From & To Sathish #7 - Page 60

https://www.statnews.com/2025/08/06/lithium-a-treatment-for-bipolar-disorders-might-be-a-key-to-alzheimers-disease/

Lithium, a treatment for bipolar disorders, might be a key to Alzheimer’s disease

Study in mice finds that lithium salts reversed some memory loss

https://psyche.co/ideas/you-dont-need-perfect-features-to-be-physically-beautiful

You don’t need perfect features to be physically beautiful

by Annett Schirmer, professor of psychology

New research reveals that physical attractiveness is more about personal compatibility than meeting universal standards

Although it’s often dismissed as superficial, the question of whether one is beautiful is undoubtedly important. Being seen as beautiful can impact a person’s life prospects. Apart from making us coveted sexual partners, it has a so-called halo-effect whereby those considered attractive are also perceived positively on other traits such as kindness and competence.

We start hearing about this early in childhood as we encounter beauty in the tales of princesses and villains showing us what is good and bad. As parents adorn us with hairdos, clothes and accessories, we learn that beauty matters for how others perceive and treat us, and we begin caring about the impressions we make. By adulthood, the concept of beauty has become so engrained that we are an easy target for the multi-billion-dollar industry that dictates beauty standards and that promises us a successful and fulfilled life – if only we purchase the right products.

To many, this might paint rather an unfair and demoralising picture. Yet, the good news is that recent findings have drastically revised our understanding of beauty, revealing that it is far less about meeting certain aesthetic norms than previously assumed.

Scientific interest in beauty dates back to the 19th century when the English polymath Sir Francis Galton used the newly developed photographic technique to average human faces. He noted that an average face combined from many others looked more beautiful than individual faces. This led him to speculate that those people seen as most attractive are of a generic type with few irregularities. Famous beauties of the day, such as Lillie Langtry – a friend of Oscar Wilde and a suspected mistress of the Prince of Wales – would have been considered beautiful, according to Galton’s theory, not because they were physically exceptional, but because their features more closely resembled the general population than was true for most other individuals. Moreover, he saw beauty as a marker of genetic quality, signalling one’s value as a sexual partner.

Later research using modern image-editing software replicated Galton’s main findings: the majority of observers really do prefer the average of many faces over the individual faces themselves. Other digital manipulations of faces have shown that, by and large, people prefer symmetrical over non-symmetrical faces, and faces that emphasise the typical sexual characteristics of women and men. For example, women tend to have higher cheekbones than men do and, if their faces exaggerate this trait, they stand out as more beautiful. Likewise, men tend to have a more angular and dominant jaw when compared with women. Hence, male faces emphasising this trait are typically perceived as more masculine and more attractive.

Individual tastes contribute significantly to judgments of beauty

Taken together, these early scientific efforts supported Galton’s idea that there are natural beauty standards and that people who meet them are seen as more attractive. Yet, more recent studies by my colleagues and I, and others, have begun to challenge such a one-sided perspective. An important limitation of the earlier research was that it always involved averaging observers’ judgments of beauty, essentially removing any individual variation in beauty preferences.

Novel statistical tools have allowed us to overcome this limitation, though applying them makes data analyses more complex and less intuitive.

Our approach entails using a form of a regression called mixed-effect modelling, which can estimate different sources of variance in attractiveness ratings, including the preferences unique to each observer and the influence of the faces themselves. If variability among individual observers explains more of the data, one can conclude that individual tastes outweigh beauty standards. On the other hand, if variability among the judged faces explains more of the data, one can conclude that beauty standards outweigh individual tastes. To date, not many studies have adopted mixed-effect modelling techniques, but those that have show that individual tastes contribute significantly to judgments of beauty. In other words, universal beauty standards are not as important as previously claimed.

With predominantly heterosexual participants, we’ve found that during first encounters with the opposite sex, when one has nothing more to go by than another’s initial appearance, beauty standards and individual tastes matter equally. Let’s say you have a personal preference for brown eyes and a crooked smile. When judging another’s beauty, at first the appeal of their face to you will be affected equally by natural standards (such as how average, symmetrical etc), and by your own idiosyncratic preferences. But then, as time goes by, other researchers have found that the balance swings in favour of individual tastes. Across minutes, hours or days, the allure of another’s brown eyes and that crooked smile will tend to increase.

This means that the beauty standards uncovered by early research and driving the beauty industry matter. Yet, they don’t matter as much as we initially thought, as personal likes and dislikes can be just as important. Indeed, one may speculate that in contributing to our sense of beauty, standards and individual tastes serve different functions. As proposed by Galton, common preferences for opposite-sex individuals may be useful in enhancing reproductive success. Individuals whose features are approaching a social group’s prototype promise to endow offspring with traits that have been tried and tested and that are thus typical, regular and fit for survival. By contrast, individual tastes may lead one to interact with those others who maximise compatibility or ‘teamability’. Given research suggesting that we can glean aspects of someone’s personality from their facial appearance, such as how sociable, anxious or trustworthy they are, perhaps we are attracted to those with whom we are likely to get along or who might complement our own strengths and weaknesses.

What makes a person beautiful to someone else must come from ‘within’

Our research has also shown that attractiveness is much more than a pretty face. This isn’t so surprising when you consider that, outside of the research laboratory, we don’t just look at each other’s faces, we see, hear and smell the whole person from the tone of their voice to the way they move. What may surprise you is that we find the attractiveness of these different aspects of a person tend to correlate. When we asked our participants to rate the attractiveness of isolated voices, body motion or scents, we found they produced similar judgments to when we asked them to rate the same target’s facial photograph. That man or woman with the brown eyes and crooked smile that you find so appealing – it’s likely you’ll also be drawn to the sway of their gait and the huskiness in their voice.

What’s more, just as for faces, we found that the attractiveness ratings for these different information channels were shaped by both beauty standards and individual tastes. A logical conclusion to draw is that what makes a person beautiful to someone else must come from ‘within’ and have a shared effect on that person’s various surface characteristics. How exactly this unfolds and what aspects of a person’s biology translate into observable nonverbal traits relevant for attraction awaits further research.

Before we uncover these hidden mechanisms, our findings already have significant implications for how you should think about your own beauty. They highlight that your attractiveness goes beyond universal aesthetic norms. It’s as much, or more, about whether you are compatible with other individuals you encounter in life.

So, are you beautiful? The science of attraction teaches us the answer to this question is likely ‘yes’. Although most of us may not meet the heralded standards of the beauty industry, we are attractive to at least a few others we encounter because our personal characteristics and values align with theirs. Moreover, chasing beauty by improving our looks can take us only so far, because beauty – rather than being strictly visual – is perceived in every sense, and depends on processes that work from the inside out. Thus, beauty is not a verdict but a dialogue with people who matter – one where our presence, in all its multisensory richness, writes its own answer.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/croatian-freediver-shatters-record-longest-130049663.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU0qNX7SXMo