would we build such ugly cities and suburbs, schools and hospitals?
It’s not the views we mischaracterize, it’s our responses to them. We
walk right past magnificence all the time, not just because we’re
busy, or because we don’t see it, but because we don’t realize what
it’s capable of doing to our brains. Valtchanov is here to help. He
envisions a Yelp-like, crowd-powered app that can make
recommendations for the most relaxing outcrop in Central Park or the
best route to take to work. “Instead of looking for food you can look
for happiness,” he said.
Here’s how it works: You hold your phone up to a scene, or a
photograph, and the app puts it through a series of algorithms to judge
its restorative potential. Natural images contain statistics. Fractals, as
Valtchanov explained, are just one of them. Color is important, as is
saturation, shapes (humans prefer rounded contours to straight lines),
the complexity of the contours, and luminescence (we rate brighter,
more saturated colors as more pleasurable). All of these visual
properties have been studied over the years for their emotional
weight, and these data feed the algorithms. For example, it’s well
known that the colors red and orange excite or agitate people (and
make us lustful and hungry, as purveyors of fast food well know),
while blues, greens and purples tend to relax us. The human eye is
well designed to respond immediately to color. In our retinas, we
have three color-sensing types of cone cells primed to pick up reds,
blues and greens, and those cones enjoy a direct line to the brain’s
visual cortex, a spot of geography in the back of the head. Most
mammals possess only two types of cones (and can’t distinguish
between red and green), but primates, being the visual monopolists
we are, are special in this regard (we have three cones). But not overly
special. Some creatures, like birds and butterflies, have five cones,
enabling them to see technicolor infrareds and ultraviolets. The
mantis shrimp trumps us all, sporting somewhere between twelve and
sixteen cones. God knows what they see, but it must be trippy.