Excerpts from The New York Times article By
LANCE HOSEY
[B]rain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement.
Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and
motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with
food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment. This could partly explain why window views of landscapes, research
shows, can speed patient recovery in hospitals, aid learning in
classrooms and spur productivity in the workplace.
Simple geometry is leading to similar revelations. For more than 2,000
years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the
unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a
golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so
on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions
(about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and
credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the
most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre
Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.
Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals —
irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature:
in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our
own lungs.
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