously. Researchers at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and aesthetics — a field now known as neuroaesthetics — describe this as a tripartite response: sensory-motor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge activation.
In plain terms, your brain first reads the raw visual data — color, contrast, edge, form. Then it runs an emotional appraisal. Then it cross-references memory and meaning. All three happen within a fraction of a second. What you consciously experience as “beautiful” is actually the output of that layered computation.
Neuroscientific imaging has confirmed that attractive stimuli activate the brain’s reward centers, triggering dopamine release. This isn’t metaphorical. Looking at something you find beautiful produces a measurable neurochemical response — the same kind associated with pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement learning. In other words, your aesthetic preferences are literally rewarding your brain.
This is why visual aesthetics and decision-making are inseparable. If beauty triggers the reward system, then aesthetically pleasing design nudges behavior just as reliably as a well-crafted argument. It operates below the level of rational deliberation. That’s both fascinating and, frankly, a little unsettling.
The Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR Framework)
I want to introduce what I call the Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR) as a working editorial framework. It maps the three neural layers involved in aesthetic judgment onto a practical design lens:
Layer 1 — Sensory Capture: The brain detects basic visual properties — hue, saturation, brightness, symmetry, edge sharpness. This happens preconsciously. Your eyes are simply scanning, and your visual cortex is categorizing.
Layer 2 — Emotional Appraisal: The limbic system assigns valence. Does this feel safe or threatening? Warm or cold? Energizing or calming? This layer is where color psychology lives. Warm hues like red and yellow often trigger energy and arousal. Cool hues like blue and green signal calm and trust.
Layer 3 — Meaning Integration: The prefrontal cortex and memory systems bring context. A shade of blue means one thing in a hospital and something entirely different on a luxury watch. Meaning isn’t in the color itself — it’s in the relationship between the color and everything you already know.
When designers talk about “visual hierarchy” or “brand consistency,” they’re really talking about managing all three layers simultaneously. Most fail to think past Layer 1.
Why Do We Instinctively Prefer Certain Colors?
Color preference is one of the most studied — and most misunderstood — topics in visual psychology. The popular notion that “red means danger, blue means trust” is a dramatic oversimplification. The truth is both more nuanced and more interesting.
Color perception operates across three primary dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness. Research consistently shows that these dimensions influence emotional valence independently of each other. Highly saturated colors generally register as more positive — they feel vivid, alive, energized. Darker tones tend to read as heavier, more serious, or even threatening. But these aren’t universal rules. Their tendencies break down quickly when context, culture, and expertise enter the equation.
Here’s a finding worth sitting with: studies comparing trained artists to general populations show significant divergence in color emotional response. Non-artists tend to rate highly saturated colors more positively. Trained artists, by contrast, develop more nuanced preferences — often favoring desaturated, complex combinations that untrained viewers find flat or dull. Expertise literally rewires aesthetic response.
This points to something important: visual aesthetic preference isn’t fixed. It’s learned, refined, and culturally mediated. At the same time, there are evolutionary baselines that cut across all of that.
Evolutionary Color Signals: Why Blue Feels Calming, and Red Feels Urgent
Evolutionary biology offers a compelling explanation for some of our most consistent color responses. Researchers have argued that human trichromatic vision — our ability to distinguish red from green — evolved specifically to read subtle changes in skin coloration. A flush of red signals anger, arousal, or exertion. A greenish or bluish tint signals illness or poor health. These color cues carry survival-relevant information. Your brain learned to read them fast because reading them slowly had consequences.
This framework explains why red commands attention so reliably. It’s not arbitrary. Red literally signaled biologically important information to your ancestors. Your visual system still treats it with urgency. Blue, conversely, maps onto open skies, clean water, and spatial distance — environments that signal safety and resource availability. That’s why blue tends to produce calm rather than alarm.
I’d call this the Chromatic Survival Map — the idea that our baseline color responses are calibrated to ancient environmental signals, not cultural conventions. Culture layers meaning on top. But the evolutionary substrate is there first.
The Shape of Beauty: Symmetry, Proportion, and the Golden Ratio
Color is only half the story. Form — the geometry of what we see — drives aesthetic response just as powerfully. And here, the science gets genuinely surprising.
Psychological and neuroscientific studies consistently show that humans have an implicit preference for symmetrical patterns. This holds across abstract designs, natural compositions, and human faces. The preference appears spontaneously and doesn’t require deliberate thought. You don’t decide to prefer symmetrical faces. You just do. And you do so within milliseconds of seeing them.
The leading explanation is perceptual fluency. Symmetrical forms are easier for the brain to process. They require less cognitive effort. And because the brain tends to associate ease of processing with accuracy and safety, fluent visual objects feel more pleasant. Beauty, in this sense, is the emotional signature of cognitive efficiency.
Infants show a preference for symmetrical faces within months of birth, before cultural conditioning could possibly account for it. This suggests the preference is innate rather than learned. Evolutionary psychology frames this as an adaptation: symmetrical features correlate with genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness. Symmetry, then, is beauty as a biological signal.
The Golden Ratio and Processing Fluency
The golden ratio — approximately 1.618:1, denoted by the Greek letter phi — appears across natural structures, from nautilus shells to sunflower spirals to the proportions of the human face. Researchers have argued that the brain processes proportions that approximate phi more efficiently than arbitrary ratios. This aligns with the perceptual fluency theory: phi-aligned compositions feel right because your visual cortex handles them with minimal friction.
Neuroscience research using fMRI shows that faces with golden ratio proportions activate reward centers more strongly than faces with different proportional relationships. This isn’t just cultural bias toward conventional attractiveness. It’s a measurable neural preference with real-world consequences — in social interactions, professional settings, and even first impressions that happen before a word is spoken.
I want to be careful here, though. The golden ratio is not a magic formula. Many deeply compelling faces and compositions deviate significantly from phi. What the ratio captures is a tendency toward proportional harmony, not a fixed template. Unique features can create memorable beauty precisely because they break expected proportions. The brain responds to surprise as much as to efficiency.
Aesthetic Preference and Daily Decision-Making
Here’s where the psychology of visual aesthetics stops being theoretical and starts being personal. Your aesthetic responses aren’t just passive reactions to the world. They actively shape your choices — what you buy, where you eat, who you trust, how you vote.
Research in neuroaesthetics has established that aesthetic evaluations influence decisions in mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and potentially even moral judgment. Your brain doesn’t cleanly separate “is this beautiful” from “should I engage with this.” The two questions get processed through overlapping neural circuits. Beauty becomes a heuristic — a fast signal that tells the brain whether something is worth further attention and trust.
This is the Aesthetic Trust Transfer effect: when something looks beautiful, we unconsciously attribute other positive qualities to it — competence, reliability, quality, safety. A more attractive product package activates stronger reward responses in the brain. A more symmetrical face reads as more trustworthy and competent, regardless of actual competence. We know this is happening. We still can’t stop it.
Visual Aesthetics in Consumer Behavior
For brands, this is everything. The aesthetics of a product, package, or interface don’t merely set a mood — they pre-load expectations that influence satisfaction before a single feature is evaluated. Research has shown that more aesthetically designed packaging activates stronger neural reward responses, shaping perceived value before the product is even touched.
Context modulates this effect. The same artwork, presented in a gallery versus on a screen, activates different neural responses in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The same product, presented with intentional design versus generic packaging, triggers different purchasing behavior. Aesthetic context isn’t decorative. It’s functional.
Personality also shapes aesthetic response in measurable ways. Extroverts show greater attraction to warm, saturated hues. Introverts tend to favor cool, desaturated palettes. This isn’t a trivial observation — it suggests that truly effective visual communication has to account for who’s looking, not just what’s being shown.
The Perceptual Fluency Principle and Why It Predicts Viral Content
One of the most useful — and underappreciated — concepts in aesthetic psychology is perceptual fluency. The idea is straightforward: when a visual stimulus is easy to process, we rate it as more pleasant, more true, and more beautiful. Ease of perception gets misread as quality of content.
This has profound implications for content creation, branding, and communication design. Clean layouts, high contrast, clear visual hierarchy, and familiar compositional structures all increase fluency. And increased fluency increases positive response — without the viewer understanding why.
I call this the Fluency Dividend: the measurable boost in perceived quality, credibility, and appeal that well-organized visual communication generates beyond its literal content. A mediocre idea in a clean design beats a brilliant idea in a cluttered one, at least in first impressions. That’s uncomfortable. And it’s true.
This is also why certain types of content spread more readily on social media. High-contrast imagery, strong compositional balance, and emotionally legible color palettes all reduce cognitive load. Reduced cognitive load means faster emotional response. Faster emotional response means faster sharing behavior. Visual aesthetics literally accelerates social contagion.
When Aesthetic Familiarity Becomes Aesthetic Fatigue
There’s a counterforce, though. The mere exposure effect — the well-documented tendency to prefer things we’ve seen before — operates within a range. Repeated exposure increases liking up to a point. Beyond that threshold, familiarity collapses into predictability, and predictability triggers boredom.
This is why aesthetic trends cycle. Minimalism gave way to maximalism. Flat design created an appetite for texture and depth. Every visual language eventually becomes overused, and the brain — always hunting for novelty alongside pattern — starts rejecting what it once rewarded.
The most enduring visual identities navigate this tension deliberately. They build on familiar structural cues — symmetry, proportion, clear hierarchy — while introducing controlled doses of unexpected color, form, or compositional choice. They play the fluency game and the surprise game simultaneously. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds, and rarer than it should be.
Cultural Conditioning and the Limits of Universal Aesthetics
All of this needs a caveat. The evolutionary and neurological baselines I’ve described are real — but they don’t operate in a vacuum. Culture, personal history, and expertise all modify aesthetic response in significant ways. What reads as elegant in one visual tradition reads as empty in another. What signals quality in one market signals coldness in another.
Cross-cultural studies show remarkable consistency in some preferences — symmetry and certain proportional harmonics appear near-universal. But specific color associations, compositional conventions, and aesthetic ideals vary enormously across populations and contexts. The Chromatic Survival Map is a baseline. Cultural code is layered on top, often overwriting it entirely.
This is why purely algorithmic approaches to beauty — the current wave of AI beauty scoring tools — need scrutiny. Optimization against culturally specific training data encodes those biases as if they were biological facts. The technology is real. The neutrality claim isn’t.
What Neuroaesthetics Predicts for the Future of Design
Neuroaesthetics is, as researchers in cognitive neuroscience have noted, at a historical inflection point. The tools for measuring aesthetic response — EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, galvanic skin response — are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The data generated by those tools is becoming trainable. AI systems are already learning to predict aesthetic preferences and adapt visual interfaces in real time based on individual response patterns.
My prediction — and I hold this with real conviction — is that the next decade will produce a discipline I’d call Adaptive Aesthetic Intelligence: design systems that continuously calibrate color, form, layout, and proportion to individual neurological and psychological profiles. Not in a manipulative sense, but in the same way typography evolved from arbitrary marks to a system of principles optimized for human reading. Design will evolve from static visual choices to dynamic aesthetic environments.
That’s exciting. It’s also risky. When aesthetic optimization becomes automated and personalized, the line between design that serves the viewer and design that exploits the viewer becomes very thin. The field will need an ethical framework that keeps pace with its technical capability. That work isn’t finished. It’s barely started.
What This Means for You, Practically
If you’re a designer, the takeaway is this: your instincts about what “looks right” are not arbitrary. They’re drawing on a sophisticated internal model shaped by evolutionary biology, cultural exposure, and trained expertise. Trust those instincts — but examine them. Ask which layer of the 3-SAR framework your choices are operating on, and whether they account for all three.
If you’re a communicator, a marketer, or anyone creating visual content: aesthetics isn’t decoration. It’s argument. Every visual choice is making a claim about quality, trustworthiness, and relevance before a single word is read. Design that claim deliberately.
And if you’re simply a person who finds themselves drawn to certain colors, shapes, and visual environments without knowing why — that’s not irrational. That’s your brain running a calculation that took millions of years to develop. It’s worth understanding. Because once you understand why beauty works, you start to see it — and use it — very differently.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Psychology of Visual Aesthetics
What is the psychology of visual aesthetics?
The psychology of visual aesthetics studies why humans find certain visual stimuli — colors, shapes, compositions, and forms — more attractive or pleasing than others. It draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and cultural theory to explain aesthetic preference and its effects on behavior and decision-making.
Why do we find symmetrical faces more attractive?
Symmetrical faces are processed more efficiently by the brain — a phenomenon called perceptual fluency. Evolutionary psychology adds that facial symmetry signals genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness, making it a reliable biological marker. Research confirms that this preference appears in infants before cultural conditioning takes hold, suggesting it is partly innate.
How does color affect decision-making?
Color activates the limbic system — the brain’s emotion center — before conscious evaluation occurs. Warm colors like red and orange tend to increase arousal and urgency. Cool colors like blue and green promote calm and trust. These responses influence purchasing decisions, brand perception, interface behavior, and even interpersonal trust. Context and culture significantly modulate these baseline effects.
What is neuroaesthetics?
Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that studies the biological bases of aesthetic experience. It examines how the brain processes and responds to visual, auditory, and environmental stimuli, and how those responses shape behavior in domains including art, design, consumer behavior, and mate selection.
Is beauty subjective or objective?
The honest answer is both. Certain aesthetic preferences — for symmetry, specific proportional relationships, and particular color dynamics — appear cross-culturally and even in infants, suggesting a biological substrate. At the same time, cultural context, personal history, and expertise strongly modify these baseline preferences. Beauty has objective structural tendencies and subjective experiential layers, and separating them cleanly is harder than either camp typically admits.
What is perceptual fluency, and why does it matter for design?
Perceptual fluency is the ease with which the brain processes a visual stimulus. Research shows that higher fluency — easier processing — produces more positive aesthetic judgments. For design, this means clean layouts, clear visual hierarchy, and coherent compositional structure don’t just look better; they actively make content feel more credible, trustworthy, and appealing. Fluency is a measurable design variable, not just an aesthetic opinion.
How does the golden ratio relate to visual beauty?
The golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1) describes a proportional relationship that appears frequently in nature and has been used in art and architecture for millennia. Neuroscientific research indicates that compositions and faces approximating this ratio activate reward centers more strongly. The likely mechanism is again perceptual fluency — phi-aligned proportions are particularly easy for the visual system to parse. However, the golden ratio is a tendency, not a rule, and many compelling designs deviate from it deliberately.
Can aesthetic preferences be changed or learned?
Yes, significantly. Research comparing trained artists to general populations shows that aesthetic expertise changes color preference, compositional judgment, and emotional response to visual stimuli. Artistic training develops more nuanced, context-sensitive preferences. Cultural exposure, repeated exposure to specific visual languages, and deliberate study all reshape aesthetic response. Preferences have a biological floor and a very high cultural ceiling.
Further Reading
These peer-reviewed sources informed this article and are worth exploring if you want to go deeper on the neuroscience and psychology of visual aesthetics.
- Chatterjee & Vartanian: Neuroaesthetics — Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Elliot, A.J.: Color and Psychological Functioning — Frontiers in Psychology
- Hue, Saturation, and Brightness in Color Emotional Perception — BMC Psychology
- Iosa et al.: Symmetry and the Golden Ratio in Beauty Perception — European Journal of Neuroscience
- Palmer & Schloss: Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference — Annual Review of Psychology
Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Art and Design sections for more inspiring content.
#aesthetics #art #design #psychology #VisualAesthetics -
The Psychology of Visual Aesthetics: Why Your Brain Decides What’s Beautiful Before You Do
Beauty isn’t a mystery. It’s a calculation — one your brain runs in milliseconds, without asking for your input. You glance at a logo, or scroll past an image, and something registers immediately. You either feel drawn in or you don’t. That instant pull is the psychology of visual aesthetics at work. And it’s far more precise, more predictable, and more powerful than most people realize.
This matters right now because we live in the most visually saturated environment in human history. Every surface competes for attention. Every brand fights for emotional resonance. Every interface is engineered to trigger a response. Understanding why we find certain colors and shapes instinctively beautiful — and how that shapes our daily decisions — is no longer just an academic question. It’s a design problem, a business problem, and ultimately, a human problem.
So let’s get into it. Not with tired color theory charts or recycled branding advice, but with the actual neuroscience, the evolutionary logic, and a few original frameworks, I think, give this topic the precision it deserves.
What Happens in Your Brain When You See Something Beautiful?
The moment your eyes land on something visually compelling, three neural systems activate almost simultaneously. Researchers at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and aesthetics — a field now known as neuroaesthetics — describe this as a tripartite response: sensory-motor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge activation.
In plain terms, your brain first reads the raw visual data — color, contrast, edge, form. Then it runs an emotional appraisal. Then it cross-references memory and meaning. All three happen within a fraction of a second. What you consciously experience as “beautiful” is actually the output of that layered computation.
Neuroscientific imaging has confirmed that attractive stimuli activate the brain’s reward centers, triggering dopamine release. This isn’t metaphorical. Looking at something you find beautiful produces a measurable neurochemical response — the same kind associated with pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement learning. In other words, your aesthetic preferences are literally rewarding your brain.
This is why visual aesthetics and decision-making are inseparable. If beauty triggers the reward system, then aesthetically pleasing design nudges behavior just as reliably as a well-crafted argument. It operates below the level of rational deliberation. That’s both fascinating and, frankly, a little unsettling.
The Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR Framework)
I want to introduce what I call the Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR) as a working editorial framework. It maps the three neural layers involved in aesthetic judgment onto a practical design lens:
Layer 1 — Sensory Capture: The brain detects basic visual properties — hue, saturation, brightness, symmetry, edge sharpness. This happens preconsciously. Your eyes are simply scanning, and your visual cortex is categorizing.
Layer 2 — Emotional Appraisal: The limbic system assigns valence. Does this feel safe or threatening? Warm or cold? Energizing or calming? This layer is where color psychology lives. Warm hues like red and yellow often trigger energy and arousal. Cool hues like blue and green signal calm and trust.
Layer 3 — Meaning Integration: The prefrontal cortex and memory systems bring context. A shade of blue means one thing in a hospital and something entirely different on a luxury watch. Meaning isn’t in the color itself — it’s in the relationship between the color and everything you already know.
When designers talk about “visual hierarchy” or “brand consistency,” they’re really talking about managing all three layers simultaneously. Most fail to think past Layer 1.
Why Do We Instinctively Prefer Certain Colors?
Color preference is one of the most studied — and most misunderstood — topics in visual psychology. The popular notion that “red means danger, blue means trust” is a dramatic oversimplification. The truth is both more nuanced and more interesting.
Color perception operates across three primary dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness. Research consistently shows that these dimensions influence emotional valence independently of each other. Highly saturated colors generally register as more positive — they feel vivid, alive, energized. Darker tones tend to read as heavier, more serious, or even threatening. But these aren’t universal rules. Their tendencies break down quickly when context, culture, and expertise enter the equation.
Here’s a finding worth sitting with: studies comparing trained artists to general populations show significant divergence in color emotional response. Non-artists tend to rate highly saturated colors more positively. Trained artists, by contrast, develop more nuanced preferences — often favoring desaturated, complex combinations that untrained viewers find flat or dull. Expertise literally rewires aesthetic response.
This points to something important: visual aesthetic preference isn’t fixed. It’s learned, refined, and culturally mediated. At the same time, there are evolutionary baselines that cut across all of that.
Evolutionary Color Signals: Why Blue Feels Calming, and Red Feels Urgent
Evolutionary biology offers a compelling explanation for some of our most consistent color responses. Researchers have argued that human trichromatic vision — our ability to distinguish red from green — evolved specifically to read subtle changes in skin coloration. A flush of red signals anger, arousal, or exertion. A greenish or bluish tint signals illness or poor health. These color cues carry survival-relevant information. Your brain learned to read them fast because reading them slowly had consequences.
This framework explains why red commands attention so reliably. It’s not arbitrary. Red literally signaled biologically important information to your ancestors. Your visual system still treats it with urgency. Blue, conversely, maps onto open skies, clean water, and spatial distance — environments that signal safety and resource availability. That’s why blue tends to produce calm rather than alarm.
I’d call this the Chromatic Survival Map — the idea that our baseline color responses are calibrated to ancient environmental signals, not cultural conventions. Culture layers meaning on top. But the evolutionary substrate is there first.
The Shape of Beauty: Symmetry, Proportion, and the Golden Ratio
Color is only half the story. Form — the geometry of what we see — drives aesthetic response just as powerfully. And here, the science gets genuinely surprising.
Psychological and neuroscientific studies consistently show that humans have an implicit preference for symmetrical patterns. This holds across abstract designs, natural compositions, and human faces. The preference appears spontaneously and doesn’t require deliberate thought. You don’t decide to prefer symmetrical faces. You just do. And you do so within milliseconds of seeing them.
The leading explanation is perceptual fluency. Symmetrical forms are easier for the brain to process. They require less cognitive effort. And because the brain tends to associate ease of processing with accuracy and safety, fluent visual objects feel more pleasant. Beauty, in this sense, is the emotional signature of cognitive efficiency.
Infants show a preference for symmetrical faces within months of birth, before cultural conditioning could possibly account for it. This suggests the preference is innate rather than learned. Evolutionary psychology frames this as an adaptation: symmetrical features correlate with genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness. Symmetry, then, is beauty as a biological signal.
The Golden Ratio and Processing Fluency
The golden ratio — approximately 1.618:1, denoted by the Greek letter phi — appears across natural structures, from nautilus shells to sunflower spirals to the proportions of the human face. Researchers have argued that the brain processes proportions that approximate phi more efficiently than arbitrary ratios. This aligns with the perceptual fluency theory: phi-aligned compositions feel right because your visual cortex handles them with minimal friction.
Neuroscience research using fMRI shows that faces with golden ratio proportions activate reward centers more strongly than faces with different proportional relationships. This isn’t just cultural bias toward conventional attractiveness. It’s a measurable neural preference with real-world consequences — in social interactions, professional settings, and even first impressions that happen before a word is spoken.
I want to be careful here, though. The golden ratio is not a magic formula. Many deeply compelling faces and compositions deviate significantly from phi. What the ratio captures is a tendency toward proportional harmony, not a fixed template. Unique features can create memorable beauty precisely because they break expected proportions. The brain responds to surprise as much as to efficiency.
Aesthetic Preference and Daily Decision-Making
Here’s where the psychology of visual aesthetics stops being theoretical and starts being personal. Your aesthetic responses aren’t just passive reactions to the world. They actively shape your choices — what you buy, where you eat, who you trust, how you vote.
Research in neuroaesthetics has established that aesthetic evaluations influence decisions in mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and potentially even moral judgment. Your brain doesn’t cleanly separate “is this beautiful” from “should I engage with this.” The two questions get processed through overlapping neural circuits. Beauty becomes a heuristic — a fast signal that tells the brain whether something is worth further attention and trust.
This is the Aesthetic Trust Transfer effect: when something looks beautiful, we unconsciously attribute other positive qualities to it — competence, reliability, quality, safety. A more attractive product package activates stronger reward responses in the brain. A more symmetrical face reads as more trustworthy and competent, regardless of actual competence. We know this is happening. We still can’t stop it.
Visual Aesthetics in Consumer Behavior
For brands, this is everything. The aesthetics of a product, package, or interface don’t merely set a mood — they pre-load expectations that influence satisfaction before a single feature is evaluated. Research has shown that more aesthetically designed packaging activates stronger neural reward responses, shaping perceived value before the product is even touched.
Context modulates this effect. The same artwork, presented in a gallery versus on a screen, activates different neural responses in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The same product, presented with intentional design versus generic packaging, triggers different purchasing behavior. Aesthetic context isn’t decorative. It’s functional.
Personality also shapes aesthetic response in measurable ways. Extroverts show greater attraction to warm, saturated hues. Introverts tend to favor cool, desaturated palettes. This isn’t a trivial observation — it suggests that truly effective visual communication has to account for who’s looking, not just what’s being shown.
The Perceptual Fluency Principle and Why It Predicts Viral Content
One of the most useful — and underappreciated — concepts in aesthetic psychology is perceptual fluency. The idea is straightforward: when a visual stimulus is easy to process, we rate it as more pleasant, more true, and more beautiful. Ease of perception gets misread as quality of content.
This has profound implications for content creation, branding, and communication design. Clean layouts, high contrast, clear visual hierarchy, and familiar compositional structures all increase fluency. And increased fluency increases positive response — without the viewer understanding why.
I call this the Fluency Dividend: the measurable boost in perceived quality, credibility, and appeal that well-organized visual communication generates beyond its literal content. A mediocre idea in a clean design beats a brilliant idea in a cluttered one, at least in first impressions. That’s uncomfortable. And it’s true.
This is also why certain types of content spread more readily on social media. High-contrast imagery, strong compositional balance, and emotionally legible color palettes all reduce cognitive load. Reduced cognitive load means faster emotional response. Faster emotional response means faster sharing behavior. Visual aesthetics literally accelerates social contagion.
When Aesthetic Familiarity Becomes Aesthetic Fatigue
There’s a counterforce, though. The mere exposure effect — the well-documented tendency to prefer things we’ve seen before — operates within a range. Repeated exposure increases liking up to a point. Beyond that threshold, familiarity collapses into predictability, and predictability triggers boredom.
This is why aesthetic trends cycle. Minimalism gave way to maximalism. Flat design created an appetite for texture and depth. Every visual language eventually becomes overused, and the brain — always hunting for novelty alongside pattern — starts rejecting what it once rewarded.
The most enduring visual identities navigate this tension deliberately. They build on familiar structural cues — symmetry, proportion, clear hierarchy — while introducing controlled doses of unexpected color, form, or compositional choice. They play the fluency game and the surprise game simultaneously. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds, and rarer than it should be.
Cultural Conditioning and the Limits of Universal Aesthetics
All of this needs a caveat. The evolutionary and neurological baselines I’ve described are real — but they don’t operate in a vacuum. Culture, personal history, and expertise all modify aesthetic response in significant ways. What reads as elegant in one visual tradition reads as empty in another. What signals quality in one market signals coldness in another.
Cross-cultural studies show remarkable consistency in some preferences — symmetry and certain proportional harmonics appear near-universal. But specific color associations, compositional conventions, and aesthetic ideals vary enormously across populations and contexts. The Chromatic Survival Map is a baseline. Cultural code is layered on top, often overwriting it entirely.
This is why purely algorithmic approaches to beauty — the current wave of AI beauty scoring tools — need scrutiny. Optimization against culturally specific training data encodes those biases as if they were biological facts. The technology is real. The neutrality claim isn’t.
What Neuroaesthetics Predicts for the Future of Design
Neuroaesthetics is, as researchers in cognitive neuroscience have noted, at a historical inflection point. The tools for measuring aesthetic response — EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, galvanic skin response — are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The data generated by those tools is becoming trainable. AI systems are already learning to predict aesthetic preferences and adapt visual interfaces in real time based on individual response patterns.
My prediction — and I hold this with real conviction — is that the next decade will produce a discipline I’d call Adaptive Aesthetic Intelligence: design systems that continuously calibrate color, form, layout, and proportion to individual neurological and psychological profiles. Not in a manipulative sense, but in the same way typography evolved from arbitrary marks to a system of principles optimized for human reading. Design will evolve from static visual choices to dynamic aesthetic environments.
That’s exciting. It’s also risky. When aesthetic optimization becomes automated and personalized, the line between design that serves the viewer and design that exploits the viewer becomes very thin. The field will need an ethical framework that keeps pace with its technical capability. That work isn’t finished. It’s barely started.
What This Means for You, Practically
If you’re a designer, the takeaway is this: your instincts about what “looks right” are not arbitrary. They’re drawing on a sophisticated internal model shaped by evolutionary biology, cultural exposure, and trained expertise. Trust those instincts — but examine them. Ask which layer of the 3-SAR framework your choices are operating on, and whether they account for all three.
If you’re a communicator, a marketer, or anyone creating visual content: aesthetics isn’t decoration. It’s argument. Every visual choice is making a claim about quality, trustworthiness, and relevance before a single word is read. Design that claim deliberately.
And if you’re simply a person who finds themselves drawn to certain colors, shapes, and visual environments without knowing why — that’s not irrational. That’s your brain running a calculation that took millions of years to develop. It’s worth understanding. Because once you understand why beauty works, you start to see it — and use it — very differently.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Psychology of Visual Aesthetics
What is the psychology of visual aesthetics?
The psychology of visual aesthetics studies why humans find certain visual stimuli — colors, shapes, compositions, and forms — more attractive or pleasing than others. It draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and cultural theory to explain aesthetic preference and its effects on behavior and decision-making.
Why do we find symmetrical faces more attractive?
Symmetrical faces are processed more efficiently by the brain — a phenomenon called perceptual fluency. Evolutionary psychology adds that facial symmetry signals genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness, making it a reliable biological marker. Research confirms that this preference appears in infants before cultural conditioning takes hold, suggesting it is partly innate.
How does color affect decision-making?
Color activates the limbic system — the brain’s emotion center — before conscious evaluation occurs. Warm colors like red and orange tend to increase arousal and urgency. Cool colors like blue and green promote calm and trust. These responses influence purchasing decisions, brand perception, interface behavior, and even interpersonal trust. Context and culture significantly modulate these baseline effects.
What is neuroaesthetics?
Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that studies the biological bases of aesthetic experience. It examines how the brain processes and responds to visual, auditory, and environmental stimuli, and how those responses shape behavior in domains including art, design, consumer behavior, and mate selection.
Is beauty subjective or objective?
The honest answer is both. Certain aesthetic preferences — for symmetry, specific proportional relationships, and particular color dynamics — appear cross-culturally and even in infants, suggesting a biological substrate. At the same time, cultural context, personal history, and expertise strongly modify these baseline preferences. Beauty has objective structural tendencies and subjective experiential layers, and separating them cleanly is harder than either camp typically admits.
What is perceptual fluency, and why does it matter for design?
Perceptual fluency is the ease with which the brain processes a visual stimulus. Research shows that higher fluency — easier processing — produces more positive aesthetic judgments. For design, this means clean layouts, clear visual hierarchy, and coherent compositional structure don’t just look better; they actively make content feel more credible, trustworthy, and appealing. Fluency is a measurable design variable, not just an aesthetic opinion.
How does the golden ratio relate to visual beauty?
The golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1) describes a proportional relationship that appears frequently in nature and has been used in art and architecture for millennia. Neuroscientific research indicates that compositions and faces approximating this ratio activate reward centers more strongly. The likely mechanism is again perceptual fluency — phi-aligned proportions are particularly easy for the visual system to parse. However, the golden ratio is a tendency, not a rule, and many compelling designs deviate from it deliberately.
Can aesthetic preferences be changed or learned?
Yes, significantly. Research comparing trained artists to general populations shows that aesthetic expertise changes color preference, compositional judgment, and emotional response to visual stimuli. Artistic training develops more nuanced, context-sensitive preferences. Cultural exposure, repeated exposure to specific visual languages, and deliberate study all reshape aesthetic response. Preferences have a biological floor and a very high cultural ceiling.
Further Reading
These peer-reviewed sources informed this article and are worth exploring if you want to go deeper on the neuroscience and psychology of visual aesthetics.
- Chatterjee & Vartanian: Neuroaesthetics — Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Elliot, A.J.: Color and Psychological Functioning — Frontiers in Psychology
- Hue, Saturation, and Brightness in Color Emotional Perception — BMC Psychology
- Iosa et al.: Symmetry and the Golden Ratio in Beauty Perception — European Journal of Neuroscience
- Palmer & Schloss: Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference — Annual Review of Psychology
Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Art and Design sections for more inspiring content.
#aesthetics #art #design #psychology #VisualAesthetics -
The Psychology of Visual Aesthetics: Why Your Brain Decides What’s Beautiful Before You Do
Beauty isn’t a mystery. It’s a calculation — one your brain runs in milliseconds, without asking for your input. You glance at a logo, or scroll past an image, and something registers immediately. You either feel drawn in or you don’t. That instant pull is the psychology of visual aesthetics at work. And it’s far more precise, more predictable, and more powerful than most people realize.
This matters right now because we live in the most visually saturated environment in human history. Every surface competes for attention. Every brand fights for emotional resonance. Every interface is engineered to trigger a response. Understanding why we find certain colors and shapes instinctively beautiful — and how that shapes our daily decisions — is no longer just an academic question. It’s a design problem, a business problem, and ultimately, a human problem.
So let’s get into it. Not with tired color theory charts or recycled branding advice, but with the actual neuroscience, the evolutionary logic, and a few original frameworks, I think, give this topic the precision it deserves.
What Happens in Your Brain When You See Something Beautiful?
The moment your eyes land on something visually compelling, three neural systems activate almost simultaneously. Researchers at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and aesthetics — a field now known as neuroaesthetics — describe this as a tripartite response: sensory-motor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge activation.
In plain terms, your brain first reads the raw visual data — color, contrast, edge, form. Then it runs an emotional appraisal. Then it cross-references memory and meaning. All three happen within a fraction of a second. What you consciously experience as “beautiful” is actually the output of that layered computation.
Neuroscientific imaging has confirmed that attractive stimuli activate the brain’s reward centers, triggering dopamine release. This isn’t metaphorical. Looking at something you find beautiful produces a measurable neurochemical response — the same kind associated with pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement learning. In other words, your aesthetic preferences are literally rewarding your brain.
This is why visual aesthetics and decision-making are inseparable. If beauty triggers the reward system, then aesthetically pleasing design nudges behavior just as reliably as a well-crafted argument. It operates below the level of rational deliberation. That’s both fascinating and, frankly, a little unsettling.
The Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR Framework)
I want to introduce what I call the Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR) as a working editorial framework. It maps the three neural layers involved in aesthetic judgment onto a practical design lens:
Layer 1 — Sensory Capture: The brain detects basic visual properties — hue, saturation, brightness, symmetry, edge sharpness. This happens preconsciously. Your eyes are simply scanning, and your visual cortex is categorizing.
Layer 2 — Emotional Appraisal: The limbic system assigns valence. Does this feel safe or threatening? Warm or cold? Energizing or calming? This layer is where color psychology lives. Warm hues like red and yellow often trigger energy and arousal. Cool hues like blue and green signal calm and trust.
Layer 3 — Meaning Integration: The prefrontal cortex and memory systems bring context. A shade of blue means one thing in a hospital and something entirely different on a luxury watch. Meaning isn’t in the color itself — it’s in the relationship between the color and everything you already know.
When designers talk about “visual hierarchy” or “brand consistency,” they’re really talking about managing all three layers simultaneously. Most fail to think past Layer 1.
Why Do We Instinctively Prefer Certain Colors?
Color preference is one of the most studied — and most misunderstood — topics in visual psychology. The popular notion that “red means danger, blue means trust” is a dramatic oversimplification. The truth is both more nuanced and more interesting.
Color perception operates across three primary dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness. Research consistently shows that these dimensions influence emotional valence independently of each other. Highly saturated colors generally register as more positive — they feel vivid, alive, energized. Darker tones tend to read as heavier, more serious, or even threatening. But these aren’t universal rules. Their tendencies break down quickly when context, culture, and expertise enter the equation.
Here’s a finding worth sitting with: studies comparing trained artists to general populations show significant divergence in color emotional response. Non-artists tend to rate highly saturated colors more positively. Trained artists, by contrast, develop more nuanced preferences — often favoring desaturated, complex combinations that untrained viewers find flat or dull. Expertise literally rewires aesthetic response.
This points to something important: visual aesthetic preference isn’t fixed. It’s learned, refined, and culturally mediated. At the same time, there are evolutionary baselines that cut across all of that.
Evolutionary Color Signals: Why Blue Feels Calming, and Red Feels Urgent
Evolutionary biology offers a compelling explanation for some of our most consistent color responses. Researchers have argued that human trichromatic vision — our ability to distinguish red from green — evolved specifically to read subtle changes in skin coloration. A flush of red signals anger, arousal, or exertion. A greenish or bluish tint signals illness or poor health. These color cues carry survival-relevant information. Your brain learned to read them fast because reading them slowly had consequences.
This framework explains why red commands attention so reliably. It’s not arbitrary. Red literally signaled biologically important information to your ancestors. Your visual system still treats it with urgency. Blue, conversely, maps onto open skies, clean water, and spatial distance — environments that signal safety and resource availability. That’s why blue tends to produce calm rather than alarm.
I’d call this the Chromatic Survival Map — the idea that our baseline color responses are calibrated to ancient environmental signals, not cultural conventions. Culture layers meaning on top. But the evolutionary substrate is there first.
The Shape of Beauty: Symmetry, Proportion, and the Golden Ratio
Color is only half the story. Form — the geometry of what we see — drives aesthetic response just as powerfully. And here, the science gets genuinely surprising.
Psychological and neuroscientific studies consistently show that humans have an implicit preference for symmetrical patterns. This holds across abstract designs, natural compositions, and human faces. The preference appears spontaneously and doesn’t require deliberate thought. You don’t decide to prefer symmetrical faces. You just do. And you do so within milliseconds of seeing them.
The leading explanation is perceptual fluency. Symmetrical forms are easier for the brain to process. They require less cognitive effort. And because the brain tends to associate ease of processing with accuracy and safety, fluent visual objects feel more pleasant. Beauty, in this sense, is the emotional signature of cognitive efficiency.
Infants show a preference for symmetrical faces within months of birth, before cultural conditioning could possibly account for it. This suggests the preference is innate rather than learned. Evolutionary psychology frames this as an adaptation: symmetrical features correlate with genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness. Symmetry, then, is beauty as a biological signal.
The Golden Ratio and Processing Fluency
The golden ratio — approximately 1.618:1, denoted by the Greek letter phi — appears across natural structures, from nautilus shells to sunflower spirals to the proportions of the human face. Researchers have argued that the brain processes proportions that approximate phi more efficiently than arbitrary ratios. This aligns with the perceptual fluency theory: phi-aligned compositions feel right because your visual cortex handles them with minimal friction.
Neuroscience research using fMRI shows that faces with golden ratio proportions activate reward centers more strongly than faces with different proportional relationships. This isn’t just cultural bias toward conventional attractiveness. It’s a measurable neural preference with real-world consequences — in social interactions, professional settings, and even first impressions that happen before a word is spoken.
I want to be careful here, though. The golden ratio is not a magic formula. Many deeply compelling faces and compositions deviate significantly from phi. What the ratio captures is a tendency toward proportional harmony, not a fixed template. Unique features can create memorable beauty precisely because they break expected proportions. The brain responds to surprise as much as to efficiency.
Aesthetic Preference and Daily Decision-Making
Here’s where the psychology of visual aesthetics stops being theoretical and starts being personal. Your aesthetic responses aren’t just passive reactions to the world. They actively shape your choices — what you buy, where you eat, who you trust, how you vote.
Research in neuroaesthetics has established that aesthetic evaluations influence decisions in mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and potentially even moral judgment. Your brain doesn’t cleanly separate “is this beautiful” from “should I engage with this.” The two questions get processed through overlapping neural circuits. Beauty becomes a heuristic — a fast signal that tells the brain whether something is worth further attention and trust.
This is the Aesthetic Trust Transfer effect: when something looks beautiful, we unconsciously attribute other positive qualities to it — competence, reliability, quality, safety. A more attractive product package activates stronger reward responses in the brain. A more symmetrical face reads as more trustworthy and competent, regardless of actual competence. We know this is happening. We still can’t stop it.
Visual Aesthetics in Consumer Behavior
For brands, this is everything. The aesthetics of a product, package, or interface don’t merely set a mood — they pre-load expectations that influence satisfaction before a single feature is evaluated. Research has shown that more aesthetically designed packaging activates stronger neural reward responses, shaping perceived value before the product is even touched.
Context modulates this effect. The same artwork, presented in a gallery versus on a screen, activates different neural responses in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The same product, presented with intentional design versus generic packaging, triggers different purchasing behavior. Aesthetic context isn’t decorative. It’s functional.
Personality also shapes aesthetic response in measurable ways. Extroverts show greater attraction to warm, saturated hues. Introverts tend to favor cool, desaturated palettes. This isn’t a trivial observation — it suggests that truly effective visual communication has to account for who’s looking, not just what’s being shown.
The Perceptual Fluency Principle and Why It Predicts Viral Content
One of the most useful — and underappreciated — concepts in aesthetic psychology is perceptual fluency. The idea is straightforward: when a visual stimulus is easy to process, we rate it as more pleasant, more true, and more beautiful. Ease of perception gets misread as quality of content.
This has profound implications for content creation, branding, and communication design. Clean layouts, high contrast, clear visual hierarchy, and familiar compositional structures all increase fluency. And increased fluency increases positive response — without the viewer understanding why.
I call this the Fluency Dividend: the measurable boost in perceived quality, credibility, and appeal that well-organized visual communication generates beyond its literal content. A mediocre idea in a clean design beats a brilliant idea in a cluttered one, at least in first impressions. That’s uncomfortable. And it’s true.
This is also why certain types of content spread more readily on social media. High-contrast imagery, strong compositional balance, and emotionally legible color palettes all reduce cognitive load. Reduced cognitive load means faster emotional response. Faster emotional response means faster sharing behavior. Visual aesthetics literally accelerates social contagion.
When Aesthetic Familiarity Becomes Aesthetic Fatigue
There’s a counterforce, though. The mere exposure effect — the well-documented tendency to prefer things we’ve seen before — operates within a range. Repeated exposure increases liking up to a point. Beyond that threshold, familiarity collapses into predictability, and predictability triggers boredom.
This is why aesthetic trends cycle. Minimalism gave way to maximalism. Flat design created an appetite for texture and depth. Every visual language eventually becomes overused, and the brain — always hunting for novelty alongside pattern — starts rejecting what it once rewarded.
The most enduring visual identities navigate this tension deliberately. They build on familiar structural cues — symmetry, proportion, clear hierarchy — while introducing controlled doses of unexpected color, form, or compositional choice. They play the fluency game and the surprise game simultaneously. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds, and rarer than it should be.
Cultural Conditioning and the Limits of Universal Aesthetics
All of this needs a caveat. The evolutionary and neurological baselines I’ve described are real — but they don’t operate in a vacuum. Culture, personal history, and expertise all modify aesthetic response in significant ways. What reads as elegant in one visual tradition reads as empty in another. What signals quality in one market signals coldness in another.
Cross-cultural studies show remarkable consistency in some preferences — symmetry and certain proportional harmonics appear near-universal. But specific color associations, compositional conventions, and aesthetic ideals vary enormously across populations and contexts. The Chromatic Survival Map is a baseline. Cultural code is layered on top, often overwriting it entirely.
This is why purely algorithmic approaches to beauty — the current wave of AI beauty scoring tools — need scrutiny. Optimization against culturally specific training data encodes those biases as if they were biological facts. The technology is real. The neutrality claim isn’t.
What Neuroaesthetics Predicts for the Future of Design
Neuroaesthetics is, as researchers in cognitive neuroscience have noted, at a historical inflection point. The tools for measuring aesthetic response — EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, galvanic skin response — are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The data generated by those tools is becoming trainable. AI systems are already learning to predict aesthetic preferences and adapt visual interfaces in real time based on individual response patterns.
My prediction — and I hold this with real conviction — is that the next decade will produce a discipline I’d call Adaptive Aesthetic Intelligence: design systems that continuously calibrate color, form, layout, and proportion to individual neurological and psychological profiles. Not in a manipulative sense, but in the same way typography evolved from arbitrary marks to a system of principles optimized for human reading. Design will evolve from static visual choices to dynamic aesthetic environments.
That’s exciting. It’s also risky. When aesthetic optimization becomes automated and personalized, the line between design that serves the viewer and design that exploits the viewer becomes very thin. The field will need an ethical framework that keeps pace with its technical capability. That work isn’t finished. It’s barely started.
What This Means for You, Practically
If you’re a designer, the takeaway is this: your instincts about what “looks right” are not arbitrary. They’re drawing on a sophisticated internal model shaped by evolutionary biology, cultural exposure, and trained expertise. Trust those instincts — but examine them. Ask which layer of the 3-SAR framework your choices are operating on, and whether they account for all three.
If you’re a communicator, a marketer, or anyone creating visual content: aesthetics isn’t decoration. It’s argument. Every visual choice is making a claim about quality, trustworthiness, and relevance before a single word is read. Design that claim deliberately.
And if you’re simply a person who finds themselves drawn to certain colors, shapes, and visual environments without knowing why — that’s not irrational. That’s your brain running a calculation that took millions of years to develop. It’s worth understanding. Because once you understand why beauty works, you start to see it — and use it — very differently.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Psychology of Visual Aesthetics
What is the psychology of visual aesthetics?
The psychology of visual aesthetics studies why humans find certain visual stimuli — colors, shapes, compositions, and forms — more attractive or pleasing than others. It draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and cultural theory to explain aesthetic preference and its effects on behavior and decision-making.
Why do we find symmetrical faces more attractive?
Symmetrical faces are processed more efficiently by the brain — a phenomenon called perceptual fluency. Evolutionary psychology adds that facial symmetry signals genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness, making it a reliable biological marker. Research confirms that this preference appears in infants before cultural conditioning takes hold, suggesting it is partly innate.
How does color affect decision-making?
Color activates the limbic system — the brain’s emotion center — before conscious evaluation occurs. Warm colors like red and orange tend to increase arousal and urgency. Cool colors like blue and green promote calm and trust. These responses influence purchasing decisions, brand perception, interface behavior, and even interpersonal trust. Context and culture significantly modulate these baseline effects.
What is neuroaesthetics?
Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that studies the biological bases of aesthetic experience. It examines how the brain processes and responds to visual, auditory, and environmental stimuli, and how those responses shape behavior in domains including art, design, consumer behavior, and mate selection.
Is beauty subjective or objective?
The honest answer is both. Certain aesthetic preferences — for symmetry, specific proportional relationships, and particular color dynamics — appear cross-culturally and even in infants, suggesting a biological substrate. At the same time, cultural context, personal history, and expertise strongly modify these baseline preferences. Beauty has objective structural tendencies and subjective experiential layers, and separating them cleanly is harder than either camp typically admits.
What is perceptual fluency, and why does it matter for design?
Perceptual fluency is the ease with which the brain processes a visual stimulus. Research shows that higher fluency — easier processing — produces more positive aesthetic judgments. For design, this means clean layouts, clear visual hierarchy, and coherent compositional structure don’t just look better; they actively make content feel more credible, trustworthy, and appealing. Fluency is a measurable design variable, not just an aesthetic opinion.
How does the golden ratio relate to visual beauty?
The golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1) describes a proportional relationship that appears frequently in nature and has been used in art and architecture for millennia. Neuroscientific research indicates that compositions and faces approximating this ratio activate reward centers more strongly. The likely mechanism is again perceptual fluency — phi-aligned proportions are particularly easy for the visual system to parse. However, the golden ratio is a tendency, not a rule, and many compelling designs deviate from it deliberately.
Can aesthetic preferences be changed or learned?
Yes, significantly. Research comparing trained artists to general populations shows that aesthetic expertise changes color preference, compositional judgment, and emotional response to visual stimuli. Artistic training develops more nuanced, context-sensitive preferences. Cultural exposure, repeated exposure to specific visual languages, and deliberate study all reshape aesthetic response. Preferences have a biological floor and a very high cultural ceiling.
Further Reading
These peer-reviewed sources informed this article and are worth exploring if you want to go deeper on the neuroscience and psychology of visual aesthetics.
- Chatterjee & Vartanian: Neuroaesthetics — Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Elliot, A.J.: Color and Psychological Functioning — Frontiers in Psychology
- Hue, Saturation, and Brightness in Color Emotional Perception — BMC Psychology
- Iosa et al.: Symmetry and the Golden Ratio in Beauty Perception — European Journal of Neuroscience
- Palmer & Schloss: Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference — Annual Review of Psychology
Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Art and Design sections for more inspiring content.
#aesthetics #art #design #psychology #VisualAesthetics -
The Psychology of Visual Aesthetics: Why Your Brain Decides What’s Beautiful Before You Do
Beauty isn’t a mystery. It’s a calculation — one your brain runs in milliseconds, without asking for your input. You glance at a logo, or scroll past an image, and something registers immediately. You either feel drawn in or you don’t. That instant pull is the psychology of visual aesthetics at work. And it’s far more precise, more predictable, and more powerful than most people realize.
This matters right now because we live in the most visually saturated environment in human history. Every surface competes for attention. Every brand fights for emotional resonance. Every interface is engineered to trigger a response. Understanding why we find certain colors and shapes instinctively beautiful — and how that shapes our daily decisions — is no longer just an academic question. It’s a design problem, a business problem, and ultimately, a human problem.
So let’s get into it. Not with tired color theory charts or recycled branding advice, but with the actual neuroscience, the evolutionary logic, and a few original frameworks, I think, give this topic the precision it deserves.
What Happens in Your Brain When You See Something Beautiful?
The moment your eyes land on something visually compelling, three neural systems activate almost simultaneously. Researchers at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and aesthetics — a field now known as neuroaesthetics — describe this as a tripartite response: sensory-motor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge activation.
In plain terms, your brain first reads the raw visual data — color, contrast, edge, form. Then it runs an emotional appraisal. Then it cross-references memory and meaning. All three happen within a fraction of a second. What you consciously experience as “beautiful” is actually the output of that layered computation.
Neuroscientific imaging has confirmed that attractive stimuli activate the brain’s reward centers, triggering dopamine release. This isn’t metaphorical. Looking at something you find beautiful produces a measurable neurochemical response — the same kind associated with pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement learning. In other words, your aesthetic preferences are literally rewarding your brain.
This is why visual aesthetics and decision-making are inseparable. If beauty triggers the reward system, then aesthetically pleasing design nudges behavior just as reliably as a well-crafted argument. It operates below the level of rational deliberation. That’s both fascinating and, frankly, a little unsettling.
The Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR Framework)
I want to introduce what I call the Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR) as a working editorial framework. It maps the three neural layers involved in aesthetic judgment onto a practical design lens:
Layer 1 — Sensory Capture: The brain detects basic visual properties — hue, saturation, brightness, symmetry, edge sharpness. This happens preconsciously. Your eyes are simply scanning, and your visual cortex is categorizing.
Layer 2 — Emotional Appraisal: The limbic system assigns valence. Does this feel safe or threatening? Warm or cold? Energizing or calming? This layer is where color psychology lives. Warm hues like red and yellow often trigger energy and arousal. Cool hues like blue and green signal calm and trust.
Layer 3 — Meaning Integration: The prefrontal cortex and memory systems bring context. A shade of blue means one thing in a hospital and something entirely different on a luxury watch. Meaning isn’t in the color itself — it’s in the relationship between the color and everything you already know.
When designers talk about “visual hierarchy” or “brand consistency,” they’re really talking about managing all three layers simultaneously. Most fail to think past Layer 1.
Why Do We Instinctively Prefer Certain Colors?
Color preference is one of the most studied — and most misunderstood — topics in visual psychology. The popular notion that “red means danger, blue means trust” is a dramatic oversimplification. The truth is both more nuanced and more interesting.
Color perception operates across three primary dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness. Research consistently shows that these dimensions influence emotional valence independently of each other. Highly saturated colors generally register as more positive — they feel vivid, alive, energized. Darker tones tend to read as heavier, more serious, or even threatening. But these aren’t universal rules. Their tendencies break down quickly when context, culture, and expertise enter the equation.
Here’s a finding worth sitting with: studies comparing trained artists to general populations show significant divergence in color emotional response. Non-artists tend to rate highly saturated colors more positively. Trained artists, by contrast, develop more nuanced preferences — often favoring desaturated, complex combinations that untrained viewers find flat or dull. Expertise literally rewires aesthetic response.
This points to something important: visual aesthetic preference isn’t fixed. It’s learned, refined, and culturally mediated. At the same time, there are evolutionary baselines that cut across all of that.
Evolutionary Color Signals: Why Blue Feels Calming, and Red Feels Urgent
Evolutionary biology offers a compelling explanation for some of our most consistent color responses. Researchers have argued that human trichromatic vision — our ability to distinguish red from green — evolved specifically to read subtle changes in skin coloration. A flush of red signals anger, arousal, or exertion. A greenish or bluish tint signals illness or poor health. These color cues carry survival-relevant information. Your brain learned to read them fast because reading them slowly had consequences.
This framework explains why red commands attention so reliably. It’s not arbitrary. Red literally signaled biologically important information to your ancestors. Your visual system still treats it with urgency. Blue, conversely, maps onto open skies, clean water, and spatial distance — environments that signal safety and resource availability. That’s why blue tends to produce calm rather than alarm.
I’d call this the Chromatic Survival Map — the idea that our baseline color responses are calibrated to ancient environmental signals, not cultural conventions. Culture layers meaning on top. But the evolutionary substrate is there first.
The Shape of Beauty: Symmetry, Proportion, and the Golden Ratio
Color is only half the story. Form — the geometry of what we see — drives aesthetic response just as powerfully. And here, the science gets genuinely surprising.
Psychological and neuroscientific studies consistently show that humans have an implicit preference for symmetrical patterns. This holds across abstract designs, natural compositions, and human faces. The preference appears spontaneously and doesn’t require deliberate thought. You don’t decide to prefer symmetrical faces. You just do. And you do so within milliseconds of seeing them.
The leading explanation is perceptual fluency. Symmetrical forms are easier for the brain to process. They require less cognitive effort. And because the brain tends to associate ease of processing with accuracy and safety, fluent visual objects feel more pleasant. Beauty, in this sense, is the emotional signature of cognitive efficiency.
Infants show a preference for symmetrical faces within months of birth, before cultural conditioning could possibly account for it. This suggests the preference is innate rather than learned. Evolutionary psychology frames this as an adaptation: symmetrical features correlate with genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness. Symmetry, then, is beauty as a biological signal.
The Golden Ratio and Processing Fluency
The golden ratio — approximately 1.618:1, denoted by the Greek letter phi — appears across natural structures, from nautilus shells to sunflower spirals to the proportions of the human face. Researchers have argued that the brain processes proportions that approximate phi more efficiently than arbitrary ratios. This aligns with the perceptual fluency theory: phi-aligned compositions feel right because your visual cortex handles them with minimal friction.
Neuroscience research using fMRI shows that faces with golden ratio proportions activate reward centers more strongly than faces with different proportional relationships. This isn’t just cultural bias toward conventional attractiveness. It’s a measurable neural preference with real-world consequences — in social interactions, professional settings, and even first impressions that happen before a word is spoken.
I want to be careful here, though. The golden ratio is not a magic formula. Many deeply compelling faces and compositions deviate significantly from phi. What the ratio captures is a tendency toward proportional harmony, not a fixed template. Unique features can create memorable beauty precisely because they break expected proportions. The brain responds to surprise as much as to efficiency.
Aesthetic Preference and Daily Decision-Making
Here’s where the psychology of visual aesthetics stops being theoretical and starts being personal. Your aesthetic responses aren’t just passive reactions to the world. They actively shape your choices — what you buy, where you eat, who you trust, how you vote.
Research in neuroaesthetics has established that aesthetic evaluations influence decisions in mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and potentially even moral judgment. Your brain doesn’t cleanly separate “is this beautiful” from “should I engage with this.” The two questions get processed through overlapping neural circuits. Beauty becomes a heuristic — a fast signal that tells the brain whether something is worth further attention and trust.
This is the Aesthetic Trust Transfer effect: when something looks beautiful, we unconsciously attribute other positive qualities to it — competence, reliability, quality, safety. A more attractive product package activates stronger reward responses in the brain. A more symmetrical face reads as more trustworthy and competent, regardless of actual competence. We know this is happening. We still can’t stop it.
Visual Aesthetics in Consumer Behavior
For brands, this is everything. The aesthetics of a product, package, or interface don’t merely set a mood — they pre-load expectations that influence satisfaction before a single feature is evaluated. Research has shown that more aesthetically designed packaging activates stronger neural reward responses, shaping perceived value before the product is even touched.
Context modulates this effect. The same artwork, presented in a gallery versus on a screen, activates different neural responses in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The same product, presented with intentional design versus generic packaging, triggers different purchasing behavior. Aesthetic context isn’t decorative. It’s functional.
Personality also shapes aesthetic response in measurable ways. Extroverts show greater attraction to warm, saturated hues. Introverts tend to favor cool, desaturated palettes. This isn’t a trivial observation — it suggests that truly effective visual communication has to account for who’s looking, not just what’s being shown.
The Perceptual Fluency Principle and Why It Predicts Viral Content
One of the most useful — and underappreciated — concepts in aesthetic psychology is perceptual fluency. The idea is straightforward: when a visual stimulus is easy to process, we rate it as more pleasant, more true, and more beautiful. Ease of perception gets misread as quality of content.
This has profound implications for content creation, branding, and communication design. Clean layouts, high contrast, clear visual hierarchy, and familiar compositional structures all increase fluency. And increased fluency increases positive response — without the viewer understanding why.
I call this the Fluency Dividend: the measurable boost in perceived quality, credibility, and appeal that well-organized visual communication generates beyond its literal content. A mediocre idea in a clean design beats a brilliant idea in a cluttered one, at least in first impressions. That’s uncomfortable. And it’s true.
This is also why certain types of content spread more readily on social media. High-contrast imagery, strong compositional balance, and emotionally legible color palettes all reduce cognitive load. Reduced cognitive load means faster emotional response. Faster emotional response means faster sharing behavior. Visual aesthetics literally accelerates social contagion.
When Aesthetic Familiarity Becomes Aesthetic Fatigue
There’s a counterforce, though. The mere exposure effect — the well-documented tendency to prefer things we’ve seen before — operates within a range. Repeated exposure increases liking up to a point. Beyond that threshold, familiarity collapses into predictability, and predictability triggers boredom.
This is why aesthetic trends cycle. Minimalism gave way to maximalism. Flat design created an appetite for texture and depth. Every visual language eventually becomes overused, and the brain — always hunting for novelty alongside pattern — starts rejecting what it once rewarded.
The most enduring visual identities navigate this tension deliberately. They build on familiar structural cues — symmetry, proportion, clear hierarchy — while introducing controlled doses of unexpected color, form, or compositional choice. They play the fluency game and the surprise game simultaneously. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds, and rarer than it should be.
Cultural Conditioning and the Limits of Universal Aesthetics
All of this needs a caveat. The evolutionary and neurological baselines I’ve described are real — but they don’t operate in a vacuum. Culture, personal history, and expertise all modify aesthetic response in significant ways. What reads as elegant in one visual tradition reads as empty in another. What signals quality in one market signals coldness in another.
Cross-cultural studies show remarkable consistency in some preferences — symmetry and certain proportional harmonics appear near-universal. But specific color associations, compositional conventions, and aesthetic ideals vary enormously across populations and contexts. The Chromatic Survival Map is a baseline. Cultural code is layered on top, often overwriting it entirely.
This is why purely algorithmic approaches to beauty — the current wave of AI beauty scoring tools — need scrutiny. Optimization against culturally specific training data encodes those biases as if they were biological facts. The technology is real. The neutrality claim isn’t.
What Neuroaesthetics Predicts for the Future of Design
Neuroaesthetics is, as researchers in cognitive neuroscience have noted, at a historical inflection point. The tools for measuring aesthetic response — EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, galvanic skin response — are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The data generated by those tools is becoming trainable. AI systems are already learning to predict aesthetic preferences and adapt visual interfaces in real time based on individual response patterns.
My prediction — and I hold this with real conviction — is that the next decade will produce a discipline I’d call Adaptive Aesthetic Intelligence: design systems that continuously calibrate color, form, layout, and proportion to individual neurological and psychological profiles. Not in a manipulative sense, but in the same way typography evolved from arbitrary marks to a system of principles optimized for human reading. Design will evolve from static visual choices to dynamic aesthetic environments.
That’s exciting. It’s also risky. When aesthetic optimization becomes automated and personalized, the line between design that serves the viewer and design that exploits the viewer becomes very thin. The field will need an ethical framework that keeps pace with its technical capability. That work isn’t finished. It’s barely started.
What This Means for You, Practically
If you’re a designer, the takeaway is this: your instincts about what “looks right” are not arbitrary. They’re drawing on a sophisticated internal model shaped by evolutionary biology, cultural exposure, and trained expertise. Trust those instincts — but examine them. Ask which layer of the 3-SAR framework your choices are operating on, and whether they account for all three.
If you’re a communicator, a marketer, or anyone creating visual content: aesthetics isn’t decoration. It’s argument. Every visual choice is making a claim about quality, trustworthiness, and relevance before a single word is read. Design that claim deliberately.
And if you’re simply a person who finds themselves drawn to certain colors, shapes, and visual environments without knowing why — that’s not irrational. That’s your brain running a calculation that took millions of years to develop. It’s worth understanding. Because once you understand why beauty works, you start to see it — and use it — very differently.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Psychology of Visual Aesthetics
What is the psychology of visual aesthetics?
The psychology of visual aesthetics studies why humans find certain visual stimuli — colors, shapes, compositions, and forms — more attractive or pleasing than others. It draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and cultural theory to explain aesthetic preference and its effects on behavior and decision-making.
Why do we find symmetrical faces more attractive?
Symmetrical faces are processed more efficiently by the brain — a phenomenon called perceptual fluency. Evolutionary psychology adds that facial symmetry signals genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness, making it a reliable biological marker. Research confirms that this preference appears in infants before cultural conditioning takes hold, suggesting it is partly innate.
How does color affect decision-making?
Color activates the limbic system — the brain’s emotion center — before conscious evaluation occurs. Warm colors like red and orange tend to increase arousal and urgency. Cool colors like blue and green promote calm and trust. These responses influence purchasing decisions, brand perception, interface behavior, and even interpersonal trust. Context and culture significantly modulate these baseline effects.
What is neuroaesthetics?
Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that studies the biological bases of aesthetic experience. It examines how the brain processes and responds to visual, auditory, and environmental stimuli, and how those responses shape behavior in domains including art, design, consumer behavior, and mate selection.
Is beauty subjective or objective?
The honest answer is both. Certain aesthetic preferences — for symmetry, specific proportional relationships, and particular color dynamics — appear cross-culturally and even in infants, suggesting a biological substrate. At the same time, cultural context, personal history, and expertise strongly modify these baseline preferences. Beauty has objective structural tendencies and subjective experiential layers, and separating them cleanly is harder than either camp typically admits.
What is perceptual fluency, and why does it matter for design?
Perceptual fluency is the ease with which the brain processes a visual stimulus. Research shows that higher fluency — easier processing — produces more positive aesthetic judgments. For design, this means clean layouts, clear visual hierarchy, and coherent compositional structure don’t just look better; they actively make content feel more credible, trustworthy, and appealing. Fluency is a measurable design variable, not just an aesthetic opinion.
How does the golden ratio relate to visual beauty?
The golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1) describes a proportional relationship that appears frequently in nature and has been used in art and architecture for millennia. Neuroscientific research indicates that compositions and faces approximating this ratio activate reward centers more strongly. The likely mechanism is again perceptual fluency — phi-aligned proportions are particularly easy for the visual system to parse. However, the golden ratio is a tendency, not a rule, and many compelling designs deviate from it deliberately.
Can aesthetic preferences be changed or learned?
Yes, significantly. Research comparing trained artists to general populations shows that aesthetic expertise changes color preference, compositional judgment, and emotional response to visual stimuli. Artistic training develops more nuanced, context-sensitive preferences. Cultural exposure, repeated exposure to specific visual languages, and deliberate study all reshape aesthetic response. Preferences have a biological floor and a very high cultural ceiling.
Further Reading
These peer-reviewed sources informed this article and are worth exploring if you want to go deeper on the neuroscience and psychology of visual aesthetics.
- Chatterjee & Vartanian: Neuroaesthetics — Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Elliot, A.J.: Color and Psychological Functioning — Frontiers in Psychology
- Hue, Saturation, and Brightness in Color Emotional Perception — BMC Psychology
- Iosa et al.: Symmetry and the Golden Ratio in Beauty Perception — European Journal of Neuroscience
- Palmer & Schloss: Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference — Annual Review of Psychology
Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Art and Design sections for more inspiring content.
#aesthetics #art #design #psychology #VisualAesthetics -
The Psychology of Visual Aesthetics: Why Your Brain Decides What’s Beautiful Before You Do
Beauty isn’t a mystery. It’s a calculation — one your brain runs in milliseconds, without asking for your input. You glance at a logo, or scroll past an image, and something registers immediately. You either feel drawn in or you don’t. That instant pull is the psychology of visual aesthetics at work. And it’s far more precise, more predictable, and more powerful than most people realize.
This matters right now because we live in the most visually saturated environment in human history. Every surface competes for attention. Every brand fights for emotional resonance. Every interface is engineered to trigger a response. Understanding why we find certain colors and shapes instinctively beautiful — and how that shapes our daily decisions — is no longer just an academic question. It’s a design problem, a business problem, and ultimately, a human problem.
So let’s get into it. Not with tired color theory charts or recycled branding advice, but with the actual neuroscience, the evolutionary logic, and a few original frameworks, I think, give this topic the precision it deserves.
What Happens in Your Brain When You See Something Beautiful?
The moment your eyes land on something visually compelling, three neural systems activate almost simultaneously. Researchers at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and aesthetics — a field now known as neuroaesthetics — describe this as a tripartite response: sensory-motor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge activation.
In plain terms, your brain first reads the raw visual data — color, contrast, edge, form. Then it runs an emotional appraisal. Then it cross-references memory and meaning. All three happen within a fraction of a second. What you consciously experience as “beautiful” is actually the output of that layered computation.
Neuroscientific imaging has confirmed that attractive stimuli activate the brain’s reward centers, triggering dopamine release. This isn’t metaphorical. Looking at something you find beautiful produces a measurable neurochemical response — the same kind associated with pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement learning. In other words, your aesthetic preferences are literally rewarding your brain.
This is why visual aesthetics and decision-making are inseparable. If beauty triggers the reward system, then aesthetically pleasing design nudges behavior just as reliably as a well-crafted argument. It operates below the level of rational deliberation. That’s both fascinating and, frankly, a little unsettling.
The Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR Framework)
I want to introduce what I call the Three-System Aesthetic Response (3-SAR) as a working editorial framework. It maps the three neural layers involved in aesthetic judgment onto a practical design lens:
Layer 1 — Sensory Capture: The brain detects basic visual properties — hue, saturation, brightness, symmetry, edge sharpness. This happens preconsciously. Your eyes are simply scanning, and your visual cortex is categorizing.
Layer 2 — Emotional Appraisal: The limbic system assigns valence. Does this feel safe or threatening? Warm or cold? Energizing or calming? This layer is where color psychology lives. Warm hues like red and yellow often trigger energy and arousal. Cool hues like blue and green signal calm and trust.
Layer 3 — Meaning Integration: The prefrontal cortex and memory systems bring context. A shade of blue means one thing in a hospital and something entirely different on a luxury watch. Meaning isn’t in the color itself — it’s in the relationship between the color and everything you already know.
When designers talk about “visual hierarchy” or “brand consistency,” they’re really talking about managing all three layers simultaneously. Most fail to think past Layer 1.
Why Do We Instinctively Prefer Certain Colors?
Color preference is one of the most studied — and most misunderstood — topics in visual psychology. The popular notion that “red means danger, blue means trust” is a dramatic oversimplification. The truth is both more nuanced and more interesting.
Color perception operates across three primary dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness. Research consistently shows that these dimensions influence emotional valence independently of each other. Highly saturated colors generally register as more positive — they feel vivid, alive, energized. Darker tones tend to read as heavier, more serious, or even threatening. But these aren’t universal rules. Their tendencies break down quickly when context, culture, and expertise enter the equation.
Here’s a finding worth sitting with: studies comparing trained artists to general populations show significant divergence in color emotional response. Non-artists tend to rate highly saturated colors more positively. Trained artists, by contrast, develop more nuanced preferences — often favoring desaturated, complex combinations that untrained viewers find flat or dull. Expertise literally rewires aesthetic response.
This points to something important: visual aesthetic preference isn’t fixed. It’s learned, refined, and culturally mediated. At the same time, there are evolutionary baselines that cut across all of that.
Evolutionary Color Signals: Why Blue Feels Calming, and Red Feels Urgent
Evolutionary biology offers a compelling explanation for some of our most consistent color responses. Researchers have argued that human trichromatic vision — our ability to distinguish red from green — evolved specifically to read subtle changes in skin coloration. A flush of red signals anger, arousal, or exertion. A greenish or bluish tint signals illness or poor health. These color cues carry survival-relevant information. Your brain learned to read them fast because reading them slowly had consequences.
This framework explains why red commands attention so reliably. It’s not arbitrary. Red literally signaled biologically important information to your ancestors. Your visual system still treats it with urgency. Blue, conversely, maps onto open skies, clean water, and spatial distance — environments that signal safety and resource availability. That’s why blue tends to produce calm rather than alarm.
I’d call this the Chromatic Survival Map — the idea that our baseline color responses are calibrated to ancient environmental signals, not cultural conventions. Culture layers meaning on top. But the evolutionary substrate is there first.
The Shape of Beauty: Symmetry, Proportion, and the Golden Ratio
Color is only half the story. Form — the geometry of what we see — drives aesthetic response just as powerfully. And here, the science gets genuinely surprising.
Psychological and neuroscientific studies consistently show that humans have an implicit preference for symmetrical patterns. This holds across abstract designs, natural compositions, and human faces. The preference appears spontaneously and doesn’t require deliberate thought. You don’t decide to prefer symmetrical faces. You just do. And you do so within milliseconds of seeing them.
The leading explanation is perceptual fluency. Symmetrical forms are easier for the brain to process. They require less cognitive effort. And because the brain tends to associate ease of processing with accuracy and safety, fluent visual objects feel more pleasant. Beauty, in this sense, is the emotional signature of cognitive efficiency.
Infants show a preference for symmetrical faces within months of birth, before cultural conditioning could possibly account for it. This suggests the preference is innate rather than learned. Evolutionary psychology frames this as an adaptation: symmetrical features correlate with genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness. Symmetry, then, is beauty as a biological signal.
The Golden Ratio and Processing Fluency
The golden ratio — approximately 1.618:1, denoted by the Greek letter phi — appears across natural structures, from nautilus shells to sunflower spirals to the proportions of the human face. Researchers have argued that the brain processes proportions that approximate phi more efficiently than arbitrary ratios. This aligns with the perceptual fluency theory: phi-aligned compositions feel right because your visual cortex handles them with minimal friction.
Neuroscience research using fMRI shows that faces with golden ratio proportions activate reward centers more strongly than faces with different proportional relationships. This isn’t just cultural bias toward conventional attractiveness. It’s a measurable neural preference with real-world consequences — in social interactions, professional settings, and even first impressions that happen before a word is spoken.
I want to be careful here, though. The golden ratio is not a magic formula. Many deeply compelling faces and compositions deviate significantly from phi. What the ratio captures is a tendency toward proportional harmony, not a fixed template. Unique features can create memorable beauty precisely because they break expected proportions. The brain responds to surprise as much as to efficiency.
Aesthetic Preference and Daily Decision-Making
Here’s where the psychology of visual aesthetics stops being theoretical and starts being personal. Your aesthetic responses aren’t just passive reactions to the world. They actively shape your choices — what you buy, where you eat, who you trust, how you vote.
Research in neuroaesthetics has established that aesthetic evaluations influence decisions in mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and potentially even moral judgment. Your brain doesn’t cleanly separate “is this beautiful” from “should I engage with this.” The two questions get processed through overlapping neural circuits. Beauty becomes a heuristic — a fast signal that tells the brain whether something is worth further attention and trust.
This is the Aesthetic Trust Transfer effect: when something looks beautiful, we unconsciously attribute other positive qualities to it — competence, reliability, quality, safety. A more attractive product package activates stronger reward responses in the brain. A more symmetrical face reads as more trustworthy and competent, regardless of actual competence. We know this is happening. We still can’t stop it.
Visual Aesthetics in Consumer Behavior
For brands, this is everything. The aesthetics of a product, package, or interface don’t merely set a mood — they pre-load expectations that influence satisfaction before a single feature is evaluated. Research has shown that more aesthetically designed packaging activates stronger neural reward responses, shaping perceived value before the product is even touched.
Context modulates this effect. The same artwork, presented in a gallery versus on a screen, activates different neural responses in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The same product, presented with intentional design versus generic packaging, triggers different purchasing behavior. Aesthetic context isn’t decorative. It’s functional.
Personality also shapes aesthetic response in measurable ways. Extroverts show greater attraction to warm, saturated hues. Introverts tend to favor cool, desaturated palettes. This isn’t a trivial observation — it suggests that truly effective visual communication has to account for who’s looking, not just what’s being shown.
The Perceptual Fluency Principle and Why It Predicts Viral Content
One of the most useful — and underappreciated — concepts in aesthetic psychology is perceptual fluency. The idea is straightforward: when a visual stimulus is easy to process, we rate it as more pleasant, more true, and more beautiful. Ease of perception gets misread as quality of content.
This has profound implications for content creation, branding, and communication design. Clean layouts, high contrast, clear visual hierarchy, and familiar compositional structures all increase fluency. And increased fluency increases positive response — without the viewer understanding why.
I call this the Fluency Dividend: the measurable boost in perceived quality, credibility, and appeal that well-organized visual communication generates beyond its literal content. A mediocre idea in a clean design beats a brilliant idea in a cluttered one, at least in first impressions. That’s uncomfortable. And it’s true.
This is also why certain types of content spread more readily on social media. High-contrast imagery, strong compositional balance, and emotionally legible color palettes all reduce cognitive load. Reduced cognitive load means faster emotional response. Faster emotional response means faster sharing behavior. Visual aesthetics literally accelerates social contagion.
When Aesthetic Familiarity Becomes Aesthetic Fatigue
There’s a counterforce, though. The mere exposure effect — the well-documented tendency to prefer things we’ve seen before — operates within a range. Repeated exposure increases liking up to a point. Beyond that threshold, familiarity collapses into predictability, and predictability triggers boredom.
This is why aesthetic trends cycle. Minimalism gave way to maximalism. Flat design created an appetite for texture and depth. Every visual language eventually becomes overused, and the brain — always hunting for novelty alongside pattern — starts rejecting what it once rewarded.
The most enduring visual identities navigate this tension deliberately. They build on familiar structural cues — symmetry, proportion, clear hierarchy — while introducing controlled doses of unexpected color, form, or compositional choice. They play the fluency game and the surprise game simultaneously. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds, and rarer than it should be.
Cultural Conditioning and the Limits of Universal Aesthetics
All of this needs a caveat. The evolutionary and neurological baselines I’ve described are real — but they don’t operate in a vacuum. Culture, personal history, and expertise all modify aesthetic response in significant ways. What reads as elegant in one visual tradition reads as empty in another. What signals quality in one market signals coldness in another.
Cross-cultural studies show remarkable consistency in some preferences — symmetry and certain proportional harmonics appear near-universal. But specific color associations, compositional conventions, and aesthetic ideals vary enormously across populations and contexts. The Chromatic Survival Map is a baseline. Cultural code is layered on top, often overwriting it entirely.
This is why purely algorithmic approaches to beauty — the current wave of AI beauty scoring tools — need scrutiny. Optimization against culturally specific training data encodes those biases as if they were biological facts. The technology is real. The neutrality claim isn’t.
What Neuroaesthetics Predicts for the Future of Design
Neuroaesthetics is, as researchers in cognitive neuroscience have noted, at a historical inflection point. The tools for measuring aesthetic response — EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, galvanic skin response — are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The data generated by those tools is becoming trainable. AI systems are already learning to predict aesthetic preferences and adapt visual interfaces in real time based on individual response patterns.
My prediction — and I hold this with real conviction — is that the next decade will produce a discipline I’d call Adaptive Aesthetic Intelligence: design systems that continuously calibrate color, form, layout, and proportion to individual neurological and psychological profiles. Not in a manipulative sense, but in the same way typography evolved from arbitrary marks to a system of principles optimized for human reading. Design will evolve from static visual choices to dynamic aesthetic environments.
That’s exciting. It’s also risky. When aesthetic optimization becomes automated and personalized, the line between design that serves the viewer and design that exploits the viewer becomes very thin. The field will need an ethical framework that keeps pace with its technical capability. That work isn’t finished. It’s barely started.
What This Means for You, Practically
If you’re a designer, the takeaway is this: your instincts about what “looks right” are not arbitrary. They’re drawing on a sophisticated internal model shaped by evolutionary biology, cultural exposure, and trained expertise. Trust those instincts — but examine them. Ask which layer of the 3-SAR framework your choices are operating on, and whether they account for all three.
If you’re a communicator, a marketer, or anyone creating visual content: aesthetics isn’t decoration. It’s argument. Every visual choice is making a claim about quality, trustworthiness, and relevance before a single word is read. Design that claim deliberately.
And if you’re simply a person who finds themselves drawn to certain colors, shapes, and visual environments without knowing why — that’s not irrational. That’s your brain running a calculation that took millions of years to develop. It’s worth understanding. Because once you understand why beauty works, you start to see it — and use it — very differently.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Psychology of Visual Aesthetics
What is the psychology of visual aesthetics?
The psychology of visual aesthetics studies why humans find certain visual stimuli — colors, shapes, compositions, and forms — more attractive or pleasing than others. It draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and cultural theory to explain aesthetic preference and its effects on behavior and decision-making.
Why do we find symmetrical faces more attractive?
Symmetrical faces are processed more efficiently by the brain — a phenomenon called perceptual fluency. Evolutionary psychology adds that facial symmetry signals genetic health, developmental stability, and immune robustness, making it a reliable biological marker. Research confirms that this preference appears in infants before cultural conditioning takes hold, suggesting it is partly innate.
How does color affect decision-making?
Color activates the limbic system — the brain’s emotion center — before conscious evaluation occurs. Warm colors like red and orange tend to increase arousal and urgency. Cool colors like blue and green promote calm and trust. These responses influence purchasing decisions, brand perception, interface behavior, and even interpersonal trust. Context and culture significantly modulate these baseline effects.
What is neuroaesthetics?
Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that studies the biological bases of aesthetic experience. It examines how the brain processes and responds to visual, auditory, and environmental stimuli, and how those responses shape behavior in domains including art, design, consumer behavior, and mate selection.
Is beauty subjective or objective?
The honest answer is both. Certain aesthetic preferences — for symmetry, specific proportional relationships, and particular color dynamics — appear cross-culturally and even in infants, suggesting a biological substrate. At the same time, cultural context, personal history, and expertise strongly modify these baseline preferences. Beauty has objective structural tendencies and subjective experiential layers, and separating them cleanly is harder than either camp typically admits.
What is perceptual fluency, and why does it matter for design?
Perceptual fluency is the ease with which the brain processes a visual stimulus. Research shows that higher fluency — easier processing — produces more positive aesthetic judgments. For design, this means clean layouts, clear visual hierarchy, and coherent compositional structure don’t just look better; they actively make content feel more credible, trustworthy, and appealing. Fluency is a measurable design variable, not just an aesthetic opinion.
How does the golden ratio relate to visual beauty?
The golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1) describes a proportional relationship that appears frequently in nature and has been used in art and architecture for millennia. Neuroscientific research indicates that compositions and faces approximating this ratio activate reward centers more strongly. The likely mechanism is again perceptual fluency — phi-aligned proportions are particularly easy for the visual system to parse. However, the golden ratio is a tendency, not a rule, and many compelling designs deviate from it deliberately.
Can aesthetic preferences be changed or learned?
Yes, significantly. Research comparing trained artists to general populations shows that aesthetic expertise changes color preference, compositional judgment, and emotional response to visual stimuli. Artistic training develops more nuanced, context-sensitive preferences. Cultural exposure, repeated exposure to specific visual languages, and deliberate study all reshape aesthetic response. Preferences have a biological floor and a very high cultural ceiling.
Further Reading
These peer-reviewed sources informed this article and are worth exploring if you want to go deeper on the neuroscience and psychology of visual aesthetics.
- Chatterjee & Vartanian: Neuroaesthetics — Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Elliot, A.J.: Color and Psychological Functioning — Frontiers in Psychology
- Hue, Saturation, and Brightness in Color Emotional Perception — BMC Psychology
- Iosa et al.: Symmetry and the Golden Ratio in Beauty Perception — European Journal of Neuroscience
- Palmer & Schloss: Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference — Annual Review of Psychology
Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Art and Design sections for more inspiring content.
#aesthetics #art #design #psychology #VisualAesthetics -
Study Finds Signs of “Functional Limb Weakness” in Patients Not Reporting Actual Limb Weakness
By David Tuller, DrPH
A recently published study about functional neurological disorder (FND) has reported some perplexing data. Of almost 300 patients diagnosed with Long Covid, 100 were identified as demonstrating one or more “positive signs” for “functional limb weakness,” a form of FND. Yet only 14 of those 100 patients reported experiencing limb weakness in the first place; the other 84 did not.
Hm. What does it mean to identify positive signs of functional limb weakness in the absence of reported limb weakness? Who knows? Certainly the investigators themselves make no credible attempt to explain this conundrum.
The study—“Contemporary positive signs of functional limb weakness in post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2: an exploratory analysis of their utility in diagnosis and follow-up”–was published in June by BMJ Neurology Open, a major joural. It is retrospective, with data drawn from the medical records of Long Covid patients who attended a neurology clinic in Tokyo, Japan, from 2021 to 2014. At the clinic, they received comprehensive neurological exams, including testing for positive signs for functional limb weakness. (According to current practice, FND diagnoses require affirmative clinical indications, often referred to as “positive signs” or “rule-in signs,” such as intact reflexes in a limb said to be weak or paralyzed, that are purportedly incompatible with known pathophysiological processes.)
During the exams, the neurologists tested for functional limb weakness using six different signs, described in detail in a supplementary file. Apparently, the discrepancy between the number of patients found to have these positive signs and the much smaller number who actually reported limb weakness during these exams did not raise any particular concerns among the investigators.
Instead, they seem to have assumed that positive signs for functional limb weakness in people with Long COVID indicate cases of FND–even in the absence of evidence that patients are experiencing the relevant symptom. The investigators then suggest that these alleged cases of FND are likely implicated in generating and/or perpetuating Long Covid symptoms like fatigue and headache. “Some of the most common neurological symptoms of long COVID may be caused by FND,” they conclude.
Given that five in six of those with positive signs of functional limb weakness did not report limb weakness, this line of argument is kind of bonkers. The most urgent question arising from this study is: Do these signs mean anything at all? (Several of the signs have long been used in neurology; a couple of them were much more recently identified. As I have previously discussed, the evidence for the overall accuracy of these various signs is shaky.)
I suppose it is possible that some patients in the study might not have been that specific and might have referred to limb weakness as “fatigue.” But it seems highly unlikely this would have occurred in 84 out of 100 cases. After all, these patients underwent comprehensive neurological exams that included tests for functional limb weakness. Presumably, the neurologists conducting these exams asked questions that would have, or should have, elicited an accurate accounting of a distinctive symptom like limb weakness.
FND is the current name for the psychiatric condition formerly called conversion disorder, in which psychological distress was said to have been “converted” into physical symptoms. Experts in the FND field assert categorically that is a “brain network” disorder, but that is a theory, not a fact. The reality is that the etiology and pathophysiological processes causing the symptoms remain unknown. What is clear is that people with FND suffer from extremely distressing and disabling symptoms that resist easy explanation. Those with the condition are ill-served by research that fails to abide by basic rules of scientific reasoning.
My UC Berkeley colleague, infectious disease physician and professor emeritus John Swartzberg, shared my low opinion of this piece of work. That this deeply flawed paper passed through a BMJ journal’s peer review process, he said, was “very disappointing.”
The paper is marred by sentences like this: “Assuming that patients with positive signs had FND, the prevalence of FND coexisting with long COVID is likely to not depend on which variant of COVID patients were infected with but solely on the number of patients infected with COVID-19, as observed in this study.” Since those with positive signs of functional limb weakness were much more likely not to have reported any limb weakness than to have reported it, the assumption that “patients with positive signs had FND” is hard to justify. And any further claims built on that unjustifiable assumption cannot be taken seriously.
And there are passages in which, given the uninterpretable results on the positive signs, the argument reads like a parody:
“In summary, our study showed that long COVID, accompanied by positive signs, is not rare and that this phenomenon indicates the possibility of the coexistence of long COVID and FND. Therefore, some patients with long COVID may present with symptoms of FND. If positive signs are observed in long COVID patients, they are a useful indicator of the coexistence of FND in those with long COVID.”
The paper is a house of cards built on unwarranted assertions and pirouettes of logic. (I’ve addressed a core concern in this post but not the only one.) In any event, BMJ journals have not distinguished themselves when it comes to ME/CFS and Long COVID. This latest problematic publication is not remotely surprising.
-
Tues. June 10, 2025: Art and The Perfect Cocktail
image courtesy of ArtandHome via pixabay.comTuesday, June 10, 2025
Day Before Full Moon
Pluto Retrograde
Rainy and cool
I hope you had a good weekend!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is here.
Friday morning, I wrote and submitted the review first thing, and requested my next assignment (which I received).
I did a polish on the ghostwriting and submitted it. Fingers crossed it’s what they want! Or at least close to it.
I expected to get the notes on the outline I submitted a couple of weeks ago, with either a rewrite on it or moving forward to the 20K version, but they won’t have it to me until tomorrow. Which takes pressure of me while company is here.
Headed to the library to drop off/pick up books. Did a big grocery shop at Big Y (because, you know, company – gotta have the meals planned and snacks and all the rest), and the liquor store. Hauled it all home and up the stairs.
Worked with my friend on the logistics, because we both have shows that were originally in the same town, but the venue of mine was moved to a different town and my start time is earlier than hers, and it’s her opening night, and it all became much more complicated that we hoped. We decided I’d pick her up Monday morning instead, which takes a lot of pressure off both of us.
Got my next book review assignment.
Turned around the two small coverages, did a bunch of admin. Tried not to feel the absolute exhaustion I feel every time I turn in a ghostwriting project. I have to figure out a better balance there.
The weather was awful, so I skipped First Friday. Cooked dinner, read, played with the cats. By Friday night, I’m usually too tired to go out.
Up early on Saturday. Did a bunch of housework. The bench that’s usually out on the back balcony, which was stored in Tessa’s room while the painters are here, is now in the living room, with the cushions on it. We were taking book to see who would be the first cat on it. Did housework, read. Read Agatha Christie’s CROOKED HOUSE (this month’s Read Christie pick). I’m sure I read it ages ago, but I didn’t remember the twist at the end. Finished Josephine Tey’s TO LOVE AND BE WISE, which was very good.
Bea spent most of the day out on the porch. She’s happy out there.
After dinner, I put on Real People clothes and makeup and headed to the Adams Theatre, to see the dance piece my advisor invited me to see. Absolutely fell in love with the space. I would love to do one of my own readings there, and it would be a great space for WAM, too.
The performance was the world premiere of LA PLAYA, by choreographer Olga Rabetskaya, with music composed by Maria Vasilevskaya. It was danced by Carl Ponce Cubero, Lavy, Elliana Lynch-Daniels, and Emma Weiss. The first half was fairly straight-forward, character-driven storytelling, and the second half was more abstract. Live music onstage was mixed with various sound cues, projections were used, it was a fascinating multi-disciplinary piece. It received an enthusiastic response, and there was a short Q & A after. The trust those four performers had to have with each other to execute the choreography was immense, and that was as beautiful to watch as the actual content.
It was a collaboration between the artists who were in residence at Floating Tower at Chase Hill (run by my advisor) and the Adams Theatre, as part of their Incubator Program. Yina Moore, the Artistic Director of the theatre, has really done a wonderful job since she took over.
I’m really glad I went. I want to support my advisor, and I want to support the creation of work like this whenever possible (and, in turn, have my work supported). The cohort program I was a part of in 2024 continues to make a huge, positive difference in my life.
Home, went through the mail, was happy to receive a check I wasn’t expecting until the end of the month. It was hard to settle down after the performance.
When I got home, Tessa had claimed the bench! She was lounging on it like the queen she is.
Sovereignty won the Belmont Stakes. Because he won the Derby and the Belmont, and Journalism the Preakness, both horses won’t get the acclaim they should. All because Mott wants to force restructuring of the Triple Crown. It’s supposed to be a challenge. If it’s “better for the horse” to skip one of the races, then that horse is not Triple Crown material. And, as I’ve said dozens of times, because of the way they’re being bred (not for stamina), even fewer horses are than ever were before. We’re not going to have another Secretariat. The problem isn’t the race schedule. It’s the breeding choices. They’re being bred for fragility (calling it speed) instead of stamina.
Finally got to sleep. Woke up early. It was nice and cool in the apartment.
Up early Sunday. Did the Community Tarot Reading for the Week, which was not as upbeat as I hoped, and the computer was an absolute pain the butt. Did some more housework.
Put on Real People clothes and makeup and headed out. First stop, Wild Soul River to make a contribution to their matching grant fund. It’s not as large as I wish, but it is something and little bits add up to big bits.
Drove down Rt. 7 toward Lenox. It was lovely until I hit Pittsfield, but it seems that every road in that city is torn up right now.
Once I got past Pittsfield, it was okay, although the tourist drivers were asshole nightmares. Once I got into Lenox, there was an art walk, which meant tents everywhere and lots of traffic, both by car and foot. I inched my way through there, took a wrong turn and ended up at Tanglewood instead of Ventfort Hall, and had to backtrack.
I finally got to Ventfort Hall. Last time I was there, for an Elsewhere Shakespeare performance, it was a gravel drive and I nearly missed it. Now it’s been paved and the signage is better.
Parked, chatted with some staff, checked in. In spite of all the kerfuffle, I was early enough to chat with fellow WAM members, and have a pastry and a drink on the lovely terrace.
The reading was ROOTED, by Deborah Zoe Laufer, directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo. It was stage managed by my fellow literary committee member, Sara Recht, and the cast was Jayne Atkinson, Jennie M. Jardow, and Hero Marguerite.
It was a lovely, layered, beautiful play. Jayne, as usual, was radiant, and Jennie and Hero were wonderful, too. It was a lovely experience, that made me laugh and also get a little teary at times.
Eavesdropping in the audience ahead of the reading was a trip (and material I will use for my own work). The audience is mostly older, white, and affluent. So there were a lot of conversations about opening the cottage and being up for the summer, like something out of the Gilded Age. Since we were in a mansion from that era, I guess it was appropriate.
The talkback was good after, and included Jenny Hansell, of Berkshire National Resources Council, which was terrific (the play takes place in a treehouse, where the central character has lived for 20 years). It was also meaningful that Genée, the Artistic Director, thanked committee members (including me) for being there.
All in all, it was a lovely experience in a beautiful space.
The drive home was less fraught than the drive down, fortunately, once I’d inched through Lenox again, and scooted around the worst of the construction in Pittsfield.
Picked up groceries for dinner and dessert at Adams Fresh Market on the way home. Changed clothes, cooked, and after dinner, cleaned the bathroom. You know, the glamorous theatre life.
Started reading a biography of Moss Hart, which is an interesting contrast to his autobiography.
Caught up on news headlines. Needless to say, I am angry about how the feds are mishandling L.A. How about following the Constitution? Which would have avoided the situation in the first place? Oh, wait, those in charge use it for toilet paper.
The Tony Awards were unabashedly defiant this year, and good for them. It was also interesting that gowns were either huge swaths of fabric or very elegant outlines.
Charlotte woke me up at 4 on Monday and was such a pest, I gave up and got up at 5. Got some stuff done around the house. Headed down to Pittsfield to pick up my friend. We had hoped to stop at Red Shirt Farm for produce (and I had checked the website for hours), but it was closed. So we went to Wild Oats instead, and chose vegetables to go with the meals for last night and tonight.
Came home, got things unpacked and my friend settled, and headed to the library to pick up a pass for MASS MoCA. We spent a few hours there. I showed her the Boiler House, we went to the Anselm Kiefer exhibit, which is just beyond powerful and disturbing. The wedding dress with large shards of glass penetrating it has so much to say on so many levels. I have to go back and spend more time there. There is a temporary exhibit, called “The Archive of Lost Memories” by Randi Malkin Steinberger. She rescues lost/abandoned photos, slides, tintypes, photo albums, etc., and creates art with them, while honoring what they are. It was an amazing and moving exhibit. It’s only there until June 30, so I will return on Community Day and spend more time with it. She was there with the work, so we got a chance to chat with her about some of the specific pieces.
We spent time in the James Turrell exhibit, including Into the Light, which I’d seen with the cohort, but went into again with my friend. It was just as disorienting and fascinating the second time. We visited a bunch of the exhibits on other floors (Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois , Amy Yoes, Amy Padmore, Spencer Finch), until our brains couldn’t process any more.
In the R & D store, I got a book on illusionists and the paranormal (which is relevant to multiple projects of mine and was on sale). We also discovered that Randi Malkin Steinberger had put together packets of some of the lost photographs and they were for sale in the store, which was very exciting.
We returned the museum pass to the library. The plan was to go to Bear & Bee Bookshop and browse. We’d checked online that it was open, but it was not. So we wandered Eagle Street. Gallery North was unexpectedly open, because the gallery member forgot it was Monday! So we got to go in and browse. One of the exhibits was by fiber artist Sarah George, who is a wool sculptor and animal portrait artist. The detail and precision of her work (and often, the sense of fun) was wonderful.
Then, it was off to Steeple City Social for cocktails and snacks. We had a drink called a Twinkle, which is vodka, elderflower, and lemon, served in a gorgeous vintage glass. It was the most perfect cocktail I’ve had in years. We also had some devilled eggs (very different recipe than mine, but oh so yummy) and sweet and salty nuts. We chatted, on one of the large vintage couches. Friends from tarot were there, and we had a nice catch-up. And then Randi Malkin Steinberger and her friend showed up! We told Randi that we’d bought some of the photo packets. I’d opened mine and even found a piece of original art in it, along with the slides, postcard, and photographs. Randi asked if I’d planned to let her know (she put her email with original art pieces), and I said yes, and we talked about me putting it on my Instagram and tagging her as well. So that’s on the agenda!
My friend got a taste of how you run into the same great people in cool places in this small city, which is one of the reasons I love it here.
Home, and we cooked dinner. My friend helped chop and prepare ingredients, which made things much easier to handle. It was a recipe from Patricia Wells’ FRENCH BISTRO cookbook, a chicken in tarragon vinegar and white wine, with shallots and tomatoes and fresh tarragon. We had mashed potatoes with it, and the Bok choy we bought at the market. And apple pie for dessert!
We did the dishes, and then sat in the living room for a good chat. Tessa hadn’t moved from the bench all day. Charlotte came shyly to join us. Bea kept a safe distance. Willa mostly stayed in my mother’s room, but had gotten a lot of extra attention during dinner and dishes, so she was happy.
Got a bizarre email from a potential client who wants some stuff he can use in a presentation packet by Thursday. I will figure it out.
Caught up on some news, including the ridiculous way That Thing is mishandling Los Angeles. Shame on any National Guard or Marine who “follows orders” against the people in this situation. They should outright refuse.
I never want to hear anyone defend the Second Amendment as necessary to fight tyranny. Instead of so doing, they all joined ICE to be a weapon of what they claimed to fight.
Slept well, although Charlotte fussed a lot. Up at the normal time.
I’m making us Eggs Benedict for breakfast. The plan today is to head for the Clark, and then maybe hit a bookshop (if we can find one that’s open). Yoga in the evening.
It’s raining today, but shouldn’t be too bad. Have a good one!
#adamsTheatre #art #cooking #dance #freelance #friends #ghostwriting #life #MassMOCA #steepleCitySocial #theatre #wamTheatre #writing
-
Tues. June 10, 2025: Art and The Perfect Cocktail
image courtesy of ArtandHome via pixabay.comTuesday, June 10, 2025
Day Before Full Moon
Pluto Retrograde
Rainy and cool
I hope you had a good weekend!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is here.
Friday morning, I wrote and submitted the review first thing, and requested my next assignment (which I received).
I did a polish on the ghostwriting and submitted it. Fingers crossed it’s what they want! Or at least close to it.
I expected to get the notes on the outline I submitted a couple of weeks ago, with either a rewrite on it or moving forward to the 20K version, but they won’t have it to me until tomorrow. Which takes pressure of me while company is here.
Headed to the library to drop off/pick up books. Did a big grocery shop at Big Y (because, you know, company – gotta have the meals planned and snacks and all the rest), and the liquor store. Hauled it all home and up the stairs.
Worked with my friend on the logistics, because we both have shows that were originally in the same town, but the venue of mine was moved to a different town and my start time is earlier than hers, and it’s her opening night, and it all became much more complicated that we hoped. We decided I’d pick her up Monday morning instead, which takes a lot of pressure off both of us.
Got my next book review assignment.
Turned around the two small coverages, did a bunch of admin. Tried not to feel the absolute exhaustion I feel every time I turn in a ghostwriting project. I have to figure out a better balance there.
The weather was awful, so I skipped First Friday. Cooked dinner, read, played with the cats. By Friday night, I’m usually too tired to go out.
Up early on Saturday. Did a bunch of housework. The bench that’s usually out on the back balcony, which was stored in Tessa’s room while the painters are here, is now in the living room, with the cushions on it. We were taking book to see who would be the first cat on it. Did housework, read. Read Agatha Christie’s CROOKED HOUSE (this month’s Read Christie pick). I’m sure I read it ages ago, but I didn’t remember the twist at the end. Finished Josephine Tey’s TO LOVE AND BE WISE, which was very good.
Bea spent most of the day out on the porch. She’s happy out there.
After dinner, I put on Real People clothes and makeup and headed to the Adams Theatre, to see the dance piece my advisor invited me to see. Absolutely fell in love with the space. I would love to do one of my own readings there, and it would be a great space for WAM, too.
The performance was the world premiere of LA PLAYA, by choreographer Olga Rabetskaya, with music composed by Maria Vasilevskaya. It was danced by Carl Ponce Cubero, Lavy, Elliana Lynch-Daniels, and Emma Weiss. The first half was fairly straight-forward, character-driven storytelling, and the second half was more abstract. Live music onstage was mixed with various sound cues, projections were used, it was a fascinating multi-disciplinary piece. It received an enthusiastic response, and there was a short Q & A after. The trust those four performers had to have with each other to execute the choreography was immense, and that was as beautiful to watch as the actual content.
It was a collaboration between the artists who were in residence at Floating Tower at Chase Hill (run by my advisor) and the Adams Theatre, as part of their Incubator Program. Yina Moore, the Artistic Director of the theatre, has really done a wonderful job since she took over.
I’m really glad I went. I want to support my advisor, and I want to support the creation of work like this whenever possible (and, in turn, have my work supported). The cohort program I was a part of in 2024 continues to make a huge, positive difference in my life.
Home, went through the mail, was happy to receive a check I wasn’t expecting until the end of the month. It was hard to settle down after the performance.
When I got home, Tessa had claimed the bench! She was lounging on it like the queen she is.
Sovereignty won the Belmont Stakes. Because he won the Derby and the Belmont, and Journalism the Preakness, both horses won’t get the acclaim they should. All because Mott wants to force restructuring of the Triple Crown. It’s supposed to be a challenge. If it’s “better for the horse” to skip one of the races, then that horse is not Triple Crown material. And, as I’ve said dozens of times, because of the way they’re being bred (not for stamina), even fewer horses are than ever were before. We’re not going to have another Secretariat. The problem isn’t the race schedule. It’s the breeding choices. They’re being bred for fragility (calling it speed) instead of stamina.
Finally got to sleep. Woke up early. It was nice and cool in the apartment.
Up early Sunday. Did the Community Tarot Reading for the Week, which was not as upbeat as I hoped, and the computer was an absolute pain the butt. Did some more housework.
Put on Real People clothes and makeup and headed out. First stop, Wild Soul River to make a contribution to their matching grant fund. It’s not as large as I wish, but it is something and little bits add up to big bits.
Drove down Rt. 7 toward Lenox. It was lovely until I hit Pittsfield, but it seems that every road in that city is torn up right now.
Once I got past Pittsfield, it was okay, although the tourist drivers were asshole nightmares. Once I got into Lenox, there was an art walk, which meant tents everywhere and lots of traffic, both by car and foot. I inched my way through there, took a wrong turn and ended up at Tanglewood instead of Ventfort Hall, and had to backtrack.
I finally got to Ventfort Hall. Last time I was there, for an Elsewhere Shakespeare performance, it was a gravel drive and I nearly missed it. Now it’s been paved and the signage is better.
Parked, chatted with some staff, checked in. In spite of all the kerfuffle, I was early enough to chat with fellow WAM members, and have a pastry and a drink on the lovely terrace.
The reading was ROOTED, by Deborah Zoe Laufer, directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo. It was stage managed by my fellow literary committee member, Sara Recht, and the cast was Jayne Atkinson, Jennie M. Jardow, and Hero Marguerite.
It was a lovely, layered, beautiful play. Jayne, as usual, was radiant, and Jennie and Hero were wonderful, too. It was a lovely experience, that made me laugh and also get a little teary at times.
Eavesdropping in the audience ahead of the reading was a trip (and material I will use for my own work). The audience is mostly older, white, and affluent. So there were a lot of conversations about opening the cottage and being up for the summer, like something out of the Gilded Age. Since we were in a mansion from that era, I guess it was appropriate.
The talkback was good after, and included Jenny Hansell, of Berkshire National Resources Council, which was terrific (the play takes place in a treehouse, where the central character has lived for 20 years). It was also meaningful that Genée, the Artistic Director, thanked committee members (including me) for being there.
All in all, it was a lovely experience in a beautiful space.
The drive home was less fraught than the drive down, fortunately, once I’d inched through Lenox again, and scooted around the worst of the construction in Pittsfield.
Picked up groceries for dinner and dessert at Adams Fresh Market on the way home. Changed clothes, cooked, and after dinner, cleaned the bathroom. You know, the glamorous theatre life.
Started reading a biography of Moss Hart, which is an interesting contrast to his autobiography.
Caught up on news headlines. Needless to say, I am angry about how the feds are mishandling L.A. How about following the Constitution? Which would have avoided the situation in the first place? Oh, wait, those in charge use it for toilet paper.
The Tony Awards were unabashedly defiant this year, and good for them. It was also interesting that gowns were either huge swaths of fabric or very elegant outlines.
Charlotte woke me up at 4 on Monday and was such a pest, I gave up and got up at 5. Got some stuff done around the house. Headed down to Pittsfield to pick up my friend. We had hoped to stop at Red Shirt Farm for produce (and I had checked the website for hours), but it was closed. So we went to Wild Oats instead, and chose vegetables to go with the meals for last night and tonight.
Came home, got things unpacked and my friend settled, and headed to the library to pick up a pass for MASS MoCA. We spent a few hours there. I showed her the Boiler House, we went to the Anselm Kiefer exhibit, which is just beyond powerful and disturbing. The wedding dress with large shards of glass penetrating it has so much to say on so many levels. I have to go back and spend more time there. There is a temporary exhibit, called “The Archive of Lost Memories” by Randi Malkin Steinberger. She rescues lost/abandoned photos, slides, tintypes, photo albums, etc., and creates art with them, while honoring what they are. It was an amazing and moving exhibit. It’s only there until June 30, so I will return on Community Day and spend more time with it. She was there with the work, so we got a chance to chat with her about some of the specific pieces.
We spent time in the James Turrell exhibit, including Into the Light, which I’d seen with the cohort, but went into again with my friend. It was just as disorienting and fascinating the second time. We visited a bunch of the exhibits on other floors (Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois , Amy Yoes, Amy Padmore, Spencer Finch), until our brains couldn’t process any more.
In the R & D store, I got a book on illusionists and the paranormal (which is relevant to multiple projects of mine and was on sale). We also discovered that Randi Malkin Steinberger had put together packets of some of the lost photographs and they were for sale in the store, which was very exciting.
We returned the museum pass to the library. The plan was to go to Bear & Bee Bookshop and browse. We’d checked online that it was open, but it was not. So we wandered Eagle Street. Gallery North was unexpectedly open, because the gallery member forgot it was Monday! So we got to go in and browse. One of the exhibits was by fiber artist Sarah George, who is a wool sculptor and animal portrait artist. The detail and precision of her work (and often, the sense of fun) was wonderful.
Then, it was off to Steeple City Social for cocktails and snacks. We had a drink called a Twinkle, which is vodka, elderflower, and lemon, served in a gorgeous vintage glass. It was the most perfect cocktail I’ve had in years. We also had some devilled eggs (very different recipe than mine, but oh so yummy) and sweet and salty nuts. We chatted, on one of the large vintage couches. Friends from tarot were there, and we had a nice catch-up. And then Randi Malkin Steinberger and her friend showed up! We told Randi that we’d bought some of the photo packets. I’d opened mine and even found a piece of original art in it, along with the slides, postcard, and photographs. Randi asked if I’d planned to let her know (she put her email with original art pieces), and I said yes, and we talked about me putting it on my Instagram and tagging her as well. So that’s on the agenda!
My friend got a taste of how you run into the same great people in cool places in this small city, which is one of the reasons I love it here.
Home, and we cooked dinner. My friend helped chop and prepare ingredients, which made things much easier to handle. It was a recipe from Patricia Wells’ FRENCH BISTRO cookbook, a chicken in tarragon vinegar and white wine, with shallots and tomatoes and fresh tarragon. We had mashed potatoes with it, and the Bok choy we bought at the market. And apple pie for dessert!
We did the dishes, and then sat in the living room for a good chat. Tessa hadn’t moved from the bench all day. Charlotte came shyly to join us. Bea kept a safe distance. Willa mostly stayed in my mother’s room, but had gotten a lot of extra attention during dinner and dishes, so she was happy.
Got a bizarre email from a potential client who wants some stuff he can use in a presentation packet by Thursday. I will figure it out.
Caught up on some news, including the ridiculous way That Thing is mishandling Los Angeles. Shame on any National Guard or Marine who “follows orders” against the people in this situation. They should outright refuse.
I never want to hear anyone defend the Second Amendment as necessary to fight tyranny. Instead of so doing, they all joined ICE to be a weapon of what they claimed to fight.
Slept well, although Charlotte fussed a lot. Up at the normal time.
I’m making us Eggs Benedict for breakfast. The plan today is to head for the Clark, and then maybe hit a bookshop (if we can find one that’s open). Yoga in the evening.
It’s raining today, but shouldn’t be too bad. Have a good one!
#adamsTheatre #art #cooking #dance #freelance #friends #ghostwriting #life #MassMOCA #steepleCitySocial #theatre #wamTheatre #writing
-
I think it had a cast of only 3 or 4 performers. They were using actual #Shakespeare #dialogue; it wasn't written in modern English or anything like that. I don't remember a lot about the performance other than what I'm about to relate. Either it wasn't that memorable, or this bit was simply burned into my brain and left no room for anything else.
Lady MacBeth was played by a young woman - probably not older than 18 - and the others were young as well. Lady MacBeth performed one of her monologues in an ... #unusual fashion.
While she was #monologuing, she and MacBeth were, to put not too fine a point on it, dry-humping. Doggy-style. So fully #clothed, but doing the, uh, motion of the real thing. Lady MacBeth was leaning forward over a chair, facing directly out into the #audience, while MacBeth was behind her, hands on her hips, #thrusting away #rhythmically through her whole #speech.
He wasn't just faking, so her lines were interrupted every couple of seconds with a #slapping sound and a hitch in her voice. I don't remember which soliloquy it was, but it would have gone something like:
We fail! (slap)
But screw your courage (slap) to the sticking-place (slap),
And we'll not fail (slap). When Duncan is asleep (slap) -
Whereto the rather (slap) shall his day's hard journey (slap) ...But they were playing it deadly serious.
2/3
#DryHump #DryHumping #DoggyStyle #monologue #performance #laugh #laughing #slap
-
I think it had a cast of only 3 or 4 performers. They were using actual #Shakespeare #dialogue; it wasn't written in modern English or anything like that. I don't remember a lot about the performance other than what I'm about to relate. Either it wasn't that memorable, or this bit was simply burned into my brain and left no room for anything else.
Lady MacBeth was played by a young woman - probably not older than 18 - and the others were young as well. Lady MacBeth performed one of her monologues in an ... #unusual fashion.
While she was #monologuing, she and MacBeth were, to put not too fine a point on it, dry-humping. Doggy-style. So fully #clothed, but doing the, uh, motion of the real thing. Lady MacBeth was leaning forward over a chair, facing directly out into the #audience, while MacBeth was behind her, hands on her hips, #thrusting away #rhythmically through her whole #speech.
He wasn't just faking, so her lines were interrupted every couple of seconds with a #slapping sound and a hitch in her voice. I don't remember which soliloquy it was, but it would have gone something like:
We fail! (slap)
But screw your courage (slap) to the sticking-place (slap),
And we'll not fail (slap). When Duncan is asleep (slap) -
Whereto the rather (slap) shall his day's hard journey (slap) ...But they were playing it deadly serious.
2/3
#DryHump #DryHumping #DoggyStyle #monologue #performance #laugh #laughing #slap
-
I think it had a cast of only 3 or 4 performers. They were using actual #Shakespeare #dialogue; it wasn't written in modern English or anything like that. I don't remember a lot about the performance other than what I'm about to relate. Either it wasn't that memorable, or this bit was simply burned into my brain and left no room for anything else.
Lady MacBeth was played by a young woman - probably not older than 18 - and the others were young as well. Lady MacBeth performed one of her monologues in an ... #unusual fashion.
While she was #monologuing, she and MacBeth were, to put not too fine a point on it, dry-humping. Doggy-style. So fully #clothed, but doing the, uh, motion of the real thing. Lady MacBeth was leaning forward over a chair, facing directly out into the #audience, while MacBeth was behind her, hands on her hips, #thrusting away #rhythmically through her whole #speech.
He wasn't just faking, so her lines were interrupted every couple of seconds with a #slapping sound and a hitch in her voice. I don't remember which soliloquy it was, but it would have gone something like:
We fail! (slap)
But screw your courage (slap) to the sticking-place (slap),
And we'll not fail (slap). When Duncan is asleep (slap) -
Whereto the rather (slap) shall his day's hard journey (slap) ...But they were playing it deadly serious.
2/3
#DryHump #DryHumping #DoggyStyle #monologue #performance #laugh #laughing #slap
-
I think it had a cast of only 3 or 4 performers. They were using actual #Shakespeare #dialogue; it wasn't written in modern English or anything like that. I don't remember a lot about the performance other than what I'm about to relate. Either it wasn't that memorable, or this bit was simply burned into my brain and left no room for anything else.
Lady MacBeth was played by a young woman - probably not older than 18 - and the others were young as well. Lady MacBeth performed one of her monologues in an ... #unusual fashion.
While she was #monologuing, she and MacBeth were, to put not too fine a point on it, dry-humping. Doggy-style. So fully #clothed, but doing the, uh, motion of the real thing. Lady MacBeth was leaning forward over a chair, facing directly out into the #audience, while MacBeth was behind her, hands on her hips, #thrusting away #rhythmically through her whole #speech.
He wasn't just faking, so her lines were interrupted every couple of seconds with a #slapping sound and a hitch in her voice. I don't remember which soliloquy it was, but it would have gone something like:
We fail! (slap)
But screw your courage (slap) to the sticking-place (slap),
And we'll not fail (slap). When Duncan is asleep (slap) -
Whereto the rather (slap) shall his day's hard journey (slap) ...But they were playing it deadly serious.
2/3
#DryHump #DryHumping #DoggyStyle #monologue #performance #laugh #laughing #slap
-
I think it had a cast of only 3 or 4 performers. They were using actual #Shakespeare #dialogue; it wasn't written in modern English or anything like that. I don't remember a lot about the performance other than what I'm about to relate. Either it wasn't that memorable, or this bit was simply burned into my brain and left no room for anything else.
Lady MacBeth was played by a young woman - probably not older than 18 - and the others were young as well. Lady MacBeth performed one of her monologues in an ... #unusual fashion.
While she was #monologuing, she and MacBeth were, to put not too fine a point on it, dry-humping. Doggy-style. So fully #clothed, but doing the, uh, motion of the real thing. Lady MacBeth was leaning forward over a chair, facing directly out into the #audience, while MacBeth was behind her, hands on her hips, #thrusting away #rhythmically through her whole #speech.
He wasn't just faking, so her lines were interrupted every couple of seconds with a #slapping sound and a hitch in her voice. I don't remember which soliloquy it was, but it would have gone something like:
We fail! (slap)
But screw your courage (slap) to the sticking-place (slap),
And we'll not fail (slap). When Duncan is asleep (slap) -
Whereto the rather (slap) shall his day's hard journey (slap) ...But they were playing it deadly serious.
2/3
#DryHump #DryHumping #DoggyStyle #monologue #performance #laugh #laughing #slap
-
I've noticed a weird corner-case in my psychology that I don't have a name for, but it's definitely there.
Picked up a loaner car from my mechanic because they have my car in to change the oil (side-note: thanks folks! The fact yinz offer a loaner car is huge). On the loaner contract, they highlighted a part where I had to bring a receipt proving I'd filled the gas tank.
This is new, so I asked what's up: normally I just bring the car back with the tank full. I even top it off for them because, hey, it's like three spare bucks for me and it saves someone on the staff a trip out in the cold.
Boss tells me the needle sticks a bit, so the receipt is to make sure it got filled. "Even if it's just fifty cents," he says, "need the receipt." Otherwise, they charge a flat $20 for a courtesy fill.
Now, my normal process is: drive over, fill the tank at the station two minutes from their garage, drop it off. But now that a receipt is involved? I'm inclined to fill it two minutes from my office, drive a half-hour to their garage and drop it off... Just so there's less actual gas in the tank.
I don't know why I'm like this. But when someone replaces a reasonable system between two rational actors with a contract and rules, it's like part of my brain flips a switch and goes "Oh. There are rules now. That must mean this is a game. And I intend to win."
-
On a somewhat lighter note,
This is PRECISELY how taking a shower feels.
I swear most of the so called executives in my brain are like. Greenhorn neurotypical Harvard Business School grads who are so AGGRESSIVELY NORMIE that they’d punch a barista if they got their triple shot breve no foam Starbucks order wrong on their way into work in my brainhole, and the one guy who CAN function in this shit hole is an aging secretary who is responsible for my pattern recognition and systematization who shows up to work in heels and a neon pink blazer.
Plot twist, he’s almost entirely ace, and he makes sure all the other bitches (who are all gay and dating secretly) get their CORRECT coffee so that they can accomplish their SINGLE actual task. Which is Take Shower. Secretary is Cooking the Sickest Memes about his batshit job in the background and posting them to his Tumblr blog, which is a sort of an open secret. He’d tell the others about it if they’d stop FUCKING FIGHTING for long enough to ask questions, lmao.
On that ridiculous note, I need to assume the role of That Fucking Secretary at Brainhole, LLC, stop fucking about on Discord, and haul my crippled ass into the fucking wet box.
Stay tuned for more magic. Probably shortly at this rate 🤣
-Lazarus
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Email Address
Subscribe
#actuallyADHD #actuallyAuDHD #ActuallyAutistic #Discord #ExecutiveDysfunction #fuckingAbout #meme #memes #neurodivergence #showeringSucks #systematization
-
Good morning! It's 2005 all over again!! :abunhdowohop: Making new covers for old fanfics and rewriting them, what is happening.
Lots of wips and a full documentation of what goes through my brain when I'm trying to make art (spoiler: a lot of complaining):
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4760637The actual fic, in rewrite progress: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55955350/chapters/142097458
#fanfic #fanfiction #StarOcean2 #StarOceanTheSecondStory #MastoArt #CreativeToots #fanart #wip #ArtProcess
-
This weekend I forgot what you call a pill minder (also known as a pill box or pill organizer or a dozen other things) despite the fact that it has a ton of actual names, because that's how #aphasia / #paraphasia works. Instead, my brain helpfully named the item a "medication cage." :YouTried:
-
So I gave #ClaudeAI a try to see how well it handled #SVG education, and sure enough it finally helped me wrap my brain around how the viewbox attribute works. I wrote up a new section on BlindSVG.com to show how you can leverage both that and the width/height attributes to control the overall scale of your #TactileGraphics when outputting them! Viewbox actually defines the canvas size,, and width/height defines how big or small the actual output will be: https://blindsvg.com/pages/setup/index.html#viewbox
-
#FartEngine devlog Day 16 & 17: I did not work on the engine on either day. I spent most of my time watching Dance moms (trying to shut my brain off) or watching Josh Strife Hayes play the worst MMO he can find. I prefer to think of it as research as opposed to being uninspired to do any actual work
#Godot4 #GodotEngine #IndieDev
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEpisdBgNpvgyQcUgTbqrgQzx_u19Rkkz